Niri / Quickshell Installer (combined)

This repository provides a single, opinionated installer script install-all.sh that automates installing and building:

• Niri (Wayland compositor)
• xwayland-satellite (rootless Xwayland helper)
• Quickshell (Qt-based shell)
• Noctalia shell assets (extracted into Quickshell config)

Important: this installer performs system package installs and builds large projects (Qt6, Rust builds). Run it only on a machine where you are comfortable installing development packages and building from source.

Quick start

1. Make the script executable:

chmod +x install-all.sh

2. Run the installer (recommended):

sudo ./install-all.sh

Running under sudo is fine: the script detects SUDO_USER and will run user-local steps (rustup, cargo installs, config extraction) as that non-root user so ownership and paths remain correct.

Environment variables

• NO_PACSTALL=1 — skip the optional pacstall step (recommended if you don't want to run third-party install scripts).
• NOCTALIA_TARBALL_URL="<url>" — override the default Noctalia release tarball URL (the script extracts this into ~/.config/quickshell/noctalia-shell).

What the script does

• Installs system packages (build tools, XCB dev libs, Qt6 dev packages used by Quickshell, and utilities).
• Installs Rust (rustup) for the invoking user if missing, then builds Niri with cargo and runs cargo install.
• Copies the resulting niri binary to /usr/local/bin/niri so display managers (GDM) can execute it.
• Builds xwayland-satellite from source and installs it to /usr/local/bin.
• Builds Quickshell with CMake/Ninja and installs it system-wide via cmake --install.
• Installs a few helper tools (for example matugen via cargo) and optionally runs pacstall if not skipped.
• Downloads and extracts the Noctalia release tarball into ~/.config/quickshell/noctalia-shell for the invoking user.
• Writes a Wayland session file at /usr/share/wayland-sessions/niri.desktop that points to /usr/local/bin/niri.

Troubleshooting

• If apt fails to find a package (especially Qt6 dev packages), your apt sources may not include the required repositories. Inspect the failed apt output and add the necessary sources or install those packages manually.
• If cargo build fails, copy the cargo error output and re-run the failing cargo build command manually as the invoking user — commonly missing native dev packages or incorrect toolchain versions cause failures.
• If niri warns about xwayland-satellite missing at runtime, verify the installed binary exists in the path visible to the compositor session:

which xwayland-satellite || ls -l /usr/local/bin/xwayland-satellite
which niri || ls -l /usr/local/bin/niri ~/.cargo/bin/niri

• If your display manager does not show the Niri session, ensure /usr/share/wayland-sessions/niri.desktop exists and its Exec points to /usr/local/bin/niri. Some DMs require a session restart:

sudo systemctl restart display-manager   # careful: this ends the graphical session

Recommendations and options

• If you prefer not to copy the niri binary system-wide, I can change the script to create a small wrapper at /usr/local/bin/niri that execs the invoking user's ~/.cargo/bin/niri instead.
• If you only want Niri (not Quickshell), or only Quickshell, tell me and I will add flags (e.g. --no-quickshell) to make the installer modular.

Support

If anything fails when you run install-all.sh, paste the failing command output here and I will help fix the script or the missing dependencies.

License & notes

This repository contains installer scripts and instructions only. The projects built by the script (Niri, Quickshell, xwayland-satellite, Noctalia) are external — review their upstream licenses and documentation for runtime and build notes.