What was not obvious to me is whether Niri supports something like a fixed panel that would display stuff like clocks, network status, battery charge, CPU load, sound volume, etc, etc.
Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
211–220 of 234 posts
Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also switched from PaperWM to niri, and I was reluctant to do it, because I really liked not having to configure several different little apps to get a working desktop environment. GNOME comes out of the box with an app launcher, a basic configuration editor, a screen locker, widgets for controlling audio and network, etc. But ultimately, PaperWM was too quirky. For example, sometimes PaperWM and an app would disag…
I'm in a similar situation; I think QuickShell [1] could be a compelling option, particularly premade configs for it like DankMaterialShell [2] (which is intended for Niri). [1] https://quickshell.org/ [2] https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell
I've been very happy with Noctalia. https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell
Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#213Niri convinced me to give up xmonad. I ran xmonad exclusively for 14 years. Being able to have an unlimited number of windows on a desktop (without continually switching the tiling structure) makes them collections of topics rather than having multiple desktops bounded by what fits comfortably. What used to be a switch from the "editor and terminals" desktop to the "browser" desktop is now horizontal movement on the…
NixOS will get you there (or anywhere, to any version, of any thing, and/or back again) just by pinning any conceivable package (and it has more than any other Linux distro) to a particular nixpkgs hash.
I thought of this because it sounds like one of the reasons you're not upgrading it is fearing the risk of it fucking everything up and it being a pain to roll back (your "it ain't broke, so why fix it?" is a hallmark of that mentality). Well...
I will never use another Linux distro for this specific reason. NixOS is the complete freedom to dip in, dip out, roll back on problems, try new things out, etc. The freedom to experiment, try it, back out if there's any issue... but with seatbelts, thanks to the declarative nature of everything (as well as being able to pick previous "instances" on boot).
Afraid of Nix (the language)? LLM's make that trivial these days. For example, I just did something like this today: "Instead of using the one in nixpkgs, whose build has issues on my hardware, set up a derivation that uses its git repo and compiles that instead." A minute later, boom. Declarative working glory, forever.
Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#214I've seen Niri floating around the conversation, but still find myself drawn to Hyprland. There's something about "pagination" vs a scrollable compositor that makes things feel much more targeted and organized. I use Omarchy, btw.
> I use Omarchy, btw.
I've been thinking about this comment all day trying to decide if this was an unironic "I use Arch btw" or an intentional homage, but it made me laugh a lot
Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, the appeal of i3/sway's model is that by having a desktop per topic (eg, one for browser, one for code, one for slack, etc) I can instantly jump to the topic I need with a single key press. The desktops I assign never change, so it's always Super+1 for my browser and Super+4 for Slack. It's all muscle memory, and I could do it in my sleep. When I jump to that desktop, everything is open and tiled. This was a…
Niri has named workspaces, each of which has a scrolling model. So you can achieve something very very close to what you want.
Not OP, but I typically only have 1–2 windows per workspace. I use tabs in both browser and terminal (eg via tmux). So it seems like niri's scrolling capabilities wouldn't bring much to my use case.
Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#216Niri convinced me to give up xmonad. I ran xmonad exclusively for 14 years. Being able to have an unlimited number of windows on a desktop (without continually switching the tiling structure) makes them collections of topics rather than having multiple desktops bounded by what fits comfortably. What used to be a switch from the "editor and terminals" desktop to the "browser" desktop is now horizontal movement on the…
For me, the appeal of i3/sway's model is that by having a desktop per topic (eg, one for browser, one for code, one for slack, etc) I can instantly jump to the topic I need with a single key press. The desktops I assign never change, so it's always Super+1 for my browser and Super+4 for Slack. It's all muscle memory, and I could do it in my sleep. When I jump to that desktop, everything is open and tiled. This was a…
I don't think of the things you listed as "topics". Browser, code, slack, etc.. seem more like tasks or activities to me.
I used to use i3 on a 49" super ultrawide monitor (32:9) and when I did each desktop was truly a topic, with a deep arrangement of windows on it and tabs to switch different areas over to different tasks.
My primary interest in tiling window management is being able to see all of the things that I need to see at once, at once. For me, it's all about context-- placing related windows next to one another. It seems like for others it's about being able to switch between a limited set of fullscreen windows quickly.
I like that Niri gives me a flexible way to divide my workspaces by topic without the windows stealing screen-space from each other. It doesn't feel much like hunting for windows, it feels like... a materialized view of alt+tab. Maybe I have a browser to the right of my editor and a terminal to the left. I can quickly shuffle back and forth between being able to edit while also seeing one or the other.
I even have this binding to cycle the columns to the right of the active window:
Mod+Tab hotkey-overlay-title="Cycle windows to the right" {
spawn "fish" "-c" "niri msg action focus-column-right; niri msg action move-column-to-last; niri msg action focus-window-previous";
}Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#217Somebody sell me on these newfangled tiling WMs. I have been using basically the same xmonad configuration for 15+ years, pretty much updating it only on breaking or deprecated changes. What do all these new Wayland compositors have to offer except "tiling, but for wayland?" Does Wayland actually work now? I've tried it every few years for over a decade now and every time I ran into showstopper bugs (usually on nvidi…
On Gnome + NVIDIA (RTX 2080) + Wayland + 3 Monitors [1DP 4K, 2HDMI (2K, FHD)]
Every time I try it, I am really impressed with the smoothness! But every time, two issues come up, which most likely due to NVIDIA, which are complete showstopper.
1. After inactivity period, monitors turns off. When I resume, one monitor won't come back up. I have to deactivate it on control panel, and cancel to get it back. Doing it many times a day, is extremely annoying. This does not happen on two monitors.
2. Monitors won't turn off ... yeah, after inactivity period the monitor's blanks, but, briefly turns off, and then turns back on. And then never turns off. This mostly happens after playing games.
I think both of the issues are due to NVIDIA.
Otherwise, Wayland has become really solid.
Using i3 now, it's not much, it's boring, and that's a good thing.
Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#218Does this or any other scrollable-tiling WM remember your preferred size of windows per-application? For instance, if I open a new Firefox window, I always want it to be the same width and full height. If I open a terminal, I want it to be half-height and the width I've set for terminals. Ideally, I'd want to set that in a configuration, so if I made adjustments to a window one time it wouldn't change the default siz…
PaperWM let's you define these types of per window rules in it's settings.
Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#219What was not obvious to me is whether Niri supports something like a fixed panel that would display stuff like clocks, network status, battery charge, CPU load, sound volume, etc, etc.
Those are provided by desktop shells rather than niri. For example Noctalia [0], or DankMaterialShell [1] which is build for niri specifically.
[0] https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell [1] https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell
Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the I use Arch btw is fair because with pure Arch you actually have to configure things, you know. But Omarchy is a fully pre-configured distro, there's no flex in that.
I'd consider it just an opinionated distribution of Arch, with a lot of flex. Sure, I think if you disagree with the majority, you'd go Arch and rice your own from the base install (lot of folks who do), but if not, it's a very streamlined way to get off to the races with a community supporting the shared baseline 'opinions'
What am saying is you can't flex if people half baked the work for you, "btw I use Arch" was a flex because you had to configure everything yourself.
So it's a but ridiculous imho, there's no flex in it but you try to flex anyways...