[20after4]

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.

[MadnessASAP]

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.

[tincholio]

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?

[MadnessASAP]

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.

[yencabulator]

I personally consider GNOME to be much more suffering...

xwayland-satellite gives you XWayland without needing compositor integration.

[20after4]

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.