this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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I Finally Tried Niri, The New Way Of Tiling Linux Users Are Going Crazy About (feed.itsfoss.com)
submitted 3 days ago by cm0002@lemy.lol to c/linux@programming.dev
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[โ€“] de_lancre@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Niri is amazing:

  • Overview just feels right to manage windows, hyprland for example lacks that feature and due other issues even existing plugins can't be used anymore (hyprland dev borked support)
  • Scrolling desktops is a weird concept, but surprisingly works well. Had to move back to hyprland after half a year on Niri and I just can't get used to it. What do you mean space on my desktop is limited?
  • It have all bells and whistles that hyprland have, like custom animations, blur (was recently added after a lot of users cried a lot), you can even write own shaders for windows opening\closing

But: Still in development, some features broken or not exists. Blur for example was added in hurry, so visual bugs with it is common. HDR is not supported. Another thing that actually forced me to switch - bit depth control is not supported (patch for that was proposed half a year ago and only recently was merged, so it should be in new release), cause of that my monitor always tries to set 16bit color space, which is obviosly imposible thru hdmi and with my TV, so after booting up niri I always have black screen (or not, sometimes it reverts to defaults which is 8 bit and for HDR\to use my monitor you ideally need 10, so it's a mess). And there some additional small things, like no way to trigger something on desktop\window switch, small things like that, which usually do exist in tailing managers.

But beyond that, it's awesome and I hope dev continue. It milions time better than hyprland just because they haven't changed damn config scheme 3 time in a focking row.

[โ€“] yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

And crucially, it is written entirely in Rust. Which could be a deciding point for some.

I am a programmer, and in my opinion, unless you are planning at looking at the source code and don't want to mess with other languages, you as a user should not care about whether the program you're about to use is written in Rust.

Wall of text with contextRust has become popular among programming enthusiasts due to resulting in fast programs while avoiding memory management problems that come from using some other "fast" languages such as C. Not just that, but Rust achieves that while also avoiding the most common approach to this problem, which is garbage collection. Garbage collection is often seen as slow, despite, when compared to C's manual memory management, garbage collection not being that far behind when well optimized. That's why some Rust enthusiasts write that their Rust programs are "Blazingly Fast ๐Ÿ”ฅ", instead of writing "very fast" like everyone else. Those same enthusiasts take the fact that, as I've said before, Rust avoids the memory management problems from some "fast" languages such as C, and advertise it as "Rust makes programs safer and remove entire classes of bugs while keeping it fast". None of these "ads" are wrong, but they can be a bit misleading to those who don't know much about programming.

First of all, a programmer can definitely make slow and buggy programs with Rust. Rust "fights" against bad memory management, but that's a small part of the issues that can rise from bad programming. Any programming language can try to "fight" bad programming practices (something that Rust tries to do), but there's always a limit to how much bad habits you can catch. Secondly, Rust isn't the only language that can offer fast, memory-safe programs. I've heard about benchmarks that showed that OCaml is one of the "fastest" programming languages, and it's a language that uses garbage collection. Many other examples exist. Heck, I've even heard of guidelines for fast memory-unsafe programming languages to avoid memory managent problems (here's an example https://misra.org.uk/).

I'm not saying this because I hate Rust, or anything. Rust is a really cool programming language that seems to be really useful for memory-constrained environments. However, just like any other programming language, it's a tool, not a magic wand. As such, please don't treat it like a miraculous solution to make your programs faster and less buggy.

You should instead look at how much care the developers put into their own programs. Now that's a good deciding point for whether to install a program.

Happy hacking! :)

(P.S.: please correct me if I wrote anything wrong)

[โ€“] anhydrous@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Also a programmer. This is true with the exception of JVM languages, which can sometimes place a burden on the user of an application.

[โ€“] tyler@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

funny, as a jvm dev, I think the same about Python. Most JVM devs are packaging their code as binaries, not raw jars. Most Python devs package their code as.. well they don't usually. they just tell you to clone the project and run it with a virtualenv. Which is so much worse than a jar.

[โ€“] pelya@lemmy.world 31 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Laughs in 15 virtual desktops

[โ€“] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

This is the way I always did it on Mac, and now do it on Cosmic.

Almost always I want windows to have the full real-estate of the screen (editor, browser, etc) so tiling rarely makes sense for me and instead I want to be able to rapidly change between windows.

So using whole workspaces as a side-to-side carousel where I can flip back and forth between adjacent ones in a moment has been my go-to workflow for 15 years already.

[โ€“] Ansis100@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Same here. I also like to have specific types of apps on specific desktops so that I always know that, for example, Super+2 is my web browser, Super+4 is email and Signal etc.

I'm much more effective on a fixed layout of things rather than searching for the app I need visually.

[โ€“] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

I don't do strictly fixed, but I do relative, for example my terminal is left of my IDE, my browser is right.

Using workspaces as instantly switchable 'screens' also helps make presentations and demos really slick, i find.

You can screen-share the whole monitor and then flick between your deck and code and a browser very cleanly with no window fumbling.

[โ€“] cmbabul@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 days ago

The independent virtual desktop per screen in KDE 6.7, Cosmic, and macOS(which Iโ€™m pretty sure has had it working like that the longest) was really such a game changer for me. The all screens changin was always so awkward.

And coupling it with a mouse that has a center-left and center-right click on its scrolling wheel which get remapped to switch desktop in the respective directions is silky smooth.

I did like the tiling in Cosmic a lot though and wouldnโ€™t mind incorporating it into a single desktop or screen.

[โ€“] abc@suppo.fi 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Niri & Noctalia are awesome. It's not quite as easy to configure as Cosmic Desktop, but the paradigm works way better and faster when you get used to it.

[โ€“] kewjo@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

it's great after customizing, using meta + vim bindings works great for me to move between windows and workspace as if everything is laid out on a grid. meta + opt + vim bindings to move windows around also seems nice.

[โ€“] greco@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago (2 children)

If you have ever lost track of your editor because Firefox decided to squish it into a 200-pixel-wide column, you know exactly how jarring that can be.

so, instead, your terminal is lost off the edge of the screen.

doesn't tabbed window layout address this issue?

I guess this is more like if tabbed window layout doesn't fit your brain model, here is an alternative that maybe does, i just struggle to find much of a difference. maybe this is just easy mode for split window tabs?

either way, i love that there are options.

[โ€“] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 3 days ago

Technically yes but tabs are modal: You have to leave the tabbed mode to look at more than one window at once, and then the third window that opens will cause one of them or both to resize. Then you need to fix that by moving it to a new workspace or the tab container.

The idea is that with scrolling, the resizing behaviour is always opt-in. New windows will never resize any existing ones, independent of any "mode" or which element you have focused.

It's not for everyone (personally I realized after a few months that I did not actually like scrolling, I just put up with it), but I do think it's a comparable paradigm shift as going from a stacking WM to a tiling one. Sure you can create tiling layouts on almost all stacking WMs fairly easily with simple mnemonic keyboard shortcuts, but using it feels different, if that makes sense?

[โ€“] mmmm@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I still miss KDE4SC's tabbed windows. It was the shit.

I hope they can come back sometime.

(That being said I like Niri's concept but I don't wanna install yet another WM, I'm using the karousel kwin script which pretty much does the same thing)

[โ€“] remnant2652@piefed.world 7 points 3 days ago

Niri was the first tiling wm that really clicked with me. It with noctalia are now my go-to laptop setup.

[โ€“] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But it's a scrolling wm...

[โ€“] de_lancre@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

But itโ€™s a scrolling wmโ€ฆ

But It's a scrolling wm!

[โ€“] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 6 points 3 days ago

Looks interesting, and I thought KDE when? But, of course, it's already there as Karousel. On the list of things to audit when I feel like futzing with UI again.

[โ€“] noobdoomguy8658@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I loved niri as a long-time i3 user, but once the novelty of it faded, I realized it was mostly its GNOME-like features that charmed me, like pressing Meta for "explode" view and dynamic workspace management, while the actual tiling and window management wasn't as streamlined for me (especially stacking thinga vertically).

Sometimes I also miss the quality-of-life of a full DE, like dynamically switching from light to dark mode, but that can arguably be achieved in some other way - or even running i3 under a DE.

Sometime when I upgrade from my trusty old Nvidia GPU, I might switch to sway, but as of now, nothing has managed to topple i3 for me.

[โ€“] certified_expert@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Im a long time i3 user too. I like my setup, and have probably dozens of custom i3-xxxxx programs that I've made over time, my custom config compositor, custom rofi menues that show different options hepending on the hostname, a well-tuned i3-status-rs, and of course: the muscle memory of all the shortcuts...

I gotta say, jumping to Wayland and using cute bars and themes looks tempting, but it's probably gonna be a pain in the ass.

[โ€“] noobdoomguy8658@feddit.org 1 points 5 hours ago

What's a config compositor? Compositor makes me think of display/server compositor, like KWin, picom, etc.

Anyway, share everything you got if you can, that sounds cool!

[โ€“] somegeek@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

i3wm-ist here. Niri also didn't provide anything to me i3 didn't. It was actually more dificcult and less productive for my professional work with two monitors. But for laptop only usage it's amazing.

i3 to sway is pretty smooth. You don't have to change much and after a while you forget if youre using i3 or sway.

[โ€“] noobdoomguy8658@feddit.org 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Multi-monitor i3 really ruins virtually any non-i3 multi-monitor, with a few exception of other tiling window managers, I think.

I heard KDE introducing something similar, but I can't imagine it being as convenient.

I'm thinking of migrating to sway on a full-AMD machine I have, but I think it had shown me some attitude a couple of times and I didn't bother further.

Aside from the best practices and safety, what can Wayland provide to me on a mostly-work machine? I know I'll miss .Xresources for the colors across multiple applications, though.

[โ€“] somegeek@programming.dev 1 points 4 hours ago

I'm taking the same approach for my main work laptop. As long as X11 is working, I probably won't bother moving to wayland/sway.

[โ€“] kcuf@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I want my xmonad to live for ever

[โ€“] buran@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'd love to try Niri. The only Wayland compositor that I have used for a long term is Hyprland, and it was an awful experience for me; I found it a little difficult to configure.

[โ€“] de_lancre@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

found it a little difficult to configure.

It's okay, dev apparently think it's hard too, otherwise I have no clue why da fuck he would change configuration scheme 3 focking times

[โ€“] PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've tried WMs a number of times but the sheer amount of shit not working out of the box (or ever) is just awful.

I have Niri + Noctalia on my laptop rn and it's nice for most tasks, but so limited. configuring external monitors doesn't work right. the steam flatpak doesn't even display a window. the builtin clipboard manager doesn't work. Non-linux people watch me use this and they decide that linux is unusable.

I mean zero disrespect to any of the people building these fantastic tools but I keep crawling back to KDE Plasma. Am I doing something wrong hahah

[โ€“] somegeek@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

Youre doing something wrong but if plasma works for you, it works for you.

I cannot imagine using anything other than a tiling WM. The same way I cannot stand coding/writing without vim mode. Because I have become so efficient and good at them, things just get done way more quickly.

But if the WM doesn't have that multiplier effect for you, just go tge easy path.