Is Niri my new favorite tiling wm?
Date: 2025-11-03
Lately I have been checking out Wayland, and with that Hyprland and another compositor, named Niri. I was never really a big fan of Wayland, and over the years I didn't really feel like I was that interested. I use an nvidia card, and even as last year I had problems running hyprland with it. However recently I looked at it again, mainly cause Omarchy topped the news lately.
I found out that it performes better than before. All the animations are fluid, and startup is really quick. I use both Hyprland and Niri, but the latter is closer to my heart, as it gives a new way to have a desktop.
Niri, not just tiling, but scrolling
Niri is an interesting beast. Unlike most tiling window manager, Niri has a horizontal philisophy, and you can have infinite number of windows on a workspace, simply because they appear next to each other, and you scroll horizontally. But you can also resize and tile the windows, like in other window managers.
How to control Niri?
You scroll horizontally between your open windows. With Vertical scrolling you have access to workspaces. It's not strictly the numbered list of 1-9 ws that we got used to in other WM or DE, but dynamically made as we create or delete them. This is a strange feeling for me, as in other tiling wms, I have my own order, which program opens on which workspace, and that list went through many versions over the years. But now I feel I have more freedom. The workspace is not just what you see on the monitor, it's several monitor in a line, I just don't see it all the time.
Talking about seeing, the Overview, let you see the workspaces with a bird's eye view. Comes pretty handy when lots of things are open, especially since if you are using multiple monitors, all of them have their own group of workspaces, which is pretty cool.
The past few weeks I tried Niri and Hyprland side by side, and as much as I started to like Hyprland, I kept using Niri more and more. The window/workspace switching become second nature, and I no longer lost between half dozen windows. It felt natural, and thanks to the animations it is responsive.
One of my concern about Wayland was gaming. I think it got better, and I have yet to encounter a game that is totally unplayable. If I do, I switch back to Herbstluftwm to play that game.
I am sure that I'll continue to use Niri for the foreseeable future, I really enjoy this new way of handling workspaces and windows. And yes I know it's largely comes from PaperWM and Gnome, but I am not a fan of Gnome.
