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But it's a scrolling wm...
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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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.
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.
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.
Laughs in 15 virtual desktops
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.
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.
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.
The independent virtual desktop per screen in KDE 6.7, Cosmic, and macOS(which I’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 wouldn’t mind incorporating it into a single desktop or screen.
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.
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.
I was also a bit resistant to the idea, but somehow finally got it. Probably on the 5th try.
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.
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.
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, resizing is always manual. 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?
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)
I want my xmonad to live for ever
Niri was the first tiling wm that really clicked with me. It with noctalia are now my go-to laptop setup.
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.
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
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.