11 ms·

Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

480 points by atlintots 1y ago

prein 1y ago
I switched from i3 to Niri a couple weeks ago, and I've been super happy with it. Niri feels like it lines up more naturally with the way I tend to use windows and workspaces. I'm working on one project per workspace, opening an occasional ephermeral terminal window or web browser to the right when I need to reference something or run a quick command. My other windows in the workspace aren't altered by these new ones, no reflow happens, and then I can close it when done. My only problem with Niri is that now I really want an Ultrawide monitor.
- kenanfyi 1y ago
  I have a 49” monitor and tried Niri for a while. I had some issues regarding Wayland, I believe because of Nvidia and stopped using it. I could probably solve them, but I have been using X since years and I don’t feel switching right now. Anyway, for that short amount of time I liked most of it on my ultrawide monitor. Except when you open just one application, it stays on the left-most part naturally and it honestly sucks to look at. I have no idea if I could modify the settings to launch apps with an offset and eventually occupy the complete screen estate. I‘m planning to build a new AMD machine and will try Wayland compositors again for a longer period of time. Niri is my first candidate.
  - christophilus 1y ago
    You can. You can also center them by default, or toggle centering via keyboard shortcut, etc. it’s pretty flexible.
aeon_ai 1y ago
I've seen Niri floating around the conversation, but still find myself drawn to Hyprland. There's something about "pagination" vs a scrollable compositor that makes things feel much more targeted and organized. I use Omarchy, btw.
- antonyh 1y ago
  I avoid anything to do with DHH for his views expressed on his blog. I'm sure Omarchy is nice and all, but there are other choices without the ethical baggage.
  - aeon_ai 1y ago
    I'm familiar with DHH's opinions -- Can you elaborate on how there are ethical implications/baggage associated with using FOSS? Must we leave the vicinity of people we don't always agree with?
    - antonyh 1y ago
      It's not the FOSS, it's the distribution. As far as I can tell everything in that distro is available elsewhere.
    - exasperaited 1y ago
      I am relaxed about the small potential downsides of not being in the vicinity of people who lionize Tommy Robinson.
      - dismalaf 1y ago
        [flagged]
        exasperaited 1y ago
        > Right now there's pro "Palestinian" "protests" on the streets of the UK celebrating the murder of 2 Jews in Manchester... That is a _disgraceful_ misrepresentation of the facts. So much so that it renders replying to any part of your point completely impossible.
        dismalaf 1y ago
        https://x.com/SFaeze_Alavi/status/1973812507346416121?t=FotrBL_dvfi4YH_m9VMG8Q&s=19 https://x.com/SFaeze_Alavi/status/1973812507346416121?t=Fotr...
sivakon 1y ago
Is there a way to run this in Ubuntu?
- __s 1y ago
  Yes
- dddw 1y ago
  I did it, lotta work. Easier on nix and arch I guess.
- maelito 1y ago
  Interested as well. I'm unfamiliar with what it takes, just an apt install ? I'm using Regolith, which is installed in two commands.
- STKFLT 1y ago
  I'm not sure what the process is like for Ubuntu, but if you just want something Debian-based then PikaOS has prebuilt niri ISOs.
baq 1y ago
I'm basically fullscreen with everything all the time on macos, but not in the super-duper-fullscreen mode so cmd-tab/cmd-` works predictably. I want this on macos. I know I can't have it on macos. I also can't switch to Linux since macos is mandated by my employer. Nothing really to take out of it except that I feel like I'm not alone feeling stuck, knowing there are better workflows and not being able to do anything about it.
- i_am_proteus 1y ago
  You are not alone.
  - anotherpaul 1y ago
    +1 Fullscreen Mac os but not the "Mac full screen" but normal full screen.
- antonyh 1y ago
  I hate that I have to hold option everytime I maximise a window. All I want is to change the default to stretch windows and not use the fullscreen mode at all because of the other weirdness it brings.
  - baq 1y ago
    Rectangle's ctrl-opt-return has been a lifesaver
  - Philip-J-Fry 1y ago
    Just double click the top of the window? If I'm understanding right, that's what you want. I only ever double click windows on both Mac and Windows.
    - diggan 1y ago
      Was long time ago I used macOS in any professional capacity, but doesn't it just maximize the height of the window, not the width? I seem to recall some UX like that, but might have been a different action/button.
gbuk2013 1y ago
How does it compare to Sway?
- nagisa 1y ago
  Been using sway for many years before moving to niri last year. Outside of the fundamental window management differences, I find that a lot of stuff with niri is easier to make work, or just happens to work out of the box. Screen sharing with sway was always a problem for me[1], whereas for niri it works great (incl. sharing individual windows only[2].) I also found that niri is much better at letting hardware go to sleep (which saves 10W on my GPU.) [1]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7898 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7898 etc. [2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/issues/3864 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/issues/3864
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tamimio 1y ago
I did try it, but hyprland is still the most usable/pretty ratio for me, I also use Vicinae launcher (I wish that name is changed it’s hard to remember) so not sure how that will work with niri.
- atlintots 1y ago
  I don't use vicinae, but I just tried it out on niri and it seems to work! I might check it out, it looks interesting.
  - tamimio 1y ago
    Glad to know it works with no issues on niri! And it’s great, works with raycast extensions too!
- knoopx 1y ago
  I'm using vicinae on Niri, no issues at all
isopede 1y ago
Somebody sell me on these newfangled tiling WMs. I have been using basically the same xmonad configuration for 15+ years, pretty much updating it only on breaking or deprecated changes. What do all these new Wayland compositors have to offer except "tiling, but for wayland?" Does Wayland actually work now? I've tried it every few years for over a decade now and every time I ran into showstopper bugs (usually on nvidia cards).
- jzb 1y ago
  I think "tried it on _what_?" is the question -- which distribution, etc.? I've been using Wayland on Fedora for years and don't have any complaints. My primary laptop/desktop has an Intel graphics chipset, but I've tested it on laptops w/NVIDIA and not had problems.
  - isopede 1y ago
    It's been a few years since I last looked at it, but I've tried daily running it probably 4 or 5 times over the last 15 years. Usually on Arch, but also some Debian/Ubuntu-based distros. It's fuzzy now but I've tried probably every NVIDIA GPU generation since the GTX 500 series. I can't remember all the bugs, but I've definitely at least encountered all flavors of flickering bugs, stale updates, GPU crashes, failed copy and paste, failed screenshares, failed videoconferences... From comments on this thread, it sounds like things have drastically improved and its probably time to take another look.
    - LeFantome 1y ago
      The version of NVIDIA drivers that Debian ships with lacks explicit sync even now. Pretty much every other distro should work though.
- argiopetech 1y ago
  In the same boat with you. Not quite the same configuration (some version change issues, lost it once in an 'rm' accident that followed a symlink to / [I learned that day...] and had to start from scratch, rewrote for fun once), but my sole desktop from '09 to '23 when I switched to Niri. My reasoning here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462034 This was on my Bonobo WS (PopOS) w/ 2x NVidia GTX 1080s, multiple screens (2 1080p, 1 4k at 2x scaling), etc. No issues other than app support. Highly recommend trying it. Very low barrier to entry.
argiopetech 1y ago
Niri convinced me to give up xmonad. I ran xmonad exclusively for 14 years. Being able to have an unlimited number of windows on a desktop (without continually switching the tiling structure) makes them collections of topics rather than having multiple desktops bounded by what fits comfortably. What used to be a switch from the "editor and terminals" desktop to the "browser" desktop is now horizontal movement on the current desktop to the related browser window (general browsing is on a different desktop). Really low barrier to entry, works great out of the box. There were some wayland teething issues (application support, e.g., no Zoom), but nothing that couldn't be overcome (occasionally by falling back to X). Most of those have been resolved with time. Edits: Hardware: 2017 System76 Bonobo WS, 2x GTX 1080, multiple screens (4k @ 2x scaling + 2 1080p). PopOS. I'm running a 1-2 year old build of niri (because it isn't broken), so I've not experienced some of the fancier animations & etc. others dislike. I consider cloning and building from source to be low barrier to entry if it doesn't involve major setup effort (it doesn't/didn't), so I may be biased. Caveat emptor.
- atlintots 1y ago
  Niri recently improved it's integration with xwayland-satellite, so it's easier to run programs that don't support wayland now: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland
  - argiopetech 1y ago
    I'm still running an older version (ain't broke, won't fix), but I keep getting recommended the newer versions for features. I'll check them out eventually.
    - silicon_laser 1y ago
      can you paste a link?
      - argiopetech 1y ago
        I'm away from the computer at the moment, but I believe I'm on 0.1.3 [0]. Noting the release notes, it does have many animations already enabled (but I have some or all of them disabled through config). I'm not recommending anyone run this in favor of newer versions, but it's working for me. [0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.3 https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.3
jzb 1y ago
I've been running niri for months now on my primary desktop, I wrote about it for LWN here: https://lwn.net/Articles/1025866/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1025866/ "Normal" tiling WMs / compositors just don't work for me, but the tiling model does. Before niri, I used PaperWM and GNOME -- but a GNOME extension can only do so much. I wish the folks doing COSMIC would add scrollable tiling, but unless/until they do I'll probably stick with niri.
- rirze 1y ago
  Thanks, I wanted to know the difference with COSMIC
- detectd 1y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the COSMIC folks add it after the 1.0 release. There's been a lot of feature requests for it. In the mean time, a System76 employee created this unofficial extension to let you use other compositors within COSMIC, including Niri. https://github.com/Drakulix/cosmic-ext-extra-sessions https://github.com/Drakulix/cosmic-ext-extra-sessions
- nylonstrung 1y ago
  Cosmic with tiling would be so incredible. I love cosmic and that's the one thing I'm missing
  - zem 1y ago
    cosmic has tiling! that's the main reason i'm using it
- chrchr 1y ago
  I also switched from PaperWM to niri, and I was reluctant to do it, because I really liked not having to configure several different little apps to get a working desktop environment. GNOME comes out of the box with an app launcher, a basic configuration editor, a screen locker, widgets for controlling audio and network, etc. But ultimately, PaperWM was too quirky. For example, sometimes PaperWM and an app would disagree about what size the app's window should be, and the window would resize itself repeatedly. The vertical sizing never worked very well either.
hackerInnen 1y ago
Why all the animations? Not only for this WM, but hyprland, too, for example. They are just way too distracting, I don't understand why people like them. Yes, i know they can usually be deactivated, but it's stupid to have them as default
- diggan 1y ago
  Better that they're there so they can be disabled, rather than not there any no one gets any choice? My pet-peeve is slow animations, as animations can help my eyes/attention to navigate to/from areas of the screen, but when they're too slow, it's just so damn frustrating that I prefer them off. But smooth, fast (nearly invisible) and clean animations seems to help me navigate better/focus faster than just being eye-candy.
- adamtulinius 1y ago
  I think they can be a helpful hint about how things are positioned relative to each other.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  I really like these animations. I can understand your opinion but I moved to something like cachyos hyprland and its dotfiles really interest me and to me seems like something that __just works__ for me and it was very easy to migrate too and I just needed to add some software and just change some keybinds and I didn't have to modify any hyprland animations on cachy by default as I liked it. Maybe there is a point to have them not be a default but that might be a hassle for people like me. There is a point to be made that maybe cachy and others could opinionate it themselves but the stock shouldn't have animations but if you know that they can be deactivated easily, its definitely a mixed bag of sorts. Like see neovim, people want to use that software with some saner defaults so they use things like lunarvim / nvchad etc. but even when I was on omarchy (which I stopped after reading https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thought/ https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...) neovim with these mods never really worked with LSP and so many other nice to have features and other things with me (maybe skill issue from my side but there was always one or two errors in that neovim and I just prefer micro nowadays, it just works)
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
I was installing hyprland on cachyos and it seems that cachyos had niri as an option too in the calameres installer. It definitely had caught my attention and I might look at it too in the future. I am really distro hopping and trying out a lot of things recently as I have really cut down on the amount of software to just zen-browser with bitwarden and ublock origin,signal and micro and zed for the most part with some custom zsh script and hyprland cachy had a fish shell which looked gorgeous out of the box and very very similar to my zsh script but my zsh script always had problems with history and what not and it seems that they are fixed now so I am very very happy.
nickjj 1y ago
One thing that was holding me back from trying Niri is its configuration was limited to 1 file with no way to override or include additional configs which is quite important IMO for having 1 main config that you slightly change on different devices if you want to make your dotfiles public. For example you can have gitignored "local" files on each device to handle overrides. Just the other day the author merged 2 PRs to handle both use cases https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/2482 https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/2482. It's not in a release yet but hopefully soon.
- atlintots 1y ago
  Yes, this feature had been in the works for quite a bit since it required non-trivial changes to do it "the right way". Very excited to see these changes merged finally!
ahoka 1y ago
Wow, they have added floating windows. Need to try again!
vergessenmir 1y ago
Moved onto Niri yesterday after having to reinstall my PopOS and it just clicked. Like i3wm did all those years ago. I can focus for hours on end and spend zero mental energy on resizing a window. I had less of that with i3wm but you had to always readjust after a few windows were tiled to your workspace. That final bit of cognitive overload was removed with Niri. EDIT: Spec: RTX 3090, Pop OS 24.04 (beta), 4K 43" Monitor, Niri Installed from cargo build, super easy install, make sure you install xwayland-satellite so that you can run VS Code, Obsidian, Zoom, Blender and other strictly X11 applications
evgpbfhnr 1y ago
My only complain about niri is that after a few weeks without reboot I end up with ~500 terms open, as I often open a new shell to check something, get distracted, and forget about it as it scrolls out of the view... (I usually notice at the 400-500 mark because this machine starts swapping noticeably, and closing it all is a chore that usually ends in pkill without checking...) Maybe a bit more self discipline would help :)
- desireco42 1y ago
  that is actually dream come true... let's keep everything open always :)
  - amlib 1y ago
    and then you reboot the machine with full session restore working (whenever that's available for wayland) and get 500 terminal windows opening at the same time :)
    - desireco42 1y ago
      This is what we all want, to be in control. I am OK to make a mess sometimes as long as it is my mess not because of magical system. So yeah I would be OK. Some kind of alert task that would tell you you have window open that you didn't visit in days would probably also be useful to your point. I am not against it, just I can see positives in this. This is like tmux without tmux.
      - amlib 1y ago
        Oh, i actually agree with you, I was more concerned about the suprise abd amusement of seeing that amount of windows pop up out of nowhere. Though, I do wonder how well a linux computer will deal with so much forking, if it freezes the machine for a minute it would be rather bad, but maybe linux and wayland are mature enough to not freeze and spawn all that in like a second or so
- noisy_boy 1y ago
jasperry 1y ago
Does this or any other scrollable-tiling WM remember your preferred size of windows per-application? For instance, if I open a new Firefox window, I always want it to be the same width and full height. If I open a terminal, I want it to be half-height and the width I've set for terminals. Ideally, I'd want to set that in a configuration, so if I made adjustments to a window one time it wouldn't change the default sizes.
- atlintots 1y ago
  Yes, please see this page: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Window-Rules https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Window-Ru...
  - jasperry 1y ago
    Wow, very nice. I didn't know how long the project had been around, I wasn't expecting it to be this fleshed out.
- MitziMoto 1y ago
  PaperWM let's you define these types of per window rules in it's settings.
exasperaited 1y ago
Every time I read about Wayland compositors, I find myself thinking the same thing: don't Wayland compositors have too many responsibilities?
- dismalaf 1y ago
  Maybe. But X11 was an unmaintainable mess that was mostly abandoned by its own devs so we get what we get.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  My understanding is that Wayland compositors have fewer responsibilities than either an X11 window manager or X11 compositor despite doing the job for both.
joshcsimmons 1y ago
Wow this is pretty. Windowing systems were a primary drive for me switching to Linux.
lillecarl 1y ago
Niri is currently being "hugged to death", if you want to contribute: Donate to Ivan or review others PRs before making your own, the project has no commercial backing and he's "overloaded" by the projects recent success. I've been using it for years now and it's obvious that Smithay and Niri are high-quality projects, I haven't had any issues other than missing features (more of which has become available over time).
- squigz 1y ago
  Link to support: https://github.com/sponsors/YaLTeR https://github.com/sponsors/YaLTeR
- rendaw 1y ago
  How much does random people reviewing other people's PRs help in practice? As a maintainer I'd still want to review PRs myself before merging, no matter how many random people did it before me. As a contributor, I'd hate for a random with shallow understanding of the problem/project to come in and tell me I had to change stuff or say my PR's no good, in the chance that the maintainer is easily influenced by strong internet opinions.
  - lillecarl 1y ago
    Drive-by contributions of all kinds suck for the most part, don't contribute if you're not going to do it properly. At some point there's got to be more than one person able to review PRs (if the project scope mandates it). Linus Torvalds doesn't review all changes he merges, how do you become a comaintainer if not assisting with maintenance? If you can't review, don't make a PR (or something).
- knoopx 1y ago
  I second this, if you are daily niri user, show your appreciation, I already did! Here's my personal setup, hope it inspires someone to try it https://github.com/knoopx/nix https://github.com/knoopx/nix
- 3abiton 1y ago
  As a hyprland user, why should I switch to Niri? Is the appeal based on the "inifinite windows" feature
sasvari 1y ago
In that context: https://github.com/dawsers/scroll https://github.com/dawsers/scroll niri concept implemented in sway.
evertedsphere 1y ago
i tried niri for a few months earlier this year ultimately it turned out that after years of i3/sway scrollable tiling doesn't feel natural at all (and neither do dynamic workspaces, but that's less significant). when i resurrected my desktop a couple of months into the experiment i found it also lagged quite badly on my desktop with an nvidia card (a 3090, tried both drivers) and i couldn't be bothered to figure that one out so that was the final straw and i went back to sway i was quite impressed with the level of thought that went into the ux and the amount of polish in everything though. it already feels like a serious, well-made piece of software, and it's not even that old yet
cmrdporcupine 1y ago
I still find it frustrating there's no debian packagers for niri, after all these years, but seems to be some for almost every other distribution?
- vergessenmir 1y ago
  Package situation on anything that isn't Arch (and I think Fedora) is pretty rough. I installed it from source. It helps that it is a rust application and was up and running in no time
thesuitonym 1y ago
Neat idea, it's not for me but I see the appeal. But if I may, I'd like to see just one implementation of a vertical bar where the text is rotated, especially if it's going to display the time. I mean, I want to see it, but not enough to actually DO anything about it.
ge96 1y ago
Is there a small icon that tells you the layout so you know which way to swipe? Oh maybe it's just up and down
- atlintots 1y ago
  Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. The infinite strip extends to the right, so you scroll left-right. Workspaces are up-down. If that's what you meant?
  - ge96 1y ago
    I just wasn't sure how you'd know where you are if you can go in any direction I suppose if it's built like top-left is 0,0 you could just scroll up/left to get to the beginning If you imagine there are 4 windows and are arranged 2x2 then I was thinking you'd have an icon somewhere like [ ] [*] [ ] [ ] So you'd know you're at the top right position
    - atlintots 1y ago
      You can't go in "any" direction, the infinite strip has a fixed height and extends infinitely to the right, so you scroll left-right. Then you have workspaces which are up/down but they are like separate strips entirely. Maybe the video of the overview on this page will help: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Overview https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Overview
      - ge96 1y ago
        Ahh okay yeah I watched the 2 min one on the main readme This does have the dots (vertical position) on the right bar Long as the windows stay fixed, it annoys me how Mac will just randomly re-arrange your virtual desktops or whatever you call em I use i3 personally at this time regarding this topic but yeah although I used to only care about it because I had crappy computers at the time so not having a full desktop meant saving 400 MB of RAM at idle for example
metalliqaz 1y ago
This is the first time I've seen this concept in window management. It's pretty cool.
dinkleberg 1y ago
I was daily driving Niri for a few months a while back and it was the first WM that worked nicely OOTB on a big ass ultrawide monitor. There is a nice hotkey to center your active window. I've found it was quite the hassle on other WMs to work nicely on a wide monitor. The traditional split view means nothing is directly in front so you're always turning. Or you have to spend a bunch of time customizing it to suit the monitor. Niri is the way to go in these cases IMO. That being said, these days I prefer floating windows so I just use GNOME.
lhl 1y ago
I'd previously been giving Hyprland a try, but after lots of customization work, there were still a bunch of things I wasn't happy with and ended back on GNOME as a "just let me get work done" thing (I use multiple workspaces, have always have dozens or hundreds of browser windows open, depend on a bunch tray extensions). That being said, GNOME just updated versions and broke all my extensions again so I've decided to recommit to work on fixing anything that isn't working for my workflow and ditching GNOME forever (I was previously much happier on Openbox, but well, Wayland). With this latest go I gave River, QTile, and Niri a try. After a bit of swapping back and forth, I've settled on Niri and am slowly adding functionality I'm missing. - I like multiple dynamic workspaces (grouped by function) and don't see much point beyond a split or two so Niri worked pretty well, and I was able to largely config all the keyboard shortcuts to something that made sense to me - I'm using waybar and swaync for my other DE bits I've also been using long running Claude Code/Codex in a workspace to build a number of custom scripts: - niri-workspaces - dynamically generate a workspace display on my waybar showing windows, activity - niri-workspace-names - integrate w/ fuzzel to let me rename workpaces - niri-alttab - getting app cycling working in a way that makes sense to me, this is a larger project probably if I want live thumbnails and the like - niri-terminal-below - I often want to have a new vertical terminal split and it's a bit hacky but works (have to punch out a new terminal, then bring it below, and move back if on the right side) I haven't gone through all the docs, done much looking around, but one nice thing with these new coding agents is that they can just go and do a passable job to tweak as I want.
- atlintots 1y ago
  Re: app cycling, you might also be interested in https://github.com/isaksamsten/niriswitcher https://github.com/isaksamsten/niriswitcher.
  - lhl 1y ago
    Looks great, thanks for the suggestion!
uberduper 1y ago
Niri convinced me Scrolling is The Way. I really want windows to be able to span columns. So if I have 1 column with two windows and focus on the bottom window then create a new window/column to the right, I want that new window to be on the bottom half of column 2. I want the window from the top of column 1 to stretch across columns 1 and 2. If I again create another window/column to the right, that top left window should stretch across columns 1-3. So I should have one very wide window across the top of the screen and 3 windows across the bottom. I've started playing with this idea in the hyprland hyprscrolling plugin but I'm kind of an idiot and don't have much free time these days.
Symmetry 1y ago
I've been happily running xmonad as my window manager from within Gnome since (checks git) 2011. Is there a reasonable way to run Niri inside one?
- atlintots 1y ago
  I'm not sure, but I doubt it. You could try PaperWM [0] inside Gnome to get a feel for the scrolling WM workflow, and see if it's worth switching to niri proper for you. [0] https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
- bilkow 1y ago
  You can run niri from within other DEs, but I'm unsure whether it works well for your use-case. From the docs[0]: "You can also run niri inside an existing desktop session. Then it will open as a window, where you can give it a try. Note that this windowed mode is mainly meant for development, so it is a bit buggy (in particular, there are issues with hotkeys)." IIRC in this case the Mod key is by default Alt instead of Super. [0] https://yalter.github.io/niri/Getting-Started.html https://yalter.github.io/niri/Getting-Started.html
lucabs 1y ago
[dead]
xvrqt 1y ago
I love Niri; finally a compositor that has an easy way to inject shaders. Also: - Rust - Great Nix Flake (thx Sodiboo) - Wayland
- squigz 1y ago
  What do you mean by shaders?
  - wongogue 1y ago
    You can write your animations in niri. A shader is a basically a program that runs on the GPU.
stephen 1y ago
I want to use/try Niri, but have been staying on Hyprland from my safety blanket of Omarchy [1], and really liking its hyprscrolling plugin: https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins/tree/main/hyprscrolling https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins/tree/main/hyprscr... Imo Hyprland should merge this hyprscrolling plugin into the main project, and just ship it as the default (only?) layout option -- it just scales to "more than 4 windows" so much better than either of Hyprland's master/dwindle layouts. [1] I tried vanilla arch + archinstall + sway/niri/etc but really couldn't make it work from scratch, vs. the contrast of Omarchy which was "wow this all works" :shrug:
jadbox 1y ago
This also reminds me of Karousel on KDE: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1f7bq31/also_loving_karousel_so_much/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1f7bq31/also_loving_ka...
Outnumber7855 1y ago
Finally Niri getting the love it deserves! It's way better than Hyprland in terms of performance and stability. The code is much easier to read too (Rust vs CPP).
gundamdoubleO 1y ago
Love this WM. Been using it as a daily driver for months now and couldn't be happier.
tracker1 1y ago
Have to admit, my first thought seeing the title was, "Really?! Do we need yet another tiling, or any desktop/wm?" but after seeing this one, I'm genuinely tempted to give it a try.... I've been running the COSMIC Alpha/Beta for about 6 months now and overall happy with it... but given my display and zoom level (45" 3440x1440 @ 125%) I'm mostly pinning a single app left/right anyway. This WM approach is pretty close to exactly what I want anyway. I usually have VS Code, Terminal, Web Browser and maybe Email, Teams, Discord etc open depending on if it's work or personal. While I can't use this at work (Windows), I may give it a shot on my personal desktop.
- LeFantome 1y ago
  I have one laptop where I use Niri along with COSMIC panel and COSMIC term. Niri is amazing.
OGEnthusiast 1y ago
Niri is phenomenal. Outstanding example of high-quality software.
lelorax 1y ago
Would it be possible for something like this to work on MacOS? Or does it fall outside of what is possible given the system's "configurability"?
- NatKarmios 1y ago
  There's this, based on the PaperWM GNOME extension. https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon
nine_k 1y ago
What was not obvious to me is whether Niri supports something like a fixed panel that would display stuff like clocks, network status, battery charge, CPU load, sound volume, etc, etc.
- atlintots 1y ago
  Those are provided by desktop shells rather than niri. For example Noctalia [0], or DankMaterialShell [1] which is build for niri specifically. [0] https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell [1] https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell
tacone 1y ago
Looks fantastic, I've been searching for something like this in the past. Is there support for stacking windows (ala i3)? Thats something currently very important to me.
- mega-tux 1y ago
  Niri supports [floating windows](https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Floating-Windows https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Floating-Windows). I think is the same as stacking, right?
  - tacone 1y ago
    No, stacking in i3 (that's what I was referring to) it's vertical tabbing. I've seen that Niri supports tabbing so I guess I just have to give it a spin to see if it fits.
pmarreck 1y ago
1) I'm still on GNOME. What's the upgrade path to Wayland? 2) There's something like this for GNOME, albeit not as cool... and this may actually get me to finally install Wayland 3) since I'm on NixOS, if important things break, I can always roll it back
hamdouni 1y ago
I'm not a paper metaphore guy so I look at this with doubt : I'm more confident to remember that Super+3 shows my browser and Super+1 goes back to my "ide", than remembering that my wanted window is on the upper left of a giant virtual screen...

480 points by atlintots 1y ago

I switched from i3 to Niri a couple weeks ago, and I've been super happy with it. Niri feels like it lines up more naturally with the way I tend to use windows and workspaces. I'm working on one project per workspace, opening an occasional ephermeral terminal window or web browser to the right when I need to reference something or run a quick command. My other windows in the workspace aren't altered by these new ones, no reflow happens, and then I can close it when done. My only problem with Niri is that now I really want an Ultrawide monitor.

kenanfyi 1y ago
I have a 49” monitor and tried Niri for a while. I had some issues regarding Wayland, I believe because of Nvidia and stopped using it. I could probably solve them, but I have been using X since years and I don’t feel switching right now. Anyway, for that short amount of time I liked most of it on my ultrawide monitor. Except when you open just one application, it stays on the left-most part naturally and it honestly sucks to look at. I have no idea if I could modify the settings to launch apps with an offset and eventually occupy the complete screen estate. I‘m planning to build a new AMD machine and will try Wayland compositors again for a longer period of time. Niri is my first candidate.
- christophilus 1y ago
  You can. You can also center them by default, or toggle centering via keyboard shortcut, etc. it’s pretty flexible.

aeon_ai 1y ago

I've seen Niri floating around the conversation, but still find myself drawn to Hyprland. There's something about "pagination" vs a scrollable compositor that makes things feel much more targeted and organized. I use Omarchy, btw.

antonyh 1y ago
I avoid anything to do with DHH for his views expressed on his blog. I'm sure Omarchy is nice and all, but there are other choices without the ethical baggage.
- aeon_ai 1y ago
  I'm familiar with DHH's opinions -- Can you elaborate on how there are ethical implications/baggage associated with using FOSS? Must we leave the vicinity of people we don't always agree with?
  - antonyh 1y ago
    It's not the FOSS, it's the distribution. As far as I can tell everything in that distro is available elsewhere.
  - exasperaited 1y ago
    I am relaxed about the small potential downsides of not being in the vicinity of people who lionize Tommy Robinson.
    - dismalaf 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - exasperaited 1y ago
        > Right now there's pro "Palestinian" "protests" on the streets of the UK celebrating the murder of 2 Jews in Manchester... That is a _disgraceful_ misrepresentation of the facts. So much so that it renders replying to any part of your point completely impossible.
        dismalaf 1y ago
        https://x.com/SFaeze_Alavi/status/1973812507346416121?t=FotrBL_dvfi4YH_m9VMG8Q&s=19 https://x.com/SFaeze_Alavi/status/1973812507346416121?t=Fotr...

sivakon 1y ago

Is there a way to run this in Ubuntu?

__s 1y ago
Yes
dddw 1y ago
I did it, lotta work. Easier on nix and arch I guess.
maelito 1y ago
Interested as well. I'm unfamiliar with what it takes, just an apt install ? I'm using Regolith, which is installed in two commands.
STKFLT 1y ago
I'm not sure what the process is like for Ubuntu, but if you just want something Debian-based then PikaOS has prebuilt niri ISOs.

baq 1y ago

I'm basically fullscreen with everything all the time on macos, but not in the super-duper-fullscreen mode so cmd-tab/cmd-` works predictably. I want this on macos. I know I can't have it on macos. I also can't switch to Linux since macos is mandated by my employer. Nothing really to take out of it except that I feel like I'm not alone feeling stuck, knowing there are better workflows and not being able to do anything about it.

i_am_proteus 1y ago
You are not alone.
- anotherpaul 1y ago
  +1 Fullscreen Mac os but not the "Mac full screen" but normal full screen.
antonyh 1y ago
I hate that I have to hold option everytime I maximise a window. All I want is to change the default to stretch windows and not use the fullscreen mode at all because of the other weirdness it brings.
- baq 1y ago
  Rectangle's ctrl-opt-return has been a lifesaver
- Philip-J-Fry 1y ago
  Just double click the top of the window? If I'm understanding right, that's what you want. I only ever double click windows on both Mac and Windows.
  - diggan 1y ago
    Was long time ago I used macOS in any professional capacity, but doesn't it just maximize the height of the window, not the width? I seem to recall some UX like that, but might have been a different action/button.

gbuk2013 1y ago

How does it compare to Sway?

nagisa 1y ago
Been using sway for many years before moving to niri last year. Outside of the fundamental window management differences, I find that a lot of stuff with niri is easier to make work, or just happens to work out of the box. Screen sharing with sway was always a problem for me[1], whereas for niri it works great (incl. sharing individual windows only[2].) I also found that niri is much better at letting hardware go to sleep (which saves 10W on my GPU.) [1]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7898 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7898 etc. [2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/issues/3864 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/issues/3864

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tamimio 1y ago

I did try it, but hyprland is still the most usable/pretty ratio for me, I also use Vicinae launcher (I wish that name is changed it’s hard to remember) so not sure how that will work with niri.

atlintots 1y ago
I don't use vicinae, but I just tried it out on niri and it seems to work! I might check it out, it looks interesting.
- tamimio 1y ago
  Glad to know it works with no issues on niri! And it’s great, works with raycast extensions too!
knoopx 1y ago
I'm using vicinae on Niri, no issues at all

isopede 1y ago

Somebody sell me on these newfangled tiling WMs. I have been using basically the same xmonad configuration for 15+ years, pretty much updating it only on breaking or deprecated changes. What do all these new Wayland compositors have to offer except "tiling, but for wayland?" Does Wayland actually work now? I've tried it every few years for over a decade now and every time I ran into showstopper bugs (usually on nvidia cards).

jzb 1y ago
I think "tried it on _what_?" is the question -- which distribution, etc.? I've been using Wayland on Fedora for years and don't have any complaints. My primary laptop/desktop has an Intel graphics chipset, but I've tested it on laptops w/NVIDIA and not had problems.
- isopede 1y ago
  It's been a few years since I last looked at it, but I've tried daily running it probably 4 or 5 times over the last 15 years. Usually on Arch, but also some Debian/Ubuntu-based distros. It's fuzzy now but I've tried probably every NVIDIA GPU generation since the GTX 500 series. I can't remember all the bugs, but I've definitely at least encountered all flavors of flickering bugs, stale updates, GPU crashes, failed copy and paste, failed screenshares, failed videoconferences... From comments on this thread, it sounds like things have drastically improved and its probably time to take another look.
  - LeFantome 1y ago
    The version of NVIDIA drivers that Debian ships with lacks explicit sync even now. Pretty much every other distro should work though.
argiopetech 1y ago
In the same boat with you. Not quite the same configuration (some version change issues, lost it once in an 'rm' accident that followed a symlink to / [I learned that day...] and had to start from scratch, rewrote for fun once), but my sole desktop from '09 to '23 when I switched to Niri. My reasoning here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462034 This was on my Bonobo WS (PopOS) w/ 2x NVidia GTX 1080s, multiple screens (2 1080p, 1 4k at 2x scaling), etc. No issues other than app support. Highly recommend trying it. Very low barrier to entry.

argiopetech 1y ago

Niri convinced me to give up xmonad. I ran xmonad exclusively for 14 years. Being able to have an unlimited number of windows on a desktop (without continually switching the tiling structure) makes them collections of topics rather than having multiple desktops bounded by what fits comfortably. What used to be a switch from the "editor and terminals" desktop to the "browser" desktop is now horizontal movement on the current desktop to the related browser window (general browsing is on a different desktop). Really low barrier to entry, works great out of the box. There were some wayland teething issues (application support, e.g., no Zoom), but nothing that couldn't be overcome (occasionally by falling back to X). Most of those have been resolved with time. Edits: Hardware: 2017 System76 Bonobo WS, 2x GTX 1080, multiple screens (4k @ 2x scaling + 2 1080p). PopOS. I'm running a 1-2 year old build of niri (because it isn't broken), so I've not experienced some of the fancier animations & etc. others dislike. I consider cloning and building from source to be low barrier to entry if it doesn't involve major setup effort (it doesn't/didn't), so I may be biased. Caveat emptor.

atlintots 1y ago
Niri recently improved it's integration with xwayland-satellite, so it's easier to run programs that don't support wayland now: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland
- argiopetech 1y ago
  I'm still running an older version (ain't broke, won't fix), but I keep getting recommended the newer versions for features. I'll check them out eventually.
  - silicon_laser 1y ago
    can you paste a link?
    - argiopetech 1y ago
      I'm away from the computer at the moment, but I believe I'm on 0.1.3 [0]. Noting the release notes, it does have many animations already enabled (but I have some or all of them disabled through config). I'm not recommending anyone run this in favor of newer versions, but it's working for me. [0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.3 https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.3

jzb 1y ago

I've been running niri for months now on my primary desktop, I wrote about it for LWN here: https://lwn.net/Articles/1025866/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1025866/ "Normal" tiling WMs / compositors just don't work for me, but the tiling model does. Before niri, I used PaperWM and GNOME -- but a GNOME extension can only do so much. I wish the folks doing COSMIC would add scrollable tiling, but unless/until they do I'll probably stick with niri.

rirze 1y ago
Thanks, I wanted to know the difference with COSMIC
detectd 1y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the COSMIC folks add it after the 1.0 release. There's been a lot of feature requests for it. In the mean time, a System76 employee created this unofficial extension to let you use other compositors within COSMIC, including Niri. https://github.com/Drakulix/cosmic-ext-extra-sessions https://github.com/Drakulix/cosmic-ext-extra-sessions
nylonstrung 1y ago
Cosmic with tiling would be so incredible. I love cosmic and that's the one thing I'm missing
- zem 1y ago
  cosmic has tiling! that's the main reason i'm using it
chrchr 1y ago
I also switched from PaperWM to niri, and I was reluctant to do it, because I really liked not having to configure several different little apps to get a working desktop environment. GNOME comes out of the box with an app launcher, a basic configuration editor, a screen locker, widgets for controlling audio and network, etc. But ultimately, PaperWM was too quirky. For example, sometimes PaperWM and an app would disagree about what size the app's window should be, and the window would resize itself repeatedly. The vertical sizing never worked very well either.

hackerInnen 1y ago

Why all the animations? Not only for this WM, but hyprland, too, for example. They are just way too distracting, I don't understand why people like them. Yes, i know they can usually be deactivated, but it's stupid to have them as default

diggan 1y ago
Better that they're there so they can be disabled, rather than not there any no one gets any choice? My pet-peeve is slow animations, as animations can help my eyes/attention to navigate to/from areas of the screen, but when they're too slow, it's just so damn frustrating that I prefer them off. But smooth, fast (nearly invisible) and clean animations seems to help me navigate better/focus faster than just being eye-candy.
adamtulinius 1y ago
I think they can be a helpful hint about how things are positioned relative to each other.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
I really like these animations. I can understand your opinion but I moved to something like cachyos hyprland and its dotfiles really interest me and to me seems like something that __just works__ for me and it was very easy to migrate too and I just needed to add some software and just change some keybinds and I didn't have to modify any hyprland animations on cachy by default as I liked it. Maybe there is a point to have them not be a default but that might be a hassle for people like me. There is a point to be made that maybe cachy and others could opinionate it themselves but the stock shouldn't have animations but if you know that they can be deactivated easily, its definitely a mixed bag of sorts. Like see neovim, people want to use that software with some saner defaults so they use things like lunarvim / nvchad etc. but even when I was on omarchy (which I stopped after reading https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thought/ https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...) neovim with these mods never really worked with LSP and so many other nice to have features and other things with me (maybe skill issue from my side but there was always one or two errors in that neovim and I just prefer micro nowadays, it just works)

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

I was installing hyprland on cachyos and it seems that cachyos had niri as an option too in the calameres installer. It definitely had caught my attention and I might look at it too in the future. I am really distro hopping and trying out a lot of things recently as I have really cut down on the amount of software to just zen-browser with bitwarden and ublock origin,signal and micro and zed for the most part with some custom zsh script and hyprland cachy had a fish shell which looked gorgeous out of the box and very very similar to my zsh script but my zsh script always had problems with history and what not and it seems that they are fixed now so I am very very happy.

nickjj 1y ago

One thing that was holding me back from trying Niri is its configuration was limited to 1 file with no way to override or include additional configs which is quite important IMO for having 1 main config that you slightly change on different devices if you want to make your dotfiles public. For example you can have gitignored "local" files on each device to handle overrides. Just the other day the author merged 2 PRs to handle both use cases https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/2482 https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/2482. It's not in a release yet but hopefully soon.

atlintots 1y ago
Yes, this feature had been in the works for quite a bit since it required non-trivial changes to do it "the right way". Very excited to see these changes merged finally!

ahoka 1y ago

Wow, they have added floating windows. Need to try again!

vergessenmir 1y ago

Moved onto Niri yesterday after having to reinstall my PopOS and it just clicked. Like i3wm did all those years ago. I can focus for hours on end and spend zero mental energy on resizing a window. I had less of that with i3wm but you had to always readjust after a few windows were tiled to your workspace. That final bit of cognitive overload was removed with Niri. EDIT: Spec: RTX 3090, Pop OS 24.04 (beta), 4K 43" Monitor, Niri Installed from cargo build, super easy install, make sure you install xwayland-satellite so that you can run VS Code, Obsidian, Zoom, Blender and other strictly X11 applications

evgpbfhnr 1y ago

My only complain about niri is that after a few weeks without reboot I end up with ~500 terms open, as I often open a new shell to check something, get distracted, and forget about it as it scrolls out of the view... (I usually notice at the 400-500 mark because this machine starts swapping noticeably, and closing it all is a chore that usually ends in pkill without checking...) Maybe a bit more self discipline would help :)

desireco42 1y ago
that is actually dream come true... let's keep everything open always :)
- amlib 1y ago
  and then you reboot the machine with full session restore working (whenever that's available for wayland) and get 500 terminal windows opening at the same time :)
  - desireco42 1y ago
    This is what we all want, to be in control. I am OK to make a mess sometimes as long as it is my mess not because of magical system. So yeah I would be OK. Some kind of alert task that would tell you you have window open that you didn't visit in days would probably also be useful to your point. I am not against it, just I can see positives in this. This is like tmux without tmux.
    - amlib 1y ago
      Oh, i actually agree with you, I was more concerned about the suprise abd amusement of seeing that amount of windows pop up out of nowhere. Though, I do wonder how well a linux computer will deal with so much forking, if it freezes the machine for a minute it would be rather bad, but maybe linux and wayland are mature enough to not freeze and spawn all that in like a second or so
noisy_boy 1y ago

jasperry 1y ago

Does this or any other scrollable-tiling WM remember your preferred size of windows per-application? For instance, if I open a new Firefox window, I always want it to be the same width and full height. If I open a terminal, I want it to be half-height and the width I've set for terminals. Ideally, I'd want to set that in a configuration, so if I made adjustments to a window one time it wouldn't change the default sizes.

atlintots 1y ago
Yes, please see this page: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Window-Rules https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Window-Ru...
- jasperry 1y ago
  Wow, very nice. I didn't know how long the project had been around, I wasn't expecting it to be this fleshed out.
MitziMoto 1y ago
PaperWM let's you define these types of per window rules in it's settings.

exasperaited 1y ago

Every time I read about Wayland compositors, I find myself thinking the same thing: don't Wayland compositors have too many responsibilities?

dismalaf 1y ago
Maybe. But X11 was an unmaintainable mess that was mostly abandoned by its own devs so we get what we get.
WorldMaker 1y ago
My understanding is that Wayland compositors have fewer responsibilities than either an X11 window manager or X11 compositor despite doing the job for both.

joshcsimmons 1y ago

Wow this is pretty. Windowing systems were a primary drive for me switching to Linux.

lillecarl 1y ago

Niri is currently being "hugged to death", if you want to contribute: Donate to Ivan or review others PRs before making your own, the project has no commercial backing and he's "overloaded" by the projects recent success. I've been using it for years now and it's obvious that Smithay and Niri are high-quality projects, I haven't had any issues other than missing features (more of which has become available over time).

squigz 1y ago
Link to support: https://github.com/sponsors/YaLTeR https://github.com/sponsors/YaLTeR
rendaw 1y ago
How much does random people reviewing other people's PRs help in practice? As a maintainer I'd still want to review PRs myself before merging, no matter how many random people did it before me. As a contributor, I'd hate for a random with shallow understanding of the problem/project to come in and tell me I had to change stuff or say my PR's no good, in the chance that the maintainer is easily influenced by strong internet opinions.
- lillecarl 1y ago
  Drive-by contributions of all kinds suck for the most part, don't contribute if you're not going to do it properly. At some point there's got to be more than one person able to review PRs (if the project scope mandates it). Linus Torvalds doesn't review all changes he merges, how do you become a comaintainer if not assisting with maintenance? If you can't review, don't make a PR (or something).
knoopx 1y ago
I second this, if you are daily niri user, show your appreciation, I already did! Here's my personal setup, hope it inspires someone to try it https://github.com/knoopx/nix https://github.com/knoopx/nix
3abiton 1y ago
As a hyprland user, why should I switch to Niri? Is the appeal based on the "inifinite windows" feature

sasvari 1y ago

In that context: https://github.com/dawsers/scroll https://github.com/dawsers/scroll niri concept implemented in sway.

evertedsphere 1y ago

i tried niri for a few months earlier this year ultimately it turned out that after years of i3/sway scrollable tiling doesn't feel natural at all (and neither do dynamic workspaces, but that's less significant). when i resurrected my desktop a couple of months into the experiment i found it also lagged quite badly on my desktop with an nvidia card (a 3090, tried both drivers) and i couldn't be bothered to figure that one out so that was the final straw and i went back to sway i was quite impressed with the level of thought that went into the ux and the amount of polish in everything though. it already feels like a serious, well-made piece of software, and it's not even that old yet

cmrdporcupine 1y ago

I still find it frustrating there's no debian packagers for niri, after all these years, but seems to be some for almost every other distribution?

vergessenmir 1y ago
Package situation on anything that isn't Arch (and I think Fedora) is pretty rough. I installed it from source. It helps that it is a rust application and was up and running in no time

thesuitonym 1y ago

Neat idea, it's not for me but I see the appeal. But if I may, I'd like to see just one implementation of a vertical bar where the text is rotated, especially if it's going to display the time. I mean, I want to see it, but not enough to actually DO anything about it.

ge96 1y ago

Is there a small icon that tells you the layout so you know which way to swipe? Oh maybe it's just up and down

atlintots 1y ago
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. The infinite strip extends to the right, so you scroll left-right. Workspaces are up-down. If that's what you meant?
- ge96 1y ago
  I just wasn't sure how you'd know where you are if you can go in any direction I suppose if it's built like top-left is 0,0 you could just scroll up/left to get to the beginning If you imagine there are 4 windows and are arranged 2x2 then I was thinking you'd have an icon somewhere like [ ] [*] [ ] [ ] So you'd know you're at the top right position
  - atlintots 1y ago
    You can't go in "any" direction, the infinite strip has a fixed height and extends infinitely to the right, so you scroll left-right. Then you have workspaces which are up/down but they are like separate strips entirely. Maybe the video of the overview on this page will help: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Overview https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Overview
    - ge96 1y ago
      Ahh okay yeah I watched the 2 min one on the main readme This does have the dots (vertical position) on the right bar Long as the windows stay fixed, it annoys me how Mac will just randomly re-arrange your virtual desktops or whatever you call em I use i3 personally at this time regarding this topic but yeah although I used to only care about it because I had crappy computers at the time so not having a full desktop meant saving 400 MB of RAM at idle for example

metalliqaz 1y ago

This is the first time I've seen this concept in window management. It's pretty cool.

dinkleberg 1y ago

I was daily driving Niri for a few months a while back and it was the first WM that worked nicely OOTB on a big ass ultrawide monitor. There is a nice hotkey to center your active window. I've found it was quite the hassle on other WMs to work nicely on a wide monitor. The traditional split view means nothing is directly in front so you're always turning. Or you have to spend a bunch of time customizing it to suit the monitor. Niri is the way to go in these cases IMO. That being said, these days I prefer floating windows so I just use GNOME.

lhl 1y ago

I'd previously been giving Hyprland a try, but after lots of customization work, there were still a bunch of things I wasn't happy with and ended back on GNOME as a "just let me get work done" thing (I use multiple workspaces, have always have dozens or hundreds of browser windows open, depend on a bunch tray extensions). That being said, GNOME just updated versions and broke all my extensions again so I've decided to recommit to work on fixing anything that isn't working for my workflow and ditching GNOME forever (I was previously much happier on Openbox, but well, Wayland). With this latest go I gave River, QTile, and Niri a try. After a bit of swapping back and forth, I've settled on Niri and am slowly adding functionality I'm missing. - I like multiple dynamic workspaces (grouped by function) and don't see much point beyond a split or two so Niri worked pretty well, and I was able to largely config all the keyboard shortcuts to something that made sense to me - I'm using waybar and swaync for my other DE bits I've also been using long running Claude Code/Codex in a workspace to build a number of custom scripts: - niri-workspaces - dynamically generate a workspace display on my waybar showing windows, activity - niri-workspace-names - integrate w/ fuzzel to let me rename workpaces - niri-alttab - getting app cycling working in a way that makes sense to me, this is a larger project probably if I want live thumbnails and the like - niri-terminal-below - I often want to have a new vertical terminal split and it's a bit hacky but works (have to punch out a new terminal, then bring it below, and move back if on the right side) I haven't gone through all the docs, done much looking around, but one nice thing with these new coding agents is that they can just go and do a passable job to tweak as I want.

atlintots 1y ago
Re: app cycling, you might also be interested in https://github.com/isaksamsten/niriswitcher https://github.com/isaksamsten/niriswitcher.
- lhl 1y ago
  Looks great, thanks for the suggestion!

uberduper 1y ago

Niri convinced me Scrolling is The Way. I really want windows to be able to span columns. So if I have 1 column with two windows and focus on the bottom window then create a new window/column to the right, I want that new window to be on the bottom half of column 2. I want the window from the top of column 1 to stretch across columns 1 and 2. If I again create another window/column to the right, that top left window should stretch across columns 1-3. So I should have one very wide window across the top of the screen and 3 windows across the bottom. I've started playing with this idea in the hyprland hyprscrolling plugin but I'm kind of an idiot and don't have much free time these days.

Symmetry 1y ago

I've been happily running xmonad as my window manager from within Gnome since (checks git) 2011. Is there a reasonable way to run Niri inside one?

atlintots 1y ago
I'm not sure, but I doubt it. You could try PaperWM [0] inside Gnome to get a feel for the scrolling WM workflow, and see if it's worth switching to niri proper for you. [0] https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
bilkow 1y ago
You can run niri from within other DEs, but I'm unsure whether it works well for your use-case. From the docs[0]: "You can also run niri inside an existing desktop session. Then it will open as a window, where you can give it a try. Note that this windowed mode is mainly meant for development, so it is a bit buggy (in particular, there are issues with hotkeys)." IIRC in this case the Mod key is by default Alt instead of Super. [0] https://yalter.github.io/niri/Getting-Started.html https://yalter.github.io/niri/Getting-Started.html

lucabs 1y ago

[dead]

xvrqt 1y ago

I love Niri; finally a compositor that has an easy way to inject shaders. Also: - Rust - Great Nix Flake (thx Sodiboo) - Wayland

squigz 1y ago
What do you mean by shaders?
- wongogue 1y ago
  You can write your animations in niri. A shader is a basically a program that runs on the GPU.

stephen 1y ago

I want to use/try Niri, but have been staying on Hyprland from my safety blanket of Omarchy [1], and really liking its hyprscrolling plugin: https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins/tree/main/hyprscrolling https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins/tree/main/hyprscr... Imo Hyprland should merge this hyprscrolling plugin into the main project, and just ship it as the default (only?) layout option -- it just scales to "more than 4 windows" so much better than either of Hyprland's master/dwindle layouts. [1] I tried vanilla arch + archinstall + sway/niri/etc but really couldn't make it work from scratch, vs. the contrast of Omarchy which was "wow this all works" :shrug:

jadbox 1y ago

This also reminds me of Karousel on KDE: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1f7bq31/also_loving_karousel_so_much/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1f7bq31/also_loving_ka...

Outnumber7855 1y ago

Finally Niri getting the love it deserves! It's way better than Hyprland in terms of performance and stability. The code is much easier to read too (Rust vs CPP).

gundamdoubleO 1y ago

Love this WM. Been using it as a daily driver for months now and couldn't be happier.

tracker1 1y ago

Have to admit, my first thought seeing the title was, "Really?! Do we need yet another tiling, or any desktop/wm?" but after seeing this one, I'm genuinely tempted to give it a try.... I've been running the COSMIC Alpha/Beta for about 6 months now and overall happy with it... but given my display and zoom level (45" 3440x1440 @ 125%) I'm mostly pinning a single app left/right anyway. This WM approach is pretty close to exactly what I want anyway. I usually have VS Code, Terminal, Web Browser and maybe Email, Teams, Discord etc open depending on if it's work or personal. While I can't use this at work (Windows), I may give it a shot on my personal desktop.

LeFantome 1y ago
I have one laptop where I use Niri along with COSMIC panel and COSMIC term. Niri is amazing.

OGEnthusiast 1y ago

Niri is phenomenal. Outstanding example of high-quality software.

lelorax 1y ago

Would it be possible for something like this to work on MacOS? Or does it fall outside of what is possible given the system's "configurability"?

NatKarmios 1y ago
There's this, based on the PaperWM GNOME extension. https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

nine_k 1y ago

What was not obvious to me is whether Niri supports something like a fixed panel that would display stuff like clocks, network status, battery charge, CPU load, sound volume, etc, etc.

atlintots 1y ago
Those are provided by desktop shells rather than niri. For example Noctalia [0], or DankMaterialShell [1] which is build for niri specifically. [0] https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell [1] https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell

tacone 1y ago

Looks fantastic, I've been searching for something like this in the past. Is there support for stacking windows (ala i3)? Thats something currently very important to me.

mega-tux 1y ago
Niri supports [floating windows](https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Floating-Windows https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Floating-Windows). I think is the same as stacking, right?
- tacone 1y ago
  No, stacking in i3 (that's what I was referring to) it's vertical tabbing. I've seen that Niri supports tabbing so I guess I just have to give it a spin to see if it fits.

pmarreck 1y ago

1) I'm still on GNOME. What's the upgrade path to Wayland? 2) There's something like this for GNOME, albeit not as cool... and this may actually get me to finally install Wayland 3) since I'm on NixOS, if important things break, I can always roll it back

hamdouni 1y ago

I'm not a paper metaphore guy so I look at this with doubt : I'm more confident to remember that Super+3 shows my browser and Super+1 goes back to my "ide", than remembering that my wanted window is on the upper left of a giant virtual screen...