Niri 26.04 was just released (scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor)

Niri is a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize.

As you may have noticed, niri now lives in a GitHub org rather than my (@YaLTeR) personal account.

The primary reason was the ability to give out issue triage permissions: I'd like to give a massive thanks to @Sempyos for triaging all of our issues and pull requests, answering many, many questions, and helping people diagnose their problems with niri.

We've also moved a few niri-adjacent projects to the GitHub org, like the awesome-niri list of related projects maintained by @Vortriz and a new artwork repo by @bluelinden and @HumpityDumpityDumber—two of the creators of our project logo. In the artwork repo, you can find a badge and several wallpapers, including two stunning 3D works created by @Duncan-Rose in Blender.

The main niri repo also flew past 20,000 stars in February! Thanks everyone for support.

Note for Packagers:

• Our minimum supported Rust version is now 1.85.
• niri.service no longer hardcodes /usr/bin/ in the niri binary path.
• @markK24 restructured the dinit service files.

Blur

It's here. The most requested niri feature by far. After tireless fork maintenance by @visualglitch91 and @Naxdy, blur is in mainline niri for everyone to use!

Windows and layer-shell components can request blur through the ext-background-effect Wayland protocol with no extra niri configuration. Many already do, including Dank Material Shell, Noctalia shell, foot terminal, and kitty terminal.

For apps that don't support ext-background-effect yet, you can enable blur through the niri config using window-rule or layer-rule blocks.

We have both normal blur and xray blur that always shows the wallpaper. Xray blur is the default because it's much more efficient: niri computes the blurred wallpaper once, and then reuses it as a static image, which is extremely cheap. Only if the wallpaper changes, the blur is recomputed.

Background blur turned out to be a massive undertaking. It required extensive refactors of Smithay's rendering architecture to make it as efficient as possible. This is one of the most complex niri features thus far, especially ensuring it works with the Overview and screencast blocking.

One more thing you can do starting from this release is to configure niri to apply transparency and background effects to pop-up menus, using the new popups block in window or layer rules.

Optional includes

Starting from this release, you can make an include optional by setting optional=true. This is useful for local/private overrides or immutable configs on NixOS. When an optional include file is missing, niri will emit a warning in the logs but continue loading the config successfully. The optional file is still watched for changes, so if you create it later, the config will automatically reload.

While we're talking about includes: they now expand paths starting with ~ to the home directory.