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Comment by anonreplier | Hacker News Reader

Niri or Umbriel with Noctalia shell is a wonderful experience, you can get similar on Mac with OmniWM. I briefly tried komorebi for windows too.

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Afyer years of using tiling WMs, Niri was such a huge improvement. You don't really have to think about anything anymore, it just clicks. You always know where windows are (lile with tiling), but you also don't have to worry how to place them.

Niri is amazingly good. It is pretty well polished and just makes sense.

I just wish I had a polished shell experience that was not a vram hog. Quickshell (multiple big monitors) seems to hog a lot of it, ashell and ironbar are better on resource management but require a lot of customization.

This is Noctalia 5. It's a complete, standalone shell with no Quickshell dependency.

You are right, I didn't look too much through it and just went ahead and installed/configured it to figure out if it fits.

The vram usage is: niri = ~163mb

noctalia = ~221mb ashell = ~2mb ironbar = ~10mb

How's OmniWM?

I've used paperspoon but it's very laggy. Paneru is better but 3 finger swipe up or down shows all windows on all workspaces which makes it impossible to pick the window you want. (which paperwm didn't do)

I used OmniWM for a year (and even sponsored it) and functionally, it was great. However, the project velocity was too much (partially AI-driven, partially the inability to say no) and I was constantly forced to keep up with breaking config changes (just use an LLM to fix your config — a GH issue literally said that) and Sequoia compatibility was added, then taken back away, which was the last straw for me. I switched to the fork Nehir and things… just work. It’s got less going on, but it’s very stable and nice.

This is my concern, OmniWM is bundling more and more functionality in, the lead dev is a bit too keen on using tokens. I may move to Nehir similarly.

OmniWM is pretty snappy! Lots of unhandled cases that aren’t even really edge cases. Floating windows and custom menus from the toolbar are poorly handled, as is window minimization (the BSP space for a minimized window remains held). Seems to be moving in the right direction, though.

I checked out OmniWM[0] and watched the demo[1], it hurt my eyes. I can't understand whats going on. It's like when the cat sits on your keyboard..

[0]https://github.com/OmniNull/OmniWM

[1]https://youtu.be/WcHjGkuD2Fc

Maybe this one is more your eye pace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWzGMEKtdbI the videe you linked was specifically done to demonstrate the responsivness of a much older OmniWM version

CachyOs with Niri and DankMaterialShell is what finally broke out of Ubuntu with Gnome.

It's slick, modern, efficient, and up to date.

I encourage trying that or similar.

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