Can confirm, best DE.
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Is it a DE though?
~~Is it not?~~
~~To me, a DE is just the GUI for the system.~~
~~Granted, Niri is super lightweight and lacks A TON of features you'd expect from Plasma or GNOME. But it's still a DE, no?~~
Edit: Well, reading up a bit, it does seem like it's 'just' a window manager, not a full fledged DE. Fair enough.
😊 And I think in Wayland... land, they don't really call it a window manager either, since it has to do more than just manage the windows, i.e. handle all the drawing to surfaces and stuff as well. Wayland WMs are rather called compositors.
interesting, thanks!
My pleasure!
Anything is a DE if you believe hard enough...
(I use arch, BTW.)
Maybe s/he's from future and it's DE there.
I've used it for a while. It's awesome for basic stuff (checking emails, browsing, etc.), but for professional usage, it gets in the way. You can do the exact same thing with sway/i3 using tabbed windows but with much more control ans customizability, and it's a lot more efficient.
I'd be curious what you mean by more control/customizability for sway/i3. I'm using niri now, and came from sway, and haven't really notice a difference in capabilities (although niri has easier animations and the overview). And now I'm wondering if I just wasn't using/understanding sway to the max.
I think on my multi-monitor setup, sway is maybe slightly better suited, but on my laptop I'm definitely preferring niri--but open to finding out new things about other wms that I missed.
From the top of my head, when working on something in sway/i3 I have my browsers assigned to workspace3, my terminals to ws1, my ide to ws2 and so on. So when I open them they automatically open in those ws, and I always know where to find them. I might have ~20 windows opened across 7-9 different workspaces. I go to ws2, edit my code, see the results in ws3 in my browser, do something in the term, and repeat. I might do this in a loop a lot. The benefit of i3 is that I know exactly where to find what and it's very simple to switch to it. But niri doesn't have fixed workspaces and for finding windows you have to visually search for them. So the process becomes pretty cumbersome.
Niri does have named workspaces so you can absolutely switch to fixed workspaces like you describe.
I have fixed workspaces but then temporarily add extra workspaces for side tasks - these are relative to the named ones but don't stop you jumping to your named workspaces (assuming you've got your shortcut keys set up to match).
Oh that's cool. This fixes my problem with switching to windows.
Another issue with niri is you kinda get lost in the infinite scroll. Sometimes you dont know if there are any other windows, or hundred other windows in a workspace. As opposed to sway tabs, that show you exactly how many windows tgere are, what they are, and where you are in your ws.
Something that would definitely make me fully switch to niri is if you could increntally scroll windows instead of one window at a time. Think I can create a terminal 3 times wider than my monitor, open nvim and create ~10 splits in it and simple switch between them. Bu you just can't do that.
I use rofi for a fuzzy window searcher and it fixes that issue for me
Yeah I noticed immediately that it wouldn't be for me, coming from i3 for like over a decade, and now Hyprland for about a year.
what do you mean by efficient. I am using niri right now, and i do not record increased power/cpu/gpu usage as compared to sway.
Best🙏
I'll need to try!
I have a finely tuned Xmonad/Xmobar but at some point I'll need to switch to Wayland. This looks promising as a replacement.