GitHub - grigio/nixos-noctalia-labwc-flake

Declarative NixOS 26.11 flake for a modern Wayland desktop — labwc compositor + Noctalia V5 AI desktop shell + Voxtype voice-to-text.

Designed for AMD hardware (GPU + CPU microcode) with pure Wayland (no XWayland).

Features

• Labwc — lightweight Wayland compositor, 4 virtual desktops, multi-monitor
• Noctalia V5 — AI-powered shell (panel, launcher, session, OSD recommender)
• Voxtype — offline voice-to-text via Whisper.cpp (ggml-base multilingual), triggered by Right Alt
• Color sync — noctalia-labwc-theme-sync reads Noctalia's palette → WCAG-contrast window decorations → labwc --reconfigure
• greetd + tuigreet — auto-login TUI greeter
• PipeWire — audio with ALSA + PulseAudio compat, WirePlumber session manager
• Screen capture — Print screen → grim + slurp region select → satty annotation editor
• OBS-cmd — scene switching (Alt-1..5, Alt-e) and recording toggle (Alt-r)
• Bluetooth — enabled (no power-on-boot)
• AMD fine-tuning — amdgpu.runpm=0 (fixes PSP LOAD_TA), microcode updates
• GNOME Keyring + polkit-gnome — credential storage and privilege escalation
• Nix GC — automatic weekly, deletes generations older than 7 days
• GDK/icon fixes — Adwaita icon theme linked, Trash icon visible in Nautilus
• Compose key — Caps Lock as compose key (Wayland-native)
• Kanshi — automatic display profile management
• Clipman — clipboard manager
• auto-cpufreq — dynamic CPU frequency tuning

First-time setup

# 1. Clone the repo to your system (e.g. at /etc/nixos)
sudo git clone https://github.com/grigio/nixos-noctalia-labwc-flake.git /etc/nixos

# 2. Generate hardware configuration for your machine
nixos-generate-config --show-hardware-config > /etc/nixos/.config/nixos-backup/hardware-configuration.nix

# 3. Rebuild
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /etc/nixos#nixos --accept-flake-config

The flake lives in .config/nixos-backup/. The hardware-configuration.nix is not tracked by git (see .gitignore) — each machine generates its own.

Rebuild

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /etc/nixos#nixos --accept-flake-config

--accept-flake-config is required to trust the noctalia.cachix.org binary cache.

Validate before applying

Run the same checks as CI before rebuilding:

# Show flake outputs
nix flake show ./.config/nixos-backup

# Format/lint checks (same as CI)
nix develop --command deadnix --fail .
nix develop --command statix check . || true
nix run --no-write-lock-file 'github:numtide/nixpkgs-fmt' -- --check . || true

# Validate and build the system closure
nix build .#nixosConfigurations.nixos.config.system.build.toplevel --accept-flake-config

|| true keeps statix/nixpkgs-fmt non-failing (same as CI).

Upgrade

cd /etc/nixos/.config/nixos-backup
nix flake update             # update flake.lock to latest inputs
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /etc/nixos#nixos --accept-flake-config

Change the user name

The default user is g. To rename it, edit .config/nixos-backup/configuration.nix:

1. Change users.users.g to users.users.<newname> (line ~687).
2. Update the initial_session.user in services.greetd.settings (line ~412) from "g" to "<newname>".
3. Rebuild with sudo nixos-rebuild switch and reboot.
4. The old home directory /home/g will remain — either symlink it or move contents.

Notes

• Noctalia is installed from nixpkgs-unstable via environment.systemPackages.
• Bootloader: Limine (not systemd-boot).
• hardware-configuration.nix is automatically imported if present — no manual uncommenting needed.

Automatic flake updates

A GitHub Actions workflow (update-flake.yml) runs every Monday at 06:00 UTC to update flake.lock and open a PR. It validates the config by building the full NixOS system closure with nix build .#nixosConfigurations.nixos.config.system.build.toplevel before proposing the change.