Niri is inspired by paperWM and it’s so much smoother. If you liked PaperWM then niri might be worth a look.
It does suffer a bit because it’s not built within the gnome environment. So niri is missing a few things that gnome provides “for free.” Niri leaves it up to you find replacements for some pretty basic functionality.
Some things it seems to be missing:
- Desktop notifications
- App launcher
- dock or any sort of list of running apps.
- Xwayland (for seamlessly running x11 applications)
All of these functions must be provided by other separate tools that are not included with niri.
My biggest complaint is the lack of clipboard synchronization between x11 and Wayland. I guess that gnome handles this automatically but it’s not so in niri - Wayland apps have independent clipboard and inability copy paste between Wayland and x11 is very annoying.
There are workarounds but none that I’ve tried so far are satisfactorily convenient and reliable.
It's the distinction between a "window manager" and a "desktop environment" KDE/Gnome/XFCE are DEs that include window managers (KWin/Mutter/xfwm4) along with a suite of other utilities that make up the complete environment.
Conversely, Sway, Niri, Hyprland, i3 are bare window managers. They do not include the suite of tools and it is left up to the user to build their environment as they wish. Fortunately thanks to some defined (FreeDesktop.org & Wayland are big) and defacto standards there is a reasonable degree of interoperability for tools. For myself I pull a decent chunk of the XFCE suite into my Sway config to make my very own, special little environment. A environment that apparently no one else can even begin to figure out how to use but at least nobody asks to borrow my laptop twice.
Mixing can work pretty well. I'm using Plasma with i3 as a WM, and it hits the perfect spot for me. Not sure if the same thing can be done on Wayland, though?
I would expect it to mostly work. Standardizing the interface between the window manager and clients. So as long as Plasma isn't depending on any special behavior (by intention or assumption) of KWin it will work just fine.
Xwayland-satellite does work quitw well in most regards, however I still haven’t fully solved the clipboard sync issue. I’ve got a hack involving wl-copy piped to xclip that mostly works but sometimes it just stops working for no apparent reason. Or I wind up with multiple copies of xclip running and I have to clean it up. I wish there was a clean way to make the few x apps play nice with Wayland that doesn’t require jumping through weird hoops. Although it hasn’t driven me back to gnome (yet).
Hot take: the way clipboard functionality is implemented seems pretty “odd” to me, especiallly on Unix but some of the legacy probably goes all the way back to old school Mac OS or maybe even to xerox parc. In modern times, Neither Xwindows nor Wayland have done a lot to fix past mistakes. Wayland has done a lot, however, to expose the weaknesses in a very antiquated design.
sway 1.10 is from october, 1.10.1 is a bugfix from late january. Since they're talking about git bisect, I imagine they might be running master (i.e., bleeding edge) instead of stable releases...
Yeah that's fair, but a lot of people are quite... impatient on IRC, ignoring that those able to answer might be busy or in a different timezone altogether. Debugging an issue requires at the very least the effort to reproduce it, and if the person doesn't already bring a trivial reproduction this can at times be a painful and time-consuming project to extract, and that time is not always available right at that instant.
Coming in with a prepared and easy reproduction and a filed issue makes quite a difference in the response you'll get.
(For the record, I don't experience anything matching what they describe on master right now, but the post was more about PaperWM vs. tiling UX so that doesn't matter that much.)
> Naturally, instead of figuring out what library made a breaking change and spending four hours running git bisect, I decided to throw nearly a decade of muscle-memory and workflow refinements out the window.
> The worst "street-cred" I have is that I've been using tiling window managers for thirty-five percent of my life: five years with Sway and two with i3. As the realization of those numbers (and my age) dawns upon me
The author is ~21 and seems worried they're old ? I had a good giggle about that.. And then it dawned upon me how old I actually am.
Reminds me of that explanation for why the years seem to move much faster when you’re older. When you’re 10, five years is half your life. When you’re 50, it’s only 10%.
I still use ratpoison, dreading the day it stops working for whatever reason (wayland being a likely one). Haven't tried it, but Cagebreak (https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak) seems like a possible successor.
Same here, I was actually reading the comments to see if someone had the same reaction. I'm not even much older than them, but enough that I look at 20 yo people as if they were inexperienced children.
This being said, time for my daily nitpicking: 7÷0.35=20, not ~21. Although I agree that 20 ≈ 21.
Yeah, I read that and was thinking "Oh, were they using dwm?" Then the next sentence: "Oooh, they're a pup!" :-) Dude, I've had my current job for over 50% of your life. I guess my street cred is I've been using Unix around as long as your parents have been alive.
I've been faithfully using the same window manager [olvwm] for ~30 years and counting. In fact the decision about which [distro] I pick for daily use is totally dependent on whether it can be coaxed into running [xview]+olvwm.
At the same time, the author refers to things like "decades" of muscle memory and finishing "all of college." I wonder if there's just an error somewhere?!
This looks really intriguing and I'm looking forward to using it.
I'm still using i3, which is just barely good enough to work.
I miss Notion, which was unfortunately too flakey and unstable to continue using, but that had one property which it looks like Niri preserves -- opening a new window will never cause a resize event. Notion is perhaps even stronger because there is no infinite canvas; opening a new window will never cause a re-layout. It will always open in a tab or a blank space. Similarly, moving windows won't cause re-layout actions; it will just move them between tabs of existing frames.
My i3 configuration tried to preserve this -- it tries to make everything tabbed by default so that moving windows will just move between tabs rather than into new blanks spaces and cause a relayout action, but sometimes, for some reason, it just ... does not, and instead opens a new split.
I tried to make xmonad work but I'm not good enough at Haskell to figure out if it was even possible to configure it the way I want.
I would like to know, coming from a traditional tiling window manager, how does the shortcut workflow look like?
For me the number one thing is having fixed shortcuts á la Super+[0-9] to go to specific windows / workspaces / essentially a specific program. If I can have that, and additionally solving the "worskpace management" problem as TFA described, I'm sold!
Does it make sense to use "workspaces" like this with Niri? For example, one workspace with the browser, one with the editor, one with several terminal columns, and so on. I would need to "switch" (immediately, without animation effects, please) e.g. from "browser" to "terminals".
Oh, perfect, thanks! I've been using Niri for less than a week, hadn't got to using named workspaces yet, and missed the bit in the docs where it says they can be empty.
I find I use Niri in a similar way to other tiling WMs, but instead of having one application per workspace, it lets me keep accessory applications clustered with the main ones. For example, my password manager lives in the same workspace (usually off-screen) as my browser. Whenever I need to generate a password or something, it's right there. Same with whatever accessory terminals I need in addition to my text editor.
You can also try out niri (really paperwm) like tiling in sway (papersway) or hype (hyprscroller). I'm using the later, and it works essentially the same as regular tiling (you can have named workspaces). That said, I notice that I have a lot of muscle memory due to previously working within the constraints of traditional tiling (i.e. You need a new to switch to a new workspace if you open more than 3 terminals, at least on my monitor). I therefore often switch to a new workspace when I really don't need to and get somewhat confused by where things are. I sometimes think a clearer break from my previous way of working might be easier.
That said I really like the approach to tiling from niri and others. It eliminates pretty much all downsides of tiling WMs IMO
Been using i3 for the last year and I feel all of the pain points from this article.
Overall, I deeply prefer i3 to gnome but the "everything gets resized" pain point is very real. Particularly when getting on a lot of calls with Zoom and the "notifications" seem to bypass the build in notifications on the system, instead treating each Zoom notification like it's own window...amplifying the problem.
Unfortunately tiling window managers for Linux have become quite stagnant in terms of improving and iterating on workflows, which is probably why we're seeing more of the kind of sentiment expressed in this post lately (of course, the poor backwards compatibility story is not helping either)
The Windows scene is definitely the place where the most interesting workflow advances in "traditional" tiling window managers are happening right now.
Can you point to any innovative Windows tiling WMs and explain what "workflow advances" it makes? All I found was FancyWM, and it seems basically identical to i3.
I'm on a phone for most of today so I won't be making the kind of lengthy reply you're asking for, but you can check out komorebi and jwno if you're genuinely interested
I don't see any real innovation with those WM. It looks like they are just migrating the features of advanced Linux-WMs to the windows-world, in their own way.
Can you name any specific features you are considering as innovative?
The main ones that I'm still waiting to see integrated into mainstream Linux twms are workspace scrolling (of course), dynamic layout rules and dynamic offset rules (important for ultrawide monitor users).
I'd also like to see container limit rules to enforce stacking after meeting a threshold (functions as a hard cap on tiles-per-workspace), and native support for Vimium-style shortcuts for every UI element on the screen (from jwno), but I could probably live without these.
I wouldn't call these particularly innovative features, in fact they are pretty low hanging fruit.
> dynamic layout rules and dynamic offset rules (important for ultrawide monitor users).
What is dynamic offset? And what are you missing from the existing layouts the existing dynamic WMs already deliver?
> and native support for Vimium-style shortcuts for every UI element on the screen (from jwno), but I could probably live without these.
Isn't this impossible with Linux, as the WM has no control over the application on that level? Maybe through accessibility-settings you can gain them on a per app-basis. But this seems more a problem of Desktop Environments than Window Managers.
Since we're >5 layers deep in the thread tree, feel free to hit me up off-platform if you'd like to discuss this more. Again, I'm on my phone today and limited in how much detail I can respond in - but if you are interested enough to dig into the documentation and video resources available you'll find the answers to all of these questions and more.
I thought moving from i3/x11 to sway/wayland but from this post is looks like screen sharing still not resolved yet completely on wayland. How much time is worth to wait until UX with wayland will be good enough to not worry about that kind stuff?
I can't say how much time it is worth to you, sorry. What I can say is that screen sharing works fine under Wayland and Gnome for me (AMD hardware all the way), so I'm inclined to say that Wayland is not the showstopper here.
anyway, if one of the majors tiling wm managers struggling to share specific window it looks like it could be more edge cases like that. Probably, I can deal with those things but I fully understand struggle of this article author so just wanna upgrade to it when possibility of struggle will be minimal for me.
I only tried out Yabai once I discovered AeroSpace in order to compare. I immediately appreciated AeroSpace's take on just completely sidestepping MacOS spaces.
I've been using sway daily since before it was really stable and recently tried Niri but maybe couldn't get over the muscle memory from sway. I use sway mostly in tabbed mode anyway which gives a similar feel to a scrolling WM but with flexibility to break out to tiles in a different workspace if needed.
What has massively improved my workflow recently is vertical tabs in Firefox. I now have browser tabs I can cycle up and down through on side of my screen, and application tabs I can cycle through left and right at the top. I love it.
This seems interesting. I've been thinking lately of re-installing a tilling WM on my daily driver because I have a wide screen and I spend more time rearranging and searching for windows than doing actual things on it. Also, it seems that all that screen estate could be put to better use with a tilling WM. Guess I'll give Niri a try, maybe it will fit my needs.
It wasn't a good fit for me. The strip of windows extending past the border of my screen, sometimes showing half a window, triggered a weird anxiety, it kept drawing my attention. I used it for about two months and then ditched it for a more traditional tiling compositor (hyprland) where windows don't overlap the screen border.
Niri is, however, very pretty from a technical standpoint. Modern Rust codebase, good code structure, very easy to understand and start hacking.
I set my column widths so there's really never a partial window at the edge.
On laptop, it's either full width or 1/2 widths depending on the task, on the ultrawide it's 1/3rd width or full width for editor with internal column splits.
I just can't wrap my head around tiling WMs (and I've been doing Linux since a _long_ time ago). I just don't see how usable they can be when you have a "small" screen to be honest.
I use Niri at home and PaperWM at work but I use most apps maximized. The thing that I like is that I can move between windows in a WASD like shortcut, more convenient that doing Alt-Tab. However vertical split is also very easy to do in Niri and it's sometimes very convenient.
More often than not you keep just one or two windows visible in the screen, and switch to another app with <super>+<number> or similar. Since you use most apps fullscreen, the small screen doesn't feel so small anymore. Feels good, honestly
Frankly, mate, the answer is a bit too hipsterish. Of "you won't understand true underground anyway" sort. We're talking about productivity tools, if there are advantages they can be described even if subjectively.
Lots of tasks involve two different apps (googling a bug while looking at the error, reading a spec while working on the code, being on a call while showing off a document etc). I'm almost always happier with two full monitors, but I use tiling when I'm stuck on a single laptop screen for example. I rarely want more than two things at once unless I'm in Emacs, and I sometimes get the sense that a lot of tiling window manager and tmux use is just people not knowing how to use their editor's built in window management and multi-process support. Obviously everyone's free to build their own environment however they like, I don't know why anyone would accept being stuck on a tiny screen for long periods though!
Tilers can remove Gnome's overly whitespaced decorations, probably saving 10% in screen pixels alone.
If you want to maximize all windows on run, niri can do that with a rule. It then becomes like a monocle layout where you can use swipes/keyboard/scroll wheel to navigate between maximized windows. I don't know of any DE that will run all windows maximized by default.
Too bad I no longer have an 800x600 netbook. Niri would be perfect for it.
I'm a hyprland zoomer but I used Niri for a bit and it worked pretty well. It slots in perfectly for someone coming from an average single-monitor Windows workflow (for most office-style tasks). I still think that more complex tiling setups have a higher productivity ceiling though. I guess if you're like this guy and keep >10 workspaces open at once you'd have to go with Niri. I wonder if the increased battery life would still hold for someone that only keeps a few windows open at once. 2 hours is insane from just a change of wm
I'm still cycling through wayland and x11, and I also do get 1.5 hours more runtime on average on my old 2nd gen t14s with x11+xmonad+no compositor. It's one of the main reasons I'm struggling to move permanently, as I really don't see any advantage from my perspective as I don't use any desktop environment or feature that would make a compositor actually useful. The only thing I do notice occasionally are black borders due to shadow dropdowns in gtk4 programs that don't respect the system theme I've set.
Having heard about Niri previously, I really didn't like the sound of it. Seeing the movement with hotkeys shown with each movement... well... that completely changed my perspective. I will have to give it a try.
Funny, I'm the opposite. The idea is intriguing, but I absolutely do not want animated. I have vision issues and animation just makes everything go (more) blurry.
There's apparently a config setting to turn all animations off, though I haven't tried it myself.
The author linked their config file from the article, and it includes this:
// Animation settings.
animations {
// Uncomment to turn off all animations.
// off
I think it's boilerplate from the default config file, which would imply that the video they showed is not the 'animations off' version, if that's not already clear from the presence of animations.
This looks interesting and I’ll probably give it a try.
I’ve been using Sway for the last five years and i3 for a few years previously. They work fairly well for me, I certainly didn’t have any of the problems the OP mentioned.
My all time favourite window manager, though, and one I wish would be revived (perhaps as a wayland WM now. How I wish I had the free time to take this on…) is GOOMWWM which I used for a decade prior to i3 (and Musca before that).
There were some forks and merges already back then that probably did not help. Then Canoncial hired the main dev, with the main project not surviving far beyond his later departure. Official end point for the project seems to have been https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTI2ODU, in 2012 and mentioning Wayland as reason (as if that were anywhere close back then).
It's still around but not in active development. Tiling window managers like i3 are just a window manager, but you can add compiz as your compositor to wobble if you want. I think compton is still the most popular "just good enough" compositor used by i3 users (it's what I use). Sway is both a compositor and a window manager.
I've use it daily since the whole hyprland toxicity thing. It works amazing for my workflow, but there are a ton of wrinkles if you stray off the happy path, but it works great (for me).
I also only use a single monitor, trying to plug a second monitor in makes it work less than ideally, and I really wish there was drag + drop support like most other tilers, but for me it's not worth giving up the rest of KDE.
Does anyone know the best way to get some tiling behavior in tradition DEs like Cinnamon.
Some basic things like notifications, keyboard controls for volume/brightness, sound etc don't work the best in i3wm by default and requires some fiddling on each machine to get it to work properly.
I love the out of the box behavior of my Mint installation and don't want to switch completely to something like i3wm.
I could get even a watered down version tiling and stacking like i3 with keyboard shortcuts, I would be very happy. There is gTile but it doesn't quite work the same way.
Sway (and most other tiling) WMs have the same behaviour; i.e., each monitor has its own unique set of workspaces instead of one workspace being shared across monitors. Workspaces not being persistent also messed with me, I have eight workspaces all divvied up for exact purposes and sometimes the ones inbetween are empty.
I use labwc currently which has the ideal workspace behaviour (one workspace shared).
This is interesting and subjective. A shared workspace is completely unacceptable to me. I need my monitors to have different, unlinked workspaces that can be independently switched. It's one of the things I hated about using Gnome.
Coming from the same background as the author and about checks notes 15 years older (ouch), I loved Niri very much. However I never managed to make x11 windows behave correctly. At the moment the solutions are a bit cumbersome [0] and I didn't manage to have a smooth experience so far...
I don't have a lot of practice with it, but what problems did you have with xwayland-satellite? It really seems like you just run it and everything magically works
Thanks! As soon as I saw Niri I wondered if there was a macOS alternative.
Aerospace has a similar resizing glitch as PaperWM.spoon: resizing one direction ends up looking wonky if you do it fast enough. It’s noticeable at the end of the smooth scrolling demo. That must be a macOS thing…
I may check out PaperWM.spoon at some point but realistically I’ll set up a VM and try out Niri
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadRecently I had a good introduction to the scrollable WM experience on GNOME with the PaperWM extension: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
It does suffer a bit because it’s not built within the gnome environment. So niri is missing a few things that gnome provides “for free.” Niri leaves it up to you find replacements for some pretty basic functionality.
Some things it seems to be missing:
- Desktop notifications - App launcher - dock or any sort of list of running apps. - Xwayland (for seamlessly running x11 applications)
All of these functions must be provided by other separate tools that are not included with niri.
My biggest complaint is the lack of clipboard synchronization between x11 and Wayland. I guess that gnome handles this automatically but it’s not so in niri - Wayland apps have independent clipboard and inability copy paste between Wayland and x11 is very annoying.
There are workarounds but none that I’ve tried so far are satisfactorily convenient and reliable.
Conversely, Sway, Niri, Hyprland, i3 are bare window managers. They do not include the suite of tools and it is left up to the user to build their environment as they wish. Fortunately thanks to some defined (FreeDesktop.org & Wayland are big) and defacto standards there is a reasonable degree of interoperability for tools. For myself I pull a decent chunk of the XFCE suite into my Sway config to make my very own, special little environment. A environment that apparently no one else can even begin to figure out how to use but at least nobody asks to borrow my laptop twice.
xwayland-satellite gives you XWayland without needing compositor integration.
Hot take: the way clipboard functionality is implemented seems pretty “odd” to me, especiallly on Unix but some of the legacy probably goes all the way back to old school Mac OS or maybe even to xerox parc. In modern times, Neither Xwindows nor Wayland have done a lot to fix past mistakes. Wayland has done a lot, however, to expose the weaknesses in a very antiquated design.
sway 1.10 is from october, 1.10.1 is a bugfix from late january. Since they're talking about git bisect, I imagine they might be running master (i.e., bleeding edge) instead of stable releases...
Coming in with a prepared and easy reproduction and a filed issue makes quite a difference in the response you'll get.
(For the record, I don't experience anything matching what they describe on master right now, but the post was more about PaperWM vs. tiling UX so that doesn't matter that much.)
> Naturally, instead of figuring out what library made a breaking change and spending four hours running git bisect, I decided to throw nearly a decade of muscle-memory and workflow refinements out the window.
The author is ~21 and seems worried they're old ? I had a good giggle about that.. And then it dawned upon me how old I actually am.
/cries in half century
Reminds me of that explanation for why the years seem to move much faster when you’re older. When you’re 10, five years is half your life. When you’re 50, it’s only 10%.
This being said, time for my daily nitpicking: 7÷0.35=20, not ~21. Although I agree that 20 ≈ 21.
[olvwm]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olvwm [distro]: https://ces.mataroa.blog/blog/distro_hoppingmd [xview]: https://github.com/olvwm/xview
I'm still using i3, which is just barely good enough to work.
I miss Notion, which was unfortunately too flakey and unstable to continue using, but that had one property which it looks like Niri preserves -- opening a new window will never cause a resize event. Notion is perhaps even stronger because there is no infinite canvas; opening a new window will never cause a re-layout. It will always open in a tab or a blank space. Similarly, moving windows won't cause re-layout actions; it will just move them between tabs of existing frames.
My i3 configuration tried to preserve this -- it tries to make everything tabbed by default so that moving windows will just move between tabs rather than into new blanks spaces and cause a relayout action, but sometimes, for some reason, it just ... does not, and instead opens a new split.
I tried to make xmonad work but I'm not good enough at Haskell to figure out if it was even possible to configure it the way I want.
For me the number one thing is having fixed shortcuts á la Super+[0-9] to go to specific windows / workspaces / essentially a specific program. If I can have that, and additionally solving the "worskpace management" problem as TFA described, I'm sold!
Does it make sense to use "workspaces" like this with Niri? For example, one workspace with the browser, one with the editor, one with several terminal columns, and so on. I would need to "switch" (immediately, without animation effects, please) e.g. from "browser" to "terminals".
That said I really like the approach to tiling from niri and others. It eliminates pretty much all downsides of tiling WMs IMO
Overall, I deeply prefer i3 to gnome but the "everything gets resized" pain point is very real. Particularly when getting on a lot of calls with Zoom and the "notifications" seem to bypass the build in notifications on the system, instead treating each Zoom notification like it's own window...amplifying the problem.
I'm going to have to give Niri a try.
default_floating_border none
# make sure pavucontrol is floated; use xprop (cli) to get window title/class/etc
for_window [class="Pavucontrol"] floating enable, resize set height 512, opacity 0.3
# https://faq.i3wm.org/question/61/forcing-windows-as-always-f...
The Windows scene is definitely the place where the most interesting workflow advances in "traditional" tiling window managers are happening right now.
Can you name any specific features you are considering as innovative?
I'd also like to see container limit rules to enforce stacking after meeting a threshold (functions as a hard cap on tiles-per-workspace), and native support for Vimium-style shortcuts for every UI element on the screen (from jwno), but I could probably live without these.
I wouldn't call these particularly innovative features, in fact they are pretty low hanging fruit.
What is dynamic offset? And what are you missing from the existing layouts the existing dynamic WMs already deliver?
> and native support for Vimium-style shortcuts for every UI element on the screen (from jwno), but I could probably live without these.
Isn't this impossible with Linux, as the WM has no control over the application on that level? Maybe through accessibility-settings you can gain them on a per app-basis. But this seems more a problem of Desktop Environments than Window Managers.
anyway, if one of the majors tiling wm managers struggling to share specific window it looks like it could be more edge cases like that. Probably, I can deal with those things but I fully understand struggle of this article author so just wanna upgrade to it when possibility of struggle will be minimal for me.
No 'endless scrolling' aspect, but I find it works great for managing window sizing and bopping around your windows via keyboard.
https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
But it still feels like a plastic fork and knife compared to Niri. Really wish Apple would open up more of their desktop APIs..
What has massively improved my workflow recently is vertical tabs in Firefox. I now have browser tabs I can cycle up and down through on side of my screen, and application tabs I can cycle through left and right at the top. I love it.
Niri is, however, very pretty from a technical standpoint. Modern Rust codebase, good code structure, very easy to understand and start hacking.
On laptop, it's either full width or 1/2 widths depending on the task, on the ultrawide it's 1/3rd width or full width for editor with internal column splits.
If you want to maximize all windows on run, niri can do that with a rule. It then becomes like a monocle layout where you can use swipes/keyboard/scroll wheel to navigate between maximized windows. I don't know of any DE that will run all windows maximized by default.
Too bad I no longer have an 800x600 netbook. Niri would be perfect for it.
The author linked their config file from the article, and it includes this:
I think it's boilerplate from the default config file, which would imply that the video they showed is not the 'animations off' version, if that's not already clear from the presence of animations.I’ve been using Sway for the last five years and i3 for a few years previously. They work fairly well for me, I certainly didn’t have any of the problems the OP mentioned.
My all time favourite window manager, though, and one I wish would be revived (perhaps as a wayland WM now. How I wish I had the free time to take this on…) is GOOMWWM which I used for a decade prior to i3 (and Musca before that).
But actually, the launchpad repo has recent commits (or do I read https://code.launchpad.net/~compiz-team/compiz/+git/compiz/+... wrong), and so does https://github.com/compiz-reloaded. You can still just use one of those if you want - Void Linux for example has it packaged, and so does Ubuntu.
I also only use a single monitor, trying to plug a second monitor in makes it work less than ideally, and I really wish there was drag + drop support like most other tilers, but for me it's not worth giving up the rest of KDE.
Some basic things like notifications, keyboard controls for volume/brightness, sound etc don't work the best in i3wm by default and requires some fiddling on each machine to get it to work properly.
I love the out of the box behavior of my Mint installation and don't want to switch completely to something like i3wm. I could get even a watered down version tiling and stacking like i3 with keyboard shortcuts, I would be very happy. There is gTile but it doesn't quite work the same way.
https://github.com/ellysaurus/KWin-TilingGuide/
https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel
there might be more
I use labwc currently which has the ideal workspace behaviour (one workspace shared).
and how does niri do it? a workspace is shared among all monitor, or it's one workspace per monitor?
[0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland
I use (and pay) for the magnet app, I don't like the native fullscreen functionality or split screen options.
Aerospace has a similar resizing glitch as PaperWM.spoon: resizing one direction ends up looking wonky if you do it fast enough. It’s noticeable at the end of the smooth scrolling demo. That must be a macOS thing…
I may check out PaperWM.spoon at some point but realistically I’ll set up a VM and try out Niri
(watch the bottom-right readout on the video)