Alternatives to niri
A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that places windows in columns on an endless horizontal strip. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
niri
A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that places windows in columns on an endless horizontal strip.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as niri.
Hyprland
Arrange Linux application windows with a configurable tiling Wayland compositor.
Hyprland is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor with animations and extensive layout configuration, where new windows share space instead of scrolling horizontally.
Sway
Use an i3-style tiling workflow on Wayland.
Sway provides i3-style keyboard-driven tiling on Wayland and supports much of the i3 configuration format, resizing existing windows as new ones open.
PaperWM
A GNOME Shell extension that tiles windows side by side on a horizontally scrolling strip.
PaperWM offers similar scrollable tiling as a GNOME Shell extension, keeping the GNOME desktop, though extensions can break with new GNOME releases.
river
A non-monolithic Wayland compositor that leaves window management to a separate program.
river is a Wayland compositor that leaves window management policy to a separate replaceable program, and building it requires the Zig toolchain.
dwl
A dwm-like dynamic tiling Wayland compositor built on the wlroots library.
dwl is a minimal dwm-style dynamic tiling Wayland compositor on wlroots, where customisation usually means editing C source and recompiling.
miracle-wm
A hackable tiling Wayland compositor for Linux built on Mir, with i3-style tiling and animations.
miracle-wm is a tiling Wayland compositor built on Mir with i3-style tiling, animations, shader effects and Rust plugin support, but a smaller community.
Wayfire
A wlroots-based Wayland compositor with plugin-driven window management and 3D desktop effects.
Wayfire is a wlroots-based Wayland compositor with plugin-driven window management and 3D effects, rather than a fixed scrollable tiling layout.
Qtile
Configure a tiling window manager using Python.
Qtile is a tiling window manager configured in Python with programmable layouts and widgets, offering both X11 and Wayland back ends.
Also worth comparing
These listings name niri as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
labwc
A lightweight wlroots-based stacking Wayland compositor inspired by Openbox.
niri is a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor placing windows in columns on a horizontal strip, and like labwc it needs separate panels and launchers.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Waybar
Add a customizable status bar to compatible Wayland desktops.
Ironbar
A customisable GTK4 status bar for Wayland compositors, written in Rust.
nwg-panel
Add desktop panels to Sway and Hyprland using GTK.
rofi
A keyboard-driven window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement for Linux desktops.
Quickshell
A QtQuick toolkit for building your own status bars, widgets, lockscreens and desktop shells.
Eww
Create custom desktop widgets using declarative configuration and styling.
