My waybar just shows the time in the center, my network status, and my battery health. It’s very minimalist. I went without entirely for a while, but I missed having the time there at a glance.
Niri is pretty, but I find sway to be faster. Hotkeys and instant switch is just better (for me). I will continue to experiment, but sway feels more productive currently.
You can disable animations in Niri, which makes switching instantaneous. Since switching from sway to niri (with a minor detour via hyprland), I found that Niri's scrolling tiling matches much more closely how I work with windows.
As a side note, I found that Niri uses less battery for me than both sway and hyprland.
niri's nice too. I used to daily drive it, but I don't remember why I stopped using it. Nowadays, I just WM hop, I've used Hyprland, labwc, and Pop Shell with GNOME so far, but dwl looks promising to me.