I’ve seen an increase in talk about this relatively new Wayland compositor called Niri recently and I decided to test drive it for a while.

The big thing that sets Niri apart is that it’s a scrollable tiling window manager. If you’ve used a normal tiling window manager, Niri behaves more or less like you’d expect until you run out of room on your current workspace. Past that point, new windows will overflow to the right. You can scroll your focus left or right, taking advantage of unlimited space per workspace. There’s lots of great links on Niri’s GitHub linked above if you’re still curious about how it works.

Installation

Now I didn’t want to start from a blank configuration and assemble everything myself. I’ve been there and done that on several window managers before, and this time I just wanted to jump straight into something usable. I read on Niri’s “Getting Started” documentation about some options for getting a more out-of-the-box experience and decided to give DankMaterialShell a go.

Installation of Niri itself was perfectly straightforward. DankMaterialShell was a little more involved, mostly because I’m on Fedora and had to build a few dependencies manually. You’d probably have an easier time than I did if you’re on something like Arch. I also didn’t love its “curl pipe into bash” installation method and did my best to work around it. I hesitate slightly to recommend it for that reason, but I still appreciated the time it saved from configuring all the components manually.

My thoughts

After two weeks on Niri, the short version of my thoughts is that I really like it.

Scrollable tiling is one of the best tools I’ve tried for staying organized while multitasking. Normally, there’d be two reasons I’d need to create a new workspace: either I’m switching to a new task or running out of space on my current workspace. Since workspace size is unlimited with scrollable tiling, I found myself only creating a new workspace when there was a logical reason to do so. The end result was fewer workspaces needed, with each one being associated with a unique task.

Something that surprised me was how easy it was to configure Niri to be driven with either the keyboard or the mouse. I don’t like having to rely on only one or the other, and I was glad to find that I didn’t have to.

The biggest trade-off in my experience was just the increased cognitive load required to drive Niri. Some of that I’m sure is just the cost of using something new and unfamiliar. Though I doubt it would ever get quite as easy to use as something like Gnome, which is what I’ve been used to for a few years now.

Where I ended up

In the end, I switched back to Gnome. It’s just comfortable and cohesive, and I like not having to think about it. But most of all, I don’t think I do enough multitasking to get the most out of Niri or something else like it.

However, I could easily see myself going back to Niri if I ever got to use a Linux machine professionally. At work is where I actually do multitask a lot and end up frustrated at MacOS because of it. I use a Mac program that emulates tiling window behavior, but despite that I’ve still found myself wishing it had Niri’s scrolling now that I know what it’s like.

If you’re something of a power user and want to try something new to improve your multitasking, I think Niri is well worth checking out!

—JP