Switching wayland bar

I am using Sway (and thus Wayland) since circa 6 years, I think. I came from i3 which is X11 / Xorg, that was ~ 2 years before. (And before that, in the early 2000s I was a WindowMaker user!).

i3 comes with a simple i3 status bar, that you could configure by changing a file, but it was text-based. When I came to Sway, I set out to search a different thing, and that was Waybar. Waybar’s great, still text-based, but you could style it with GTK’s CSS abilities, and you could include scripts and some sorts of customizations.

You can spend a lot of time tweaking your bar, so at some point I left it how it was, and tried to no longer change it. From time to time I could not hesitate to look around for more modern alternatives, and sometimes new projects popped up. Most of them didn’t fit my taste of how a bar should be.

A good bar should:

• provide useful information and access to often used systems, ie. current playing songs, bluetooth, network, systray, poweroff menu
• show current and and time
• not draw attention
• be nice to look at (beautiful)
• be extensible

After waybar, there was nothing else. One time, ags appeared, but it was rebooted as a project, and was too immature for me to pick it. I left the field to develop itself, and this time, there was noctalia.

Noctalia ticked several boxes, and it comes with a full configuration editor - quite remarkable for an open source product. It feels quite mature, complete and adaptable. I have removed waybar and it several companions I had so far and am giving Noctalia a try, in the long term.

What does not work yet

I am using systemd-networkd to configure network, and this doesn’t show up in Noctalia, it supports NetworkManager. Also, Wifi and VPN is not shown. I don’t want to leave systemd for it, though.

Update (September 19th, 2026)

Still staying with noctalia. Software it has replaced for me are:

• dunst
• wofi
• awww (previously swww)
• avizo
• syncthing-gtk
• blueman
• waylogout
• swaylock

And self-written scripts:

• a pacman-update checker
• a waybar script that indicates whether screen sharing is currently active (though I have no replacement yet)