DankInstall

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dankinstall sets up the full DankMaterialShell desktop experience - wallpapers, auto-theming, notifications, lock screen, and everything else you'd expect from a modern desktop. It installs packages and configures user-level settings for your compositor and terminal. If you already have niri or Hyprland set up, dankinstall can work around your existing config (and always backs things up before making changes).

Quickstart​

curl -fsSL https://install.danklinux.com | sh

What Gets Installed​

Core Components​

• DankMaterialShell - The desktop shell built with quickshell & Go.
• Compositor - Your choice of niri or Hyprland
• Terminal - Ghostty, with Kitty and Alacritty as alternatives
• dms CLI - Backend service providing dbus APIs, plugin management, and wayland protocol implementations

Desktop Utilities​

• quickshell - The QML-based shell framework powering DMS
• matugen - Auto-theming engine that generates color schemes from wallpapers
• dgop - System resource monitoring (CPU, RAM, GPU, temperatures)
• dsearch - Blazingly fast filesystem search.
• cliphist - Clipboard history manager
• wl-clipboard - Clipboard utilities for Wayland

System Packages​

Build dependencies: git, jq, curl, wget, go, cmake, rustup. The exact package list varies by distribution.

Supported Distributions​

Arch Linux & Derivatives​

Supported: Arch, ArchARM, Archcraft, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Manjaro

Uses pacman for system packages from official repos, including dms-shell from extra. Builds quickshell, matugen (pre-compiled binary), and dgop from AUR using makepkg - no AUR helper needed. niri and hyprland are available in official repos.

If you're using archinstall, the minimal profile with NetworkManager for networking is a good starting point.

Fedora & Derivatives​

Supported: Fedora, Nobara, Fedora Asahi Remix

Almost everything comes from official repos or COPR repositories (avengemedia/danklinux, avengemedia/dms, solopasha/hyprland, niri-wm/niri). Only dgop needs to be built from source with Go.

dankinstall is tested on Workstation Edition but should work fine on any Fedora flavor.

Ubuntu​

Supported: Ubuntu 25.04+

Packages come from the DankLinux PPA (ppa:avengemedia/danklinux). Hyprland comes from ppa:cppiber/hyprland.

Debian​

Supported: Debian 13+ (Trixie), Debian Testing, Debian Sid

Packages come from the DankLinux OBS repository. niri only - Debian doesn't have Hyprland packages yet.

openSUSE Tumbleweed​

Good package availability out of the box. niri, hyprland, ghostty, and most tools are in standard repos. Additional packages come from the DankLinux OBS repository.

Gentoo​

Special Notes:

• Gentoo installs are highly variable and user-specific, success is not guaranteed.
  • dankinstall is most likely to succeed on a fresh stage3/systemd system
• Uses Portage package manager with GURU overlay for additional packages
• Automatically configures global USE flags in /etc/portage/make.conf
  • Will create or append to your existing USE flags.
• Automatically configures package-specific USE flags in /etc/portage/package.use/danklinux
• Unmasks packages as-needed with architecture keywords in /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/danklinux
• Supports both amd64 and arm64 architectures dynamically
• If not using bin packages, prepare for long compilation times
• Ghostty is removed from the options, due to extremely long compilation time of its

Package Sources:

Global USE Flags: dbus udev alsa policykit jpeg png webp gif tiff svg brotli gdbm accessibility gtk qt6 egl gbm

Package-Specific USE Flags:

• sys-apps/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk: wayland X
• gui-wm/niri: dbus screencast
• gui-wm/hyprland: X
• dev-qt/qtbase: wayland opengl vulkan widgets
• dev-qt/qtdeclarative: opengl vulkan
• media-libs/mesa: opengl vulkan
• gui-apps/quickshell: breakpad jemalloc sockets wayland layer-shell session-lock toplevel-management screencopy X pipewire tray mpris pam hyprland hyprland-global-shortcuts hyprland-focus-grab i3 i3-ipc bluetooth

What About Manual Building?​

Most distros now have pre-built packages via the DankLinux Repository. The installer handles any remaining builds automatically:

• dgop - Built from Go source on distros without packages. Installs to /usr/local/bin.
• Gentoo - Still builds most packages from source via Portage (see above).

Managing Your Setup​

dankinstall configures DMS as a systemd user service by default. The shell starts automatically when you log in - no need to add anything to your compositor config.

# Restart the shell (works with both systemd and manual setups)
dms restart

# Check service status
systemctl --user status dms

# View logs
journalctl --user -u dms -f

# Interactive management TUI
dms

# Send IPC commands to running shell
dms ipc <command>

Environment Variables​

dankinstall creates ~/.config/environment.d/90-dms.conf with environment variables for Qt/GTK theming and Wayland compatibility. If you need to change Qt platform theming (e.g., switching from gtk3 to qt6ct), edit this file and log out/in for changes to take effect.

You can also run systemctl --user edit dms and add Environment=VAR=Value lines under [Service]. This only affects DMS and apps it launches, whereas 90-dms.conf applies to all user sessions.