Noctalia is a Linux desktop shell for Wayland compositors, providing a fully integrated user environment including a bar, dock, notification center, lock screen, wallpaper management, launcher/dmenu, control center, on-screen displays, and a plugin system based on Luau scripting. The application is written in modern C++ (C++20/23) with its own retained-mode scene graph UI rendered via OpenGL ES, and communicates with the system through Wayland protocols, D-Bus, PipeWire, and Unix sockets. It supports multiple Wayland compositors (Hyprland, Sway, Niri, Mango, Labwc, dwl, KDE, Umbriel) via compositor-specific backends, and features a sophisticated theme engine with Material 3 palette generation, template application to third-party tools, and a CLI/IPC interface for runtime control. The codebase exhibits strong engineering practices: clean abstractions (poll sources, scene nodes, config schema engine), extensive test coverage, and a well-organized modular structure despite its monolithic architecture.