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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

Well, that sucks. When the sale was announced, I tried several launchers, free and paid, and none of them were as good as Nova :/ Guess I’ll do another round.

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I've been using Niagara for a few years and I love it.

Completely different style of launcher though.

Yes, and it does exactly what a launcher should do. It is not designed to show a dozen widgets spread over five workspaces.

Priced at 15 eurobucks (back in the day) it's the most expensive piece of Android software I have ever bought. I have felt no buyer's remorse whatsoever.

Edit: looks like the perpetual license costs EUR 40 nowadays.

My screen is pretty simple, 5 folders with icons, 10 other icons, one calendar widget, one weather widget. It’s what a homescreeen should do for me. Because not everyone is you.

Afaik, Niagra has all of that.

My favorite aspect of it is that I can remove all text and see 95% of the wall paper at all times.

If you look at your parents' phone, chances are that there are five or more almost empty pages with automatically added icons all over the place.

Okay?

I personally don't need a bunch of screens of widgets. I've got my first screen of the 17 apps I use the most, a clock/weather widget, and the app drawer button to bring up the (iconized) app list. On the second screen a have a widget for an app used to share pictures with friends.

Launchers are personal, so Niagara works for you that's great! But for my use having everything is a single column is a nightmare.

Every item in the single column can also be a widget, shortcut, or popup folder. I have the 5 top apps I use, then a popup folder that holds 4 I use less often. It works great, and I can get to/launch everything just using the thumb holding the phone.

Niagara Launcher is like Niri among the other Linux Window Managers. It is highly unique, and yet still gets the job done, if not better.

Smart Launcher is the one I settled on after my last round of testing. Not perfect, but closer than most.

Please update here if you find any good alternative? I'm stuck in the same place

Lawnchair has been good enough for me, get a recent development build, they don't release very often.

Lawnchair is the best open source launcher IMHO. It's feature reach but it does have one problem: the defaults are the opposite of sane lol.

I just switched to Lawnchair - took me quite a while to replicate the minimal look/feel I had with Nova. Thanks for recommending it!

I've been having fun with Kvaesitso after it was recommended here. There are some things I'd change, but it's nice.

https://github.com/MM2-0/Kvaesitso

I'm trying that one too. I did not like Octopi or KISS. Kvaesitso looks nice, I like the drawer and the drawer widgets are kind of cool too. The annoying thing that might drive me away is that you cannot set the order of favourites and the order changes depending on what you last used. Changing the order of something has to be very thoughtful or it quickly becomes frustrating - and with the favourites its not obvious that should be like a "recently used" list.

Kvaesitso is open source, so since writing this I downloaded it, removed the dynamic ordering and updated it on my phone.

Holy crap nice! Well done!

I highly recommend Octopi launcher. Simple, does exactly what it should. Works great on foldables, as well.

I’ll be trying out Hyperion now as default launcher, list of stuff I checked quickly:

Kvaesitso (FLOSS) and AIO: Different style of launcher that I don’t want, so out.

Action: Felt weird to use, didn’t find a setting for auto search in app drawer

Smart launcher: The most expensive one at 25€, and no proper app drawer search either.

Lawnchair (FLOSS): Annoying animations, widgets don’t work properly (many widgets require Yx2 sizing that should work as Yx1)

Octopi: Slightly better widgets than lawnchair, but still sizing issues. Without that I’d probably have gone with it first.

Hyperion: This is what I’ll be testing for now. The only Nova feature I’m missing is showing recently installed apps in the drawer, but that’s extremely minor. Apparently support is bad and updates rare, but neither is an issue for me.

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