I switched over from v4 a couple days ago, and its a nice upgrade.

Gotta make sure to disable any theme templates in v4 first though, or they're permanently applied, can't even get rid of them by deleting the files.

How does Noctalia compare to DMS? They seem to be very similar projects, and I'm just curious to hear from people who have tried both.

IIRC both Noctalia v4 and DMS are quickshell based, probably that's why they look similar. Noctalia v5 has its own thing. v5 is not as customizable as v4 at the moment but it will get there, worth looking for.

A little anecdot from my Thinkpad X201, both v4 and v5 are heavy for it, though v5 supposedly have better performance, however still slow in my opinion. Both fine on my main PC. Color generation is also nice by the way, saved me from mingling with Kvantum, Qt, GTK themes etc. Also generates terminal themes, even has a separate theme for btop.

First wayland DE (?) that looks nice to me. Thinking about switching from KDE but I doubt it's as polished... The plugins seem to be nice, as they seem to be using many of the same software stack as I do (Syncthing, Tailscale, KDE Connect, scrcpy, ...).

Where are the screenshots?

they have a gallery here: https://noctalia.dev/#spotlight

Much lighter and snappier than DMS.

I tried Noctalia for a bit. I like what they are going for. It's a pretty simple way to get the hyprland experience. I do think I still prefer raw hyprland and ricing it myself though. I do hope it will be a good entry point for people that haven't tried hyprland.

I've been using it for a while, it's very nice on minimal WMs like sway

I have been using Noctalia since their very early days and eventually tried DMS. I found Noctalia to be much smoother and more straightforward, and v5 is also lighter on resources. Worth checking out

If you think a keyboard focused workflow is for you then go try it! I found it a very gentle and accessible way to use WMs