this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Niri is pretty great, and Zirconium (fedora atomic niri spin) rules. (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 week ago by TheModerateTankie@hexbear.net to c/libre@hexbear.net
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If you haven't tried niri yet, it's pretty great. If you are interested in a tiling WM and don't want to mess with the omarchy/hyprland fascists, I recommend checking it out. The tiling behavior makes sense and there aren't several dozen shortcuts to learn before you can use it properly.

And if you want to play around with a distro where it's set up my default, check out zirconium. One of the reasons that kept me away from trying a tiling window manager was because I didn't want to mess with a bunch of config files before my laptop became not-annoying to use, and this has a decent set up from the start.

It's a universal blue (fedora atomic) derivative built on niri and dankmaterialshell, and it's great for older hardware. I installed on a 10 year old laptop, and it feels brand new. From what I can tell Niri+DMS uses about half the resources as a gnome or kde desktop. It's extremely smooth, stable, and has very sensible and minimal default software installed. It's focus is developers, but you can still game on it. It just won't have all the bells and whistles of something like bazzite preinstalled.

Niri is also easy to set up with CachyOS from what I understand.

I rate it 9 out of 10 linuxes. halal

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[–] gila@hexbear.net 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

There's pretty much only one config file to mess around with, config.kdl.

With noctalia shell, there's really not much to set up. The trackpad gestures work out of the box. I added a few keyboard shortcuts and that's it. (Cachyos)

Been using it since I noped out of early COSMIC. Really good specifically for laptops

[–] ExtimateCookie@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've been on Sway for ages and tried Hyprland but didn't care for it and don't get the hype tbh. Weird multiple packages and different versions for doing the same thing. It's a total mess. I switched to Niri and never looked back. I've looked at the code base too and it's really clean and well-written.

[–] TheModerateTankie@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am particularly impressed by how good niri feels to use with a trackpad. I can sort of mimic the workflow on gnome with extensions, but it just doesn't feel as good.

Hyprland is unstable, or at least under active development where major changes to the code happen regularly, and its typically installed on rolling release distro, so it seems like a bad choice unless you like messing with configs and troubleshooting.

[–] o_d@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 1 week ago

The Hyprland lead Dev is also a chud, in case you needed another reason to avoid it lol

[–] Inui@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I really like the Zirconium devs, most of whom also work on Bazzite. There's an image that is a mash of Zirconium and Bazzite called Bazzirco.

I can't get into Niri though. I use about 6 different workspaces that are for specific tasks and I always leave the programs I need open in them. I have some configured with 1 window taking up 60% of the right side of my monitor, one window in the upper left, then two smaller windows side-by-side below that. Niri doesn't let you do stacks like that with 1 on top of 2 smaller sized windows. Not if you're using it as its really intended anyway. I need better "zone" behavior instead. PlasmaZones gives me that rn.

[–] TheModerateTankie@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

There's an image that is a mash of Zirconium and Bazzite called Bazzirco.

Oh nice, I'll remember that if I switch my main PC to niri.

I can't get into Niri though. I use about 6 different workspaces that are for specific tasks and I always leave the programs I need open in them.

Oh yeah, I've heard thats an issue people have with it. Thats too bad. I'm not using an advanced setup, but saving layouts would be a nice feature.

[–] RondoRevolution@hexbear.net 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm a KDE girl but this is pretty cool! I heard of Niri before but never seen much of it outside r/unixporn.

I'm not gonna lie, I do have the urge to try out some form of tiling WM, but every time I tried tiling capabilities, I have found it confusing and had to keep excluding apps from floating here and there. If anyone has any tips for this, I'm willing to test it on KDE so I can finally get what the appeal is.

Also I love how these tiling WM desktops looks like, but I find it daunting to do this level of customization that so many do, I wish I had the patience. Maybe I'll try zirconium on a VM to see how it is.

Oh and I love the trans Z in fastfetch cat-trans

[–] TheModerateTankie@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It would probably work pretty well in a VM, that would probably be a good way to try it out. Zirconium has some quality of life improvements built in, like if you pop out the video browser in firefox it will automatically be a floating always on top window. There's a bunch of little things like that, and for the most part everything is really intuitive. I think most people will be pleasantly surprised at how functional it is.

[–] RondoRevolution@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'll take a look into it with a VM then. I also decided to look around into what is used for tiling on KDE right now, last time I tried it the big one was Bismuth which had a cool ass logo, but seems like nowadays the 2 options are Polonium and Krohnkite. There's also one that takes inspiration from Niri stuff, called PlasmaZones, but it is not auto tiling.

[–] weeb_lenin@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Last time I was on kde and wanted to try scrolling, I used carousel, might be worth a try if it's still active.

[–] RondoRevolution@hexbear.net 2 points 6 days ago

I've seen that one mentioned, but I didn't go looking for it yet. I think PlasmaZones has scrolling too if I'm not mistaken.

[–] lurkerlady@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

how did they do the trans z dog i need that shit

[–] RondoRevolution@hexbear.net 2 points 6 days ago

The fastfetch config might be in their github somewhere. I have searched how to do this on fastfetch, but I didn't have much luck, there is a repo on github about doing that on arch, but I didn't find where were the colors they were using.

[–] shallot@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Doesn’t seem to be what’s used here (at least on the face of it cause the history says fastfetch), but hyfetch is an easy tool to trans up your fastfetch.

If you don’t want a tool on a tool, the logos look like you just drop some color codes in your favorite ASCII file, e.g. see:

https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch/blob/dev/src/logo/ascii/a/arch.txt

https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch/wiki/Color-Format-Specification

https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch/discussions/444

[–] transition_property@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago

I fucking love Niri. It's been what I've been using for a bit now

[–] o_d@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 week ago

I had Zirconium installed on my laptop for a little while, but it kept locking up on me randomly for no apparent reason. I switched to Fedora Kinoite on my laptop, but decided to try Niri on my Arch Linux desktop and I've been pretty happy with it so far.