Niri 26.04 ships a new release of the scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor where windows live on an infinite horizontal strip and never force-resize siblings.
Key Takeaways
Windows are arranged in columns on an unbounded horizontal strip; opening a new window never triggers existing window resizes.
The scrollable model decouples workspace count from keyboard shortcut slots, removing a long-standing constraint of traditional tiling WMs like i3.
Niri is a full Wayland compositor, not a layer on top of an existing one; xwayland-satellite provides X11 compatibility for legacy apps.
Version numbering follows a date-based scheme (26.04), signaling active, regular release cadence.
Hacker News Comment Review
Multiple commenters report switching from i3 after a decade-plus and finding the unbounded horizontal scroll model more freeing than fixed workspaces, with no significant productivity regressions.
The main outstanding pain point cited is xwayland-satellite’s lack of drag-and-drop support between X and Wayland apps, a known gap in the X compatibility layer.
Mac users are tracking OmniWM (github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM) as a Niri-layout emulation layer for macOS, recently updated for Sequoia compatibility.
Notable Comments
@dyates: switched from i3 after 10+ years; highlights unbounded scroll and unconstrained workspace count as the core wins; drag-and-drop across X/Wayland boundary remains broken in xwayland-satellite.
@nickjj: maintains dotfiles with a full Niri install script for Arch-based distros, calling the switch from Windows “the best computing decision” in recent memory.