Posted 2025-10-29 @ 23:20 EST (2025-10-30 00:20 EDT, 05:20 UTC)

Welcome to the first post of my blog! Ignore the file in the "blog" directory labelled "welcome.html", it's not important, it's nothing for you to worry about, please ignore it, it's nothing of your concern please ignore it plsplsplsplsplsplkspslsplssplks

If you couldn't tell by the title of this blog, I've moved window managers. This is part "Hyprland-diss-track", part "niri-semi-review". Why did I ditch Hyprland? The main reason is that the community is toxic and the guy who originally programmed the WM doesn't give two microlitres of a fuck about that. There is a blog by Drew DeVault explaining why Hyprland's community is so shitty in detail, but to put it in simple terms, the community is prone to harassing minorities and they defend said harassment by saying "it's ironic", "it's unserious", etc. One transgender user on the Discord server put her pronouns in her username, and then an admin responded by changing her nickname so that the pronouns now say "Who/Cares". The other users decided to make the transgender user's life a living hell. Vaxry, who created Hyprland, seemingly didn't care at all. In other words, not very welcoming. I'm not willing to put my trust in a piece of software where the community has a complete lack of respect for anyone who doesn't fit into THEIR idea of "the perfect human." Also, this is unimportant, but I CAN'T FUCKING SCREENSHARE ON VESKTOP WITH HYPRLAND! INSTANT DITCH!!! Anyways, now that I've gotten why I told Hyprland to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-W1awh7zQI out of the way, let's talk about niri.

The review part of the blog

Before I say anything about Niri, I'm going to tell you what it is. Niri is a tiling window manager... sort of. A tiling window manager, for people who are not well-versed in computer culture, is a kind of window manager (basically the component of a desktop user interface that handles the actual windowing of your programs) in which all of the windows are affixed to a grid with their own space allocated for them. You can have floating windows in a tiling window manager (you can even set all windows from certain programs like a terminal emulator to start in floating mode by default in a configuration file), but otherwise, most windows are bound to their own space on the screen. This can be somewhat problematic for bigger windows because usually, in tiling window managers, all of your programs that you have running in the present moment have to fit within the space of your screen, as well as taking into account the permanent fixtures you set, like an infobar. Your screen can only show so many windows before everything becomes illegible. Most tiling window managers have solved this problem by making it so that you have a bunch of workspaces you can put your windows in without interfering with other windows. Niri is a bit different. While yes, you still have the workspaces and the bound windows, Niri has one thing that most other window managers don't: Infinite planes to put all the windows you want on. Infinite's a bit of an exaggeration, as you're still limited by the resources your computer has, and even if that wasn't the case, you'd have trouble organizing all of your windows if you put them ALL on the same infinite plane. It's what the Linux community calls a "scrolling window manager." All workspaces have their own horizontal planes. The workspaces themselves are arranged in a vertical manner, similar to GNOME 3. Also in similar vein to GNOME, the workspaces are dynamic, so instead having a fixed number of workspaces that's bound by the number of number keys on your keyboard, you have a dynamic number of work spaces, again bound by resource constraints. Now that I've mentioned GNOME, this WM takes heavy influences from GNOME. It uses most of the same libraries as GNOME, it uses the same XDG Desktop Portal as GNOME, and as previously mentioned, it has dynamic workspaces. The lead developer of the project, YaLTeR, is a GNOME developer, and because he's a GNOME dev, he's familiar with the way that GNOME works. He's also familiar with GNOME components, which is why he used GNOME's desktop portal instead of writing his own.

The thing I like about this WM is the concept that it brings to the table. At least when it was first committed and people started discovering it, it was a unique concept. Never would you have to worry about running out of space to put your windows. While you still utilize workspaces, you don't have to use them as much because you basically have as much space on a single workspace that you can get because of the horizontal space that each workspace provides. You can freely resize windows, you can do the sort of window tiling thing and put two windows on the same column, and because of the fact that it has tiling WM elements, it's still good for people who want to use keyboards for system navigation. The downside is that niri is not really for beginners. But really, would a Linux beginner use one of these? They're probably more comfortable with something more akin to Windows or Mac, and if that's the case, that's totally fine. Whatever floats their boat.

This is barely a review, but fuck it. Just trying to put the blog page to use.

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