I installed NixOS on my desktop and used Sway for a while before switching to Niri.
With Sway, I'm constantly having to find a place to open a new window (tuck it into the current workspace or create Yet Another One). Or I'd slot it into some tabbed group and forget.
With Niri, I hate to admit it, but even after a month I would get lost. I would lose track of where things were not just between workspaces, but even on the same workspace: was that one claude terminal I'm looking for scrolled off to the right or left?
I ended up writing my own Fuzzel tools so that I could do the macOS thing where I alt-tab to apps and then alt-tilde between apps of the same kind.
But in the end I couldn't make it more productive than my macOS workflow with a global hotkey iTerm2 window with 10 tabs and then just alt-tabbing + alt-tilde between apps.
And anything cool I liked about NixOS and all of the utilities I built, I just ported to nix-darwin and macOS. And my dkesto
Niri¹ is awesome. It took quite a bit of customization when I originally installed it, however, quite a few things have improved since then. I believe that niri's out-of-the-box experience is reasonably good with the latest version. With the addition noctalia², it really feels like a complete desktop and offers the essential functionality that I'd expect from gnome or kde.
My favorite part about Niri is that a bunch of people said that writing a Wayland compositor in Rust was too hard to do for years. Turns out they're wrong!
I haven't checked the repo but just carefully use unsafe as an escape hatch when needed and Rust gets out of your way. Sure you give away some of the guarantees that some people get cultish about but you get to tap into a beautiful ecosystem and reap the benefits.
My only gripe is that these newer wm's require hardware acceleration. It's hard to try them out in a VM, and committing to a hardware install is a big ask for anyone that's been using something else for a while.
You can often install packages in a live system ("try" option of installation medium). The backing storage for that is a RAM disk overlay. Did you not know or is that too short-lived for you for a proper trial?
I really miss classic X11 virtual panning desktops where I can get more real estate just by scrolling offscreen. I have a cyberdeck with a 1080x480 screen, and the vertical resolution is just too low to be able to display most dialogue boxes; if I could just have panning in Wayland it would be fantastic, as the guts are an RPi 5 and X11 is slow as molasses on there due to lack of classic 2D acceleration primitives.
I installed NixOS on my desktop and used Sway for a while before switching to Niri.
With Sway, I'm constantly having to find a place to open a new window (tuck it into the current workspace or create Yet Another One). Or I'd slot it into some tabbed group and forget.
With Niri, I hate to admit it, but even after a month I would get lost. I would lose track of where things were not just between workspaces, but even on the same workspace: was that one claude terminal I'm looking for scrolled off to the right or left?
I ended up writing my own Fuzzel tools so that I could do the macOS thing where I alt-tab to apps and then alt-tilde between apps of the same kind.
But in the end I couldn't make it more productive than my macOS workflow with a global hotkey iTerm2 window with 10 tabs and then just alt-tabbing + alt-tilde between apps.
And anything cool I liked about NixOS and all of the utilities I built, I just ported to nix-darwin and macOS. And my dkesto
Niri¹ is awesome. It took quite a bit of customization when I originally installed it, however, quite a few things have improved since then. I believe that niri's out-of-the-box experience is reasonably good with the latest version. With the addition noctalia², it really feels like a complete desktop and offers the essential functionality that I'd expect from gnome or kde.
1. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri
2. https://docs.noctalia.dev/getting-started/installation/
My favorite part about Niri is that a bunch of people said that writing a Wayland compositor in Rust was too hard to do for years. Turns out they're wrong!
I haven't checked the repo but just carefully use unsafe as an escape hatch when needed and Rust gets out of your way. Sure you give away some of the guarantees that some people get cultish about but you get to tap into a beautiful ecosystem and reap the benefits.
My only gripe is that these newer wm's require hardware acceleration. It's hard to try them out in a VM, and committing to a hardware install is a big ask for anyone that's been using something else for a while.
You can often install packages in a live system ("try" option of installation medium). The backing storage for that is a RAM disk overlay. Did you not know or is that too short-lived for you for a proper trial?
Just install sway and run it from a different tty
You don't have to remove other WMs to try a new one. Most login managers will let you choose at login.
First time I saw the word Dank in the Big 26
I really miss classic X11 virtual panning desktops where I can get more real estate just by scrolling offscreen. I have a cyberdeck with a 1080x480 screen, and the vertical resolution is just too low to be able to display most dialogue boxes; if I could just have panning in Wayland it would be fantastic, as the guts are an RPi 5 and X11 is slow as molasses on there due to lack of classic 2D acceleration primitives.
Yes I had recently tried to fake a scrolling tiling WM this way and surprised it's not available afaics on distros or MacOS?
With that said, I love DankMaterialShell along with Niri, it's basically exactly what I had been wanting after using PaperWM for a while.