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.

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

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.

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

> 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. Which I guess I can get used to, it just seems odd?

Would love to hear the perspective of anyone who switched from a similar workflow to Niri. How does the mental model shift?

One thing I learned in the process was that the custom wayland desktop world has the concept of a "desktop shell," which provides most or all of the additional components you might want on top of your compositor, rather than having to separately install a top bar, manage suspend/hibernate, figure out notifications, etc. You can of course still do all of that, but you can also just install niri and something like the "dank material shell"[0] and be off to the races. I first discovered this via awesome-niri[1].

The combination of niri and the shell means that the extent of my custom NixOS configuration for the two is entirely limited to keybindings and some custom window rules for zoom.

[0]: https://danklinux.com/

[1]: https://github.com/niri-wm/awesome-niri

https://github.com/mangowm/mango

But I’m giving it a real shot, and the nice thing about it being a Gnome extension is that the rest of the Gnome DE is right there without a ton of config.

I think I would’ve adjusted best if I could somehow just watch someone do their daily work on Niri, to learn how to use it right. Curious if people who like Niri came from tiling WMs or standard DEs.

Before that I was on sway for 6 years, before that on i3, before that on KDE, Gnome, ...

I'll never look back.

Niri is the best window manager I ever used, it just instantly clicked with me.

Totally not mass psychosis guys pump the SPY