Niri is so good. I've switched to using it about 5 months ago and it was legit the best computing decision I can remember making in recent history to move away from Windows.

I have a huge amount of gratitude towards the author of niri.

My dotfiles have always included an install script for setting everything up around command line tools, theme switching and more but it fully supports niri now too on Arch based distros https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles in case anyone is shopping around for a new desktop environment and wants to get going quickly. I run it on both my main desktop and a travel laptop.

Niri introduced scroll-based window management to me and it instantly clicked. I'm very happy to see a full-on Niri per-workspace emulation mode in OmniWM[1] for the Mac, recently and thankfully made compatible with Sequoia. It immediately became my main window manager.

[1] https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM

If you are on a Mac, check out OmniWM, which has a Niri layout, in addition to one that's more like Hyprland. It has made my work on MacOS much more pleasant.

https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM

I posted about it a bit ago when I just started using it, and it's been really great. Highly recommended.

A few releases back when niri got "proper" Alt-Tab behavior like one expects from more mainline WMs made it pretty much perfect for me. Could not dream of wanting anything more than what it already has.

I switched to Niri at the end of last year after over a decade on i3.[1] Having horizontal scroll unbounded by my monitor size and workspace count unbound by the number of shortcut keys I have configured has been very freeing, and the graphical stuff is nice too.

My only remaining pain-point is that its X compatibility layer, xwayland-satellite, does not yet support drag and drop between X and Wayland programs.[2]

[1]: https://davidyat.es/2026/01/28/niri/

[2]: https://github.com/Supreeeme/xwayland-satellite/issues/133

This sounds very interesting. I'm currently in the middle of revisiting my interaction style. Landed on Qtile/Wayland but now I'm starting to notice lag.

> Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never "overflow" onto an adjacent monitor

I'm someone who was very content with the constraint of a laptop (one single screen, generally running one maximized window per workspace and switching with F-keys), but has never really become comfortable with multi-monitors. Can anyone explain why window managers always default to treating individual monitors as completely separate entities rather than one larger screen that works together? Like I would have thought the default here would be to have two monitors operate on the same horizontally-scrolling set of windows. Either tied together, or as independent viewports. But everybody always seems to reach towards treating each monitor as having disjoint windows.

I'm on hyprland (which also has a scrolling layout). How do you guys navigate between your workspaces? I'm accomodated to super+<num>, which jumps to workspace #<num> with a mostly fixed purpose. If I opened something ad-hoc, I usually know where I placed it. I found it difficult to operate in a setting which more resembles the state of my desk (if it weren't random access).