I'm on wayland. Kitty can be used as a layershell window. So you can build panels, taskbars, etc if you were so inclined. For example, you want fastfetch or htop as a live desktop background? Kitty can do that.
To be fair, "more consistent" if you only use KDE apps. Once you start adding other Linux apps, you end up with a motley crue of GTK 3, GTK 4, QT 5, QT 6, Electron apps with some dark, some light and everywhere in between. Consistency doesn't exist on any OS.
As someone who spends most of his time in nvim and TUIs (yazi, lazydocker, termusic, tmux in ssh ...), Niri is as keyboard centric as you want. Mine is configured to use vim keys.
That's on NixOS, but on other distros there are issues. When I tried nix last year, installing alacritty, for example, required an opengl wrapper. Neovim couldn't compile plugins without environment hackery.
The non-NixOS OpenGL/gpu story is unfortunately tricky as it requires a binary matchup between a userspace library and the kernel driver—which on non-NixOS is unknown to the Nix package manager since it's being managed by whatever the host is.
This is arguably a flaw in how Nvidia architected this, but it is what it is. The classical solution is nixGL [1], but this requires downloading special nixified versions of the libraries on every host system kernel change. An alternative option that I was involved in the development of is nix-gl-host [2],
which manipulates the LD_LIBRARY_PATH for a Nix executable to allow it to link patched versions of the host's own userspace GL libraries.
In the shorts, you wake up as some famous person in history: Cleopatra, Caesar ... It's a first person POV of their life and surroundings. They're AI vids.
Tilers can remove Gnome's overly whitespaced decorations, probably saving 10% in screen pixels alone.
If you want to maximize all windows on run, niri can do that with a rule. It then becomes like a monocle layout where you can use swipes/keyboard/scroll wheel to navigate between maximized windows. I don't know of any DE that will run all windows maximized by default.
Too bad I no longer have an 800x600 netbook. Niri would be perfect for it.
Niri is RAM efficient. I run Niri in an 8GB VM on Intel Macbook, and on a $99 8GB mini PC. Total RAM usage on boot is less than 400MB with waybar, polkit, ssh-agent, mako ... That's in the ultra lightweight WM category. Compare that to Gnome+paperwm (1.6GB)
There are features Niri sorely needs: 1) 2D overview (zoom in/out), 2) enhanced meta for windows (to create window indicator [1] and window picker)
> We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on memory requirements.
My WM uses 1,158K of RAM, or basically just a bit above 1M. This is a very minimal custom thing I wrote years ago that works for me.
But the previous person said "total RAM usage on boot". I was curious enough to reboot: on boot my Linux system uses 310M. That's without Xorg and starting only some very minimal services. After startx it uses about 405M.
"RAM usage" is a tricky topic. I have 32G on my machine and there's no memory pressure at all on boot, so the kernel can just allocate/cache stuff "just in case", but it doesn't necessarily need all that memory to allocate.
> We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on memory requirements.
How much is your X server process using? Because a Wayland compositor has to be both the display server and the WM in one. Comparing OpenBox alone to Niri is incomplete and incorrect, you have to compare OpenBox+Xorg+(xcompmgr or whatever frame-perfect compositor) to get a 1:1-ish comparison.
Niri doesn't use 400MB by itself, that's the entire memory footprint of everything running. In comparison, OpenBox with all the utilities needed for wallet, ssh agent etc is in the 450MB range on my box. That's probably due X11 vs Wayland.
A minimal Niri functional environment is similar to IceWM in RAM usage. I used to run antiX in VMs.
