Niri vs. River vs. Hyprland: The Tiling WM Battle for Minimalist Wayland Supremacy
The conversation centers on optimizing highly customized, minimalist tiling desktop environments using modern Wayland compositors like Niri and River.
The community is divided on the best tool. 'variety4me' pushes the 'do one thing best' mantra, favoring combinations of small tools like waybar, mako, and rofi. However, 'coltn' criticizes Niri for being too feature-heavy, calling built-in features like screenshots a violation of Unix philosophy. Meanwhile, 'coltn' also praises River's architectural split between WM and compositor as technically superior for future deep customization, while 'Arkhive' flags the missing but desired feature of a toggleable, special floating workspace within Niri.
The consensus skews toward extreme minimalism and dedicated toolsets. The key fracture point is whether 'good enough' stability (Niri's out-of-the-box appeal, noted by 'variety4me') outweighs the purity and architectural promise of a system like River, or the nostalgia for battle-tested workflows like DWM or Hyprland's established use.
Key Points
The 'do one thing best' philosophy should guide tool selection.
variety4me advocates for sticking to small, dedicated apps like waybar, mako, and rofi.
Niri is criticized for feature bloat.
coltn argues Niri includes too much—like native screenshots—violating Unix principles.
River's architecture offers superior technical future-proofing.
coltn points to River's separation of the WM and compositor as a major technical advantage.
A dedicated, toggleable 'special/floating workspace' is a missing feature.
Arkhive notes this specific overlay capability is desirable but absent in current tools.
Niri provides a reliable initial experience.
variety4me noted Niri's stability and functionality right out of the box.
Source Discussions (4)
This report was synthesized from the following Lemmy discussions, ranked by community score.