// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Nitrux Shows Off a New Desktop Approach Other Distros Might Want to Take Note of
Don't think that this move came out of the blue. Nitrux has been busy building this up since last year, when it swapped out KDE Plasma for Hyprland and told everyone that they were headed towards 'a new beginning' that was not for everyone.
The project now has a name for what it has been creating, the "Workspace Environment." It ties together four new in-house developed components as pieces of a five-layer architecture, presenting a very different desktop experience for Nitrux than we are used to.
Uri Herrera, Nitrux's founder, describes it as filling a gap, where a window manager gives you almost nothing beyond window placement and a full desktop environment like GNOME or Plasma bundles everything into one tightly coupled process tree.
The Workspace Environment sits in between as a cohesive shell built from independent, single-purpose components that don't share a process lifecycle with the compositor or with each other.
Valenz is the new workspace bar, handling media controls, tray, notifications, and indicators for network, Bluetooth, battery, and power profile, plus weather, a calendar view, and system resource widgets.
Whereas Marina is the new dock that tracks and groups open windows across workspaces on Hyprland while handling pinning, auto-hide, and horizontal scrolling. It also adds unread message badges for pinned apps that expose a launcher count.
Workspace Settings replaces KDE System Settings entirely, covering user accounts, locale, networking, and MauiKit configuration without any Plasma dependency.
Desklock completes the set as a native QML lock screen built on the QMLGreet codebase, with PAM authentication, per-output lock surfaces, and CPU, memory, and network monitors alongside MPRIS playback controls.
All four are QML-based and built with MauiKit, though only Valenz and Marina share LayerShell-Qt, so the stack still ends up with one visual language instead of stitched together toolkits.
The switches aren't just cosmetic, and alternatives were considered.