Niri recently improved it's integration with xwayland-satellite, so it's easier to run programs that don't support wayland now: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland

I'm still running an older version (ain't broke, won't fix), but I keep getting recommended the newer versions for features. I'll check them out eventually.

Zoom works, it's just janky.

I'm pretty much the same fwiw I currently use stage manager and double click the top bar of the window to maximize (that's different than the green button)

For me, the appeal of i3/sway's model is that by having a desktop per topic (eg, one for browser, one for code, one for slack, etc) I can instantly jump to the topic I need with a single key press. The desktops I assign never change, so it's always Super+1 for my browser and Super+4 for Slack. It's all muscle memory, and I could do it in my sleep. When I jump to that desktop, everything is open and tiled. This was a revelation to me coming from MacOS, where I was constantly hunting for windows with Cmd+Tab or squinting at thumbnails in Mission Control. So I'm surprised to hear that you prefer Niri's scroll model, which to me sounds like hunting for windows all over again.

Yes same here but with i3, I ran it for over 10 years but niri was just an instant 'aha' moment for me.

I will say, recent builds have a 'mini map' sort of zoom-out feature that I quite like - my one critique of niri was that I would sometimes get 'lost'.

The only thing I feel like is missing from niri is a scratch layer. There are some apps that just don’t need to be tiled and it’s nice to have access to them immediately no matter “where” you are. Perfect example is matrix client. If the wife texts me I want to become able to pop that sucker up immediately and reply, not find the “matrix client workspace”. Plus it’s tiny and doesn’t need to be tiled. Same with media players.

Paperwm on gnome has this.

I've been using i3 for 7 years now, and my immediate response to the scrolling thing was "why?" and after reading your comment, I'm still trying to understand. As one would expect for any tiling wm, the screenshots only show how pretty it can be, and don't really illustrate how it helps with productivity.

Would you mind going into more detail on what actually happens when you move horizontally? What happens when you have a fullscreen editor, then slide over to a half-screen browser? Do you only see half the editor, or does the editor get squished?

One thing I desperately want is a tiling wm that is also a browser. Like if surf ran a practical engine and was more deeply integrated into dmenu.

NixOS will get you there (or anywhere, to any version, of any thing, and/or back again) just by pinning any conceivable package (and it has more than any other Linux distro) to a particular nixpkgs hash.

I thought of this because it sounds like one of the reasons you're not upgrading it is fearing the risk of it fucking everything up and it being a pain to roll back (your "it ain't broke, so why fix it?" is a hallmark of that mentality). Well...

I will never use another Linux distro for this specific reason. NixOS is the complete freedom to dip in, dip out, roll back on problems, try new things out, etc. The freedom to experiment, try it, back out if there's any issue... but with seatbelts, thanks to the declarative nature of everything (as well as being able to pick previous "instances" on boot).

Afraid of Nix (the language)? LLM's make that trivial these days. For example, I just did something like this today: "Instead of using the one in nixpkgs, whose build has issues on my hardware, set up a derivation that uses its git repo and compiles that instead." A minute later, boom. Declarative working glory, forever.

I've been running Xmonad for about 16 years and, having read the description and watched the video think I will keep on doing so. It looks to me like the cognitive load of the horizontally scrolling strip is higher than that of the paged approach used by e.g. Xmonad just like it is a lot harder to locate a specific section in a vertically scrolling unpaged ream of text than in a paged book. Especially on pages with many windows - 10 terminals on page 1 is more or less standard, 2 large ones stacked in the middle flanked by 4 smaller ones on each side - I keep track of which terminal goes where based on (among others) location. This works because all 10 of them are visible at the same time, it would not work if the display only shows one or two of them at a time. Am I missing something or is this WM/compositor more suitable to smaller displays which can not show all that many windows at the same time?

Of course I also use X11 so this thing would not work for me anyway.

What does xwayland-satellite do that normal xwayland doesn't ?

I've been working on porting komorebi to macOS[1] over the past month and the scrolling layout[2] works pretty well

It (the scrolling layout) is not exactly the same as Niri because the implementation is based on my personal preferences, but it does what it's supposed to on both platforms

[1]: https://youtu.be/u3eJcsa_MJk?si=jSbDsAdLWQu0k1lZ

[2]: https://youtu.be/b1yECfF7Qyg?si=VXMbQo0RqtdzuDjG

> I know I can't have it on macos. I also can't switch to Linux since macos is mandated by my employer.

I’ve had two employers with dumb rules like this and I just worked on a Linux VM running fullscreen on all monitors. It was technically macOS, so IT didn’t have any issues, and it still ran all the security stuff that my employer wanted. At one job, my manager even provisioned a VMWare license for this.

I love the full-fullscreen mode for things like VSCode and FreeCAD on my 13" MBP. Never have a real issue with alt-tab though I must say I do end up paying attention to it more when I am switching between three windows and not in a cyle.

I have tried to get this in KDE Plasma 6 (with a global menu bar) and you just can't quite get there, so you have to settle for maximised but not full-screen apps, which is annoying.

I understand the difference and the architectural history that is that "full-screen" on X/Wayland is essentially a kiosk/don't-interrupt-my-game mode, whereas on the Mac it is chromeless windows on a virtual desktop that you can't get stuck in if you forget the restore keystroke.

But it frustrates me I can't get that.

I use Yabai on Mac for a WM - it works great with my big screen, but I haven't figured out a good workflow for when I need to use just the laptop, then it becomes a bunch of spaces with one or two windows in each.

Try flashspace. It's a perfect solution when running apps full screen. You just bind your workspaces to keys and they switch instantly. Without any animations.

Yes, this feature had been in the works for quite a bit since it required non-trivial changes to do it "the right way". Very excited to see these changes merged finally!

Nvidia + Arch + Gnome3 + Wayland user here. I've tried Wayland on/off for the last couple of years, and made the switch I think late last year sometimes once I stopped seeing very obvious bugs/issues. Just about everything works fine nowadays in my experience.

Mostly made the switch because Wayland seems to run a lot smoother and efficient, especially when it came to Firefox for some reason.

On Gnome + NVIDIA (RTX 2080) + Wayland + 3 Monitors [1DP 4K, 2HDMI (2K, FHD)]

Every time I try it, I am really impressed with the smoothness! But every time, two issues come up, which most likely due to NVIDIA, which are complete showstopper.

1. After inactivity period, monitors turns off. When I resume, one monitor won't come back up. I have to deactivate it on control panel, and cancel to get it back. Doing it many times a day, is extremely annoying. This does not happen on two monitors.

2. Monitors won't turn off ... yeah, after inactivity period the monitor's blanks, but, briefly turns off, and then turns back on. And then never turns off. This mostly happens after playing games.

I think both of the issues are due to NVIDIA.

Otherwise, Wayland has become really solid.

Using i3 now, it's not much, it's boring, and that's a good thing.

In the same boat with you. Not quite the same configuration (some version change issues, lost it once in an 'rm' accident that followed a symlink to / [I learned that day...] and had to start from scratch, rewrote for fun once), but my sole desktop from '09 to '23 when I switched to Niri. My reasoning here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462034

This was on my Bonobo WS (PopOS) w/ 2x NVidia GTX 1080s, multiple screens (2 1080p, 1 4k at 2x scaling), etc. No issues other than app support.

Highly recommend trying it. Very low barrier to entry.

I just setup Asus Rog G14 with nvidia 3060, I was skeptical against Wayland but basically got it working straight away with only setting drm.modeset (thanks chatgpt?).

So two external monitors working, except if they are daisy chained I am logged out when (dis)connecting them. So I use one hdmi and one dp over usb-c and it works.

So, not 100% but works better than X for me. Still too recent to have seen all the edge cases though.

This is a scrolling WM (not tiling). I've been using it as my daily driver for over a year now, and it's awesome. I never liked tiling WMs because I do a lot of web work, and I often want a large code editor and a large browser window and a few terminals open. I don't like having stuff scrunched into a little rectangle, but I do like having all of that related stuff grouped in a single workspace. This works perfectly with Niri. I can keep my editor in the center, a peek of my browser to the right and a peek of my terminal to the left, and easily flip between them, resize, stack, etc.

I know it doesn't sound all that interesting, but once I used it for a while, I just couldn't go back.

See my comment above (moved from i3wm) but my spec is

RTX 3090, Pop OS 24.04 (beta), 4K 43" Monitor,

Nvidia cards worked out the box with no problems

"written on rust" is one pro, the other is the native scrolling thing, I appreciate workspaces with a bit of leeway. If you're already on hyprland it'll be an easy switch

Give flashspace a try.

If there is one thing about macOS that really sucks, it is the window management. I have been using it for three months now and still don't understand how to use it.

It is not that I am inexperienced (Windows 95/98/2k/XP/Vista/7/8/10/11, Linux with all kinds of Desktops over the years (KDE 2/3/4/5/6, Gnome 2/3, Sway, Unity, XFCE, Enlightenment, blackbox, ...)), or that I didn't try (searched, watched several YouTube tutorials). I also tried different options, such as disabling the entire "Displays have separate spaces" feature (it fixes some cases, but others worsen).

My verdict is simple: They would be better off just adopting the dumb Microsoft Windows 95 approach to window management.

And it isn't that I don't like the system overall. I have never had a laptop with such superb performance, and at the same time, it stays cool as ice and silent. I love the animated video backgrounds on the lock screen with the slowdown on login, and having Zsh as the default is also fun. But the window management...

You might try Hammerspoon[0] with PaperWM.spoon[1] on macOS. This is what I use, and while it has quirks, it works better than not having it.

[0] https://www.hammerspoon.org/ [1] https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

Aerospace[0] is by far the best window manager I've come across for Mac.

[0]: https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

You are not alone.

Be careful. There are still showstoppers in wayland implementations, if you do anything that isn't common for a Linux user. Example: I am still unable to change the orientation of my drawing tablet.

There are many like this. It mostly works, but it isn't as flawless as just using X11 (unless we are talking about displays and stuff).

Nvidia works since driver 570.

(Edit: grammar and Nvidia note)

I think "tried it on _what_?" is the question -- which distribution, etc.? I've been using Wayland on Fedora for years and don't have any complaints. My primary laptop/desktop has an Intel graphics chipset, but I've tested it on laptops w/NVIDIA and not had problems.

KDE, Gnome and others obviously do provide stacking windows, but you do get the impression that writing a stacking window manager/compositor is just extremely hard to do with Wayland. Someone is maintaining a list of compositors[1] and there do seem to be a number of stacking ones, they just don't really get much attention.

1) https://www.gilesorr.com/wm/table.html

I have a 49” monitor and tried Niri for a while. I had some issues regarding Wayland, I believe because of Nvidia and stopped using it. I could probably solve them, but I have been using X since years and I don’t feel switching right now.

Anyway, for that short amount of time I liked most of it on my ultrawide monitor. Except when you open just one application, it stays on the left-most part naturally and it honestly sucks to look at. I have no idea if I could modify the settings to launch apps with an offset and eventually occupy the complete screen estate. I‘m planning to build a new AMD machine and will try Wayland compositors again for a longer period of time. Niri is my first candidate.

Re: app cycling, you might also be interested in https://github.com/isaksamsten/niriswitcher.

don't you just love how many ways of going full screen there are in macOS

can you paste a link?

Hammerspoon is quite easy to use, so attempting to cobble together your own thing (that does exactly what you want) might also be feasible. The documentation is decent and the iteration time is short.

It took me about 30 minutes to replicate some Windows/AutoHotKey crap that I wrote myself and have been using for years, and it wasn't painful.

+1 Fullscreen Mac os but not the "Mac full screen" but normal full screen.

This is my exact experience! I really tried for 6 months and I just couldn't avoid fumbling around. For example, the experience of going in/out of fullscreen is jarring.

What's funny is that when someone first learns about Alt+Tab it's like the best cheat-code for any desktop navigation, but after switching to Niri, Alt+Tab seems like a silly way to layout your windows.

Seconding this, I've used alternatives like Amethyst, and I can't disable S.I.P for yabai, but Aerospace fills in that missing aspect from Linux when I am in want of it.

Oh weird, I never had a problem like that with my drawing tablet, but then again I dumped Nvidia in 2011 when I switched to archlinux fulltime and had to fix my install twice because of the drivers not being compatible with the latest kernel.

What I still miss is stuff like browser docks in OBS and such things that just work in X but are being dragged on for multiple years to be supported on Wayland now (CEF thing though)

The audience of stacking wms is mainly serviced by the desktop environements. Both Gnome and Plasma are bigger than everything else combined.

You can. You can also center them by default, or toggle centering via keyboard shortcut, etc. it’s pretty flexible.

Maximizing and Fullscreening are different modes in all operating systems.

I use Niri and it has 3:

1. Use all width (windows are full height by default) and display system bar

2. Use the entire screen and hide the system bar

3. Same as 1 but make the app believe that it’s in Mode 2

Looks great, thanks for the suggestion!

It’s nice, but it doesn’t support things like Safari tabs properly.

It's been a few years since I last looked at it, but I've tried daily running it probably 4 or 5 times over the last 15 years. Usually on Arch, but also some Debian/Ubuntu-based distros. It's fuzzy now but I've tried probably every NVIDIA GPU generation since the GTX 500 series.

I can't remember all the bugs, but I've definitely at least encountered all flavors of flickering bugs, stale updates, GPU crashes, failed copy and paste, failed screenshares, failed videoconferences...

From comments on this thread, it sounds like things have drastically improved and its probably time to take another look.

I drew that once in a github issue and next thing I knew it was there! https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/352#discussioncom...

Yeah, I have been wanting this. The way it works on Sway is "okay", but it would be nice to have a floating workspace that can be shown or hidden on top of whatever your active workspace is. The workaround most people are using seems to be a named workspace for scratch.

I put those on the top or bottom desktop, but you could create a named workspace (scratch) and set up a keybinding to navigate to it.

Named workspaces bound to specific key combos does that.

Re. pane size, it's normal tiling behavior. Panes can be take the full screen or some percentage (I like 1/2, 2/3, and 1/3). If the widths add to 1, both panes fill the screen.

If the widths don't add to 1, there are two possible behaviors (configurable). Either the newly focused pane adheres to the size of the screen (e.g., scroll right from the full screen editor and the half-screen browser is on the right border with half the editor visible), or the newly focused pane centers on the screen. I prefer the first behavior, but I make significant use of the "center pane" keybinding.

The Video Demo section in the README gives a pretty good demonstration of this behavior in the first 10-15 seconds.

Edit: To add to this thought and address some comments elsewhere about losing windows, I use "struts", which show P pixels of the panes to the left and right (when they exist) of the current view as a visual aid/reminder of where I am in the ribbon. These reduce the size of the tiled section of the screen and the calculation of pane size accordingly.

> Am I missing something or is this WM/compositor more suitable to smaller displays which can not show all that many windows at the same time?

IMO smaller screens are where it shines, but you can also vertically stack within a column in Niri for similar density compared to tiling if you want.

> I keep track of which terminal goes where based on (among others) location.

I think this is a pretty nice benefit of Niri actually, having a second dimension to work with makes it much easier for me to keep track of windows because I can reduce the total number of workspaces and instead rely in part of relative location to other windows without being forced to fit all of them completely on screen. When I don't need my full screen real estate I often set up splits so that a little bit of the offscreen window is still visible and it makes it effortless to remember whats there.

I've been very happy with Noctalia. https://github.com/noctalia-dev/noctalia-shell

Yeah the tabs is biggest issue

The version of NVIDIA drivers that Debian ships with lacks explicit sync even now. Pretty much every other distro should work though.

One of the advantages of tilling wm are that every window that is run, is visible too. Nothing invisible exists.

But in this "endless horizontal tilling" scheme, the above principle would no longer hold, right?

Would this scratch your itch? https://github.com/probeldev/niri-float-sticky

I didn’t try it myself though. I found it while scrolling https://github.com/Vortriz/awesome-niri

In my case I've found niri's workflow quite nice for these scratch windows, since every new window opens to the immediate left of the currently focused window, and doesn't affect the size or tiling of any other windows, they're just shifted to the right.

I was using i3/sway for years previously as well (and some awesome, qtile before that). The big difference is window size.

Generally I believe most people like to order their workspacesroughly by topic, e.g. all work related Windows on one, browser or on another, some also do all terminals on one... Now with sway/i3 I often found myself in the situation where I was e.g. on the "browser" desktop and you read something you quickly want to try in, e.g. ipython, or you are working on a latex document and want to briefly open a PDF. In i3 that would reduce the size of your original window, so you end up switching to a workspace (or you manually switch to tabbed tiling) for me the mental overhead was significantly higher and I was ending up creating more and more workspaces just to hold temporary terminals.

This is actually related to why I switched to i3 in the first place, I just felt vertical tiling is the only tiling that makes sense in 95% of the cases and that just worked best in i3. But that comes at the cost that you are limited to only 3-4 tiles per workspace (depending on screensize) now in niri I have infinite theoretically. Which means I spend less mental overhead when I want to open another window (which is really thebgoal of tiling wms in my opinion, reduce thinking spend on window management)

The WM has no job being the browser, but yes we should be able to run firefox without tabs like it's surf (and stop doing part of the WM's job). But you cannot practically do that.

What LLM(s) do you use or recommend for nix?

Well it does look beautiful but I don't think I can go back to anything that's un-paged neither, after 17 years of dwm. Also, just watched a bit of an XMonad demo which reminded me how much I love the simplicity of dwm's tiling workflow based on having a master window per page (dwm's tag) because it completely removed the burden of window management for me with barely any configuration, I wonder how I'd do without it ... Probably going to try XMonad just to feel the difference, maybe I'll like it.

This is addressed on the linked page.

Quote:

We're using xwayland-satellite rather than Xwayland directly because X11 is very cursed. xwayland-satellite takes on the bulk of the work dealing with the X11 peculiarities from us, giving niri normal Wayland windows to manage.

xwayland-satellite works well with most applications: Steam, games, Discord, even more exotic things like Ardour with wine Windows VST plugins. However, X11 apps that want to position windows or bars at specific screen coordinates won't behave correctly and will need a nested compositor to run. See sections below for how to do that.

No, because every tiling WM has multiple workspaces.

But yes, that wouldn't be true, though focus moves to fresh windows so it's not an issue.

Dang that’s a nice list

> yes we should be able to run firefox without tabs like it's surf

Can't you? You used to be able to show the tab bar only when there was more than one tab; I guess that has disappeared?

You can do this: Put this code into your userChrome.css file:

#tabbrowser-tabs .tabbrowser-tab:only-of-type, #tabbrowser-tabs .tabbrowser-tab:only-of-type + #tabbrowser-arrowscrollbox-periphery { display: none !important; }

#tabbrowser-tabs, #tabbrowser-arrowscrollbox { min-height: 0 !important; }

Zen browser (which is derived from Firefox) does a really good job of making this the default (at the expense of mainly supporting vertical tab lists, which I've come to love).

just open new windows instead of tabs. Or am I missing something?

I've been using Claude and Codex and both are excellent; I imagine Gemini would be too. Likely Grok as well. They're all smart enough to be helpful at this point.

Kind of interesting about the X11 position issue, since that is exactly the issue that I have with Hyprland

What do you mean by un-paged? I just looked at dwm and I don't see that it has anything that other tiling wms don't have. Xmonad, i3, sway... all have workspaces/tags.

Niri also has named workspaces, but when I switched to niri, I realised I only want named workspaces for very few things everything else is just temporary.

That typically isn't true in practice right? It's fairly common to have multiple "desktops" when using a tiling WM.

Newly started applications receive focus, so they're visible by default. They are inserted right of the current view, so recovering the previous active pane is consistent ("left pane" keybinding, or the appropriate gesture).

Things on other desktops are invisible in every WM.

The only difference with niri is the possibility for things to be left or right of the current window. Overview helps with that, but I know what I expect to be on a specific desktop (it's related to the topic) and seldom need it.

That's true, you do end up with some windows hidden or partially visible. Niri is still tiling, though, so with proper management you can avoid making too much use of the infinite strip (though that would defeat the purpose of niri).

Tiling window managers have tabs, so not all windows are visible.

You can see window titles on the tabs on the tab bar, but you can’t even see the title of windows which are in a split container of a background tab.

That only works for windows that you would be opening and closing, not persistent ones like chat apps or music players?

Thank you for the explanation! Between your explanation and a Youtube video I found of someone using it, I think have a grip on the "why" now. Interestingly, it seems like I might use i3 a little differently than you did. A single working context for me can span many desktops, and I just work in a way that keeps my number of concurrent working contexts low. I only ever have 1-2 programs on any given desktop, and even 2 is unusual. I keep every window in tabbed mode. When I need a scratch "thing" (nautilus, terminal, localc, whatever) it opens as a new tab. If I need it side-by-side with that desktop's primary window, I pop it out using mod4+shift+left/right. This accomplishes a similar thing to that Niri is getting you, just with different ergonomics. It probably helps that I have good habits around closing unused tabs / programs.

This seems like a good place to note the "center window" keybinding for windows that don't fit well in the screen (e.g., 2/3 wide pane next to 2/3 wide pane, or 1/3 pane on the right end of the stack next to a full-screen pane).

Vastly preferable to having to look at the edge of the screen.

Tabs, and workspaces.

Many of those apps minimise when closed and reopen when calling, so often it is not really an issue (although it's sometimes annoying that you have to specifically tell the apps to exit when you do want to close).

Yes, still on each workspace, everything is visible on i3. I wonder how scroll to the right differs from i3's tabbed panes.

Like imagine editor is on ws2, you open a terminal to /tmp/ to check something quick, it scrolls to the right, then jump to ws3 for your file manager and other stuff and go back to your editor.

Now you want to access that terminal on /tmp/ again. Where was it?

In i3, I just spam-switch workspaces in this case, but at least I can find them. With scrollable wms, every ws can potentially hold that target app.

Yes it seems like you're using i3 quite differently. I agree that if you good discipline about opening and closing windows in the right workspace/tile i3 can give you a more structured layout. I just found for myself even if I tried I could not keep the discipline up (I doesn't help that I often work on several things at the same time).

I think that's the beauty of tiling WMs (and I consider scrolling WMs a subset), you can really adjust them to suit your work flow even if work flows might be very different. In contrast stacking WMs seem to be more a lowest common denominator type thing. They work with every workflow, but suboptimal.

Oh! That didn't exist a few months ago, I need to update and do this then :D

Oh, i actually agree with you, I was more concerned about the suprise abd amusement of seeing that amount of windows pop up out of nowhere. Though, I do wonder how well a linux computer will deal with so much forking, if it freezes the machine for a minute it would be rather bad, but maybe linux and wayland are mature enough to not freeze and spawn all that in like a second or so

It’s a meme, not a flex.

Ahh okay yeah I watched the 2 min one on the main readme

This does have the dots (vertical position) on the right bar

Long as the windows stay fixed, it annoys me how Mac will just randomly re-arrange your virtual desktops or whatever you call em

I use i3 personally at this time regarding this topic but yeah although I used to only care about it because I had crappy computers at the time so not having a full desktop meant saving 400 MB of RAM at idle for example

I think my i3 "style" came from using a 12-inch thinkpad for many years. The small screen size and low resolution force you to work in certain ways. And if I had left 100 Firefox tabs open on that machine's second-gen mobile i5, I think it would have melted straight through the desk.

I might give Niri a shot at some point, but yes, this is my thought too: this is more or less the same as having multiple tabbed panes, which enables the grouping GP refers to.

It's right of your editor, where it started.

If you have (having had "Editor" focused, and just opened "TermT"):

  Editor | (TermT) | Term | Browser
  (FM) | Term | Browser | etc.

(where pipe delimits a pane and parens are the active pane), if you go "next desktop" from "TermT" (the terminal at /tmp), that moves you down the stack of desktops. Moving up the stack of desktops returns with focus on "TermT". You'd then go "left pane" from "TermT" to get back to the editor.

The answer (for me) is to think of desktops as topics. The terminal on /tmp is with the things that prompted its creation. If I needed to check some log output, for example, it's with the project that made that log output.

Edit: Note that there's nothing keeping you from stacking those terms if you like, i.e., the appropriate keybinding goes from the previous to

  Editor | (TermT), Term | Browser
  (FM) | Term | Browser | etc.

where the terms stack vertically in the ribbon of the desktop.

I was running i3 and sway foe years and tabbed tiles never really clicked for me the same way scrolling did. The first time I used a scrolling WM (I tried on of the plugins for sway or hyprland IIRC) it was an immediate revelation. However the sway/hyprland version were always a bit quirky, while niri "just works".

For those on older niri versions I have to say the "zoom out" overview feature is definitely worth the upgrade. As another poster said it really fixes the one issue on scrolling/ tiling wms, which is getting lost.

I think they aren't referring to "where does it go?" and more being forgetful.

If you have something that would be reasonable to open on any workspace because it's ephemeral (they used a tmp terminal as an example), and you open it, navigate away from it, and then switch workspaces a few time, and then get pulled into a meeting or go to lunch, and come back, switch workspaces a few more times...

"Where did I leave that terminal, I dont remember where I was when I opened it."

In i3wm/sway etc, you can cycle all your workspaces and eventually one of them will have it visible. On Niri, as you cycle through all your workspaces you may never see it because you don't see all the windows in a workspace, unless you scroll through the workspace panes as you cycle workspaces.

It's not a problem necessarily, but it is something to consider. It sounds like this doesn't affect your workflow, but it might affect others.

It has overview. You can see all windows and workspaces in a scaled out view of your preference.

Fair enough. "Overview" [0] presumably solves this, though.

[0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Overview