Need advice on Niri/Nocatlia installation

geop

As a KaOS user since May 2024, I wanted to give this a try. But when I login with Niri selected, only Niri runs, not noctalia.

Observations:

in journalctl, there is a error message in parsing the niri config that ./noctalia.kdl (llast llne in the config file) is missing
ps shows no evidence noctalia is running
pacman -Qi confirms noctalia is installed, but "which noctalia" and "which noctalia-shell" show nothing.

In doing the install an hour or so ago, I followed all the directions from https://kaosx.us/desktop/niri/,
except for the kitty stuff.

Also, I assumed that the "optdepends" mentioned on that install page refers to the "Optional dependencies" listed during the pacman install. On my install, noctalia was labelled "pending" in that list.
I did install the qt6ct mentioned.

Advice appreciated.

demm

In your plasma session, you can check the validity of the niri conf.kdl file.
Might be a closing bracket missing.

niri validate

~~Please note if you find it is an error in the Doc, needs to be corrected asap then.~~

EDIT:
Scratch the above, the docs needed updating, you now also need to copy noctilia.kdl (that is the line that the error message refers to):

cp -r /etc/skel/niri/noctalia.kdl ~/.config/niri/

geop

Still only niri. I get something like "file includes itself" in niri validate. Then I noticed that config.kdl and noctalia.kdl files are identical.

Also, as long as you're fixing the install page, you may want to mention that before the "cp"s, one must create the niri and noctalia directories in ~/.config.

demm

You need this file:
https://codeberg.org/KaOS/main/src/commit/90c66547b4407fab1f072f19c596d12565c9db4e/niri/noctalia.kdl
There is an error in packaging, wrong file gets added:
https://codeberg.org/KaOS/main/src/commit/90c66547b4407fab1f072f19c596d12565c9db4e/niri/PKGBUILD#L57
The docs will move to using install -D

demm

To get things working now though, you can edit ~/.config/niri/config.kdl and remove the last line include "./noctalia.kdl"

geop

OK, I commented it out and that worked. Noctalia runs!

My next problem is that my flatpak emacs won't run. I'll need to research this more, but in case anyone has any ideas, here are the relevant lines from journalctl:

Feb 20 14:48:17 F16 flatpak[20268]: emacs: standard input is not a tty
Feb 20 14:48:17 F16 systemd[1045]: app-org.gnu.emacs@autostart.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Feb 20 14:48:17 F16 systemd[1045]: app-org.gnu.emacs@autostart.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

demm

I have not tried flatpaks or emacs, but they might not be Wayland ready, to run X11 only apps in niri, you need to have xwayland-satellite installed, so try installing that and reboot (so niri autoloads that xwayland backend).
https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/wiki/Xwayland

geop

Thanks, but not wayland related. I've been running the emacs flatpak on KaOS plasma wayland since I started on KaOS.

demm

Many applications still run as X11 in a Wayland environment, on Plasma Wayland, xwayland is used for those, niri uses xwayland-satellite, so to have others further assist you, you will need to note whether you added xwayland-satellite to your install.

geop

I should never have doubted you, Demm! Yes, all it took to get emacs flatpak running was to install xwayland-satellite.

A pure wayland emacs has been available for a while. I thought that was the one in the flatpak, but no, it's an X version. :-(

The other odd problem I have it getting my Vivaldi browser flatpak to run. (Love those side tabs!) It's Chromium-based and needs the "Chrome Safe Key" that it usually gets from kwallet or gnome-keyring. However instead I get a "Who's using ...?" question, which from past experience I know means it can't find either of those secret services. I started kwallet from the noctalia menu but no help. No mention of this on the Noctalia Discord. Out of ideas right now, but this is such a specialized question, I don't expect any solution here. Just letting you know what sort of issues user can encounter on a move to Niri/Noctalia. (Of course, I am cheating with these non-qt flatpaks... )

demm

The Vivaldi question was posted on Matrix too (why you use a flatpak version is not clear, Vivaldi is up in KCP and maintained very well there by the KCP maintainer), it was resolved, will try to go back in Matrix and find what the solution was.

Vivaldi works with the same fix as used for signal desktop:
https://codeberg.org/KaOS/apps/src/branch/master/signal-desktop/PKGBUILD#L17, so adding --password-store="kwallet6" to the startup (seems the best workaround for most chromium/electron based applications).
The tested and fully working polkit backend is polkit-kde-agent-1, on the ISO it is enabled by default, to do the same now, add it to the startup section of niri/config.kdl, see: https://codeberg.org/KaOS/live-uefi/src/branch/master/configs/shared/overlay/home/live/.config/niri/config.kdl#L275

And Noctalia is just the shell, you will find much better answers to any questions/issues in niri, either the github issues, discussions, docs, or their Matrix channnel.

Regarding vertical tabs in browsers, the repositories have quite a few that support that too, best support is in zen-browser, but helium, google-chrome, falkon, all have it.

geop

Hi, Demm. The reason I use Vivaldi as a flatpak (and also emacs and LibreOffice) is that I have up to four distros running on my laptop at any given time, using this strategy:

my main distro, which for some time has been Kaos
a main distro competitor, right now the alpha of KDE Linux
- (KaOS has previously defeated KDE Neon, which was my main, and also OpenSUSE Tumbleweed)
Linux Mint - my original distro, that I keep around for nostalgia
a distro of interest, e.g. I tried PopOS with Cosmic here and found it too Gnome-like

The flatpaks are installed with --user, which puts them in my home directory, which is in its own partition. This means I don't have to reconfigure them for every different distro I might try - they just always work the way I want them too, For example, with Vivaldi, all my tabs, bookmarks, and history are there whichever distro I bring them up in.

This means that their .desktop files are also shared, so as far as adding 'password-store="kwallet6"' for Vivaldi, that might work for Niri/Noctalia, but I expect it would mess up distros like Mint, which use the gnome-keyring.

Except for Niri/Noctalia, Vivaldi has just used whatever secret service was available. (I just had to manually set the Chrome Safe Storage key to the same value as in the other distros.) I need to check if Niri/Noctalia might be running some non-KDE and non-gnome secret service.

I picked Vivaldi because (I think) it was the first with side tabs, and I jumped right on it. I don't have any reason to change now.