arch on my two laptops, and desktop. proxmox on my server as the hypervisor, and debian on the vm/lxc. my routers are running openwrt.

one of my laptops i use for testing, and i do switch distro’s… i’ve tried alpine, gentoo and i’d like to try openbsd. but arch is comfy

Though I can’t say I’m mad about it coming with screenshots built in because I struggled getting screenshots working for my entire stay on Arch. I didn’t try super hard, just had other fish to fry

exactly, i think this is why right now if a someone were to ask me for a starting point to get into a WM environment–I’d say niri with noctalia. But for me, there is some joy in just writing my scripts with grim and slurp and being able to do wacky things like automatically create a magic link on my local server, and my own domain to the screen shot that is accessible to the outside net.

yea, one thing that just feels so good for me is being able to view multiple tags at once. So you can temporarily view tag X and Y together (so filling in a password, copying a command, or reading documentation), but then you don’t have to reorganize you applications back into their “designated” work spaces/tags. Your “chat” and “terminal” can remain in their workspaces, but you can view them together briefly without having to move them back and forth. For me as someone who usually tries to abide to each activity has it’s own workspace/tag, this work really well.

i did try mango when it was maomaowm–it was pretty cool but at the time it was quite unstable; i think now, it just seems a bit bloated (again, this is a me thing) and like it’s trying to do every single paradigm.

ultimately i’m hoping river will be something that becomes a solid compositor base that supports most of the wlroots features. but then i can use a super minimal wm that is like a more modern dwm.

but the compositor/wm space is wayland is still too thin, there aren’t a lot of options

Hopefully this will change with river! For example here is a wm that is written with 600 lines of janet

don’t get me wrong though, niri has been so solid and is such a good compositor–maybe i slighted it a bit too much in my previous comment. Niri was a breath of fresh air compared to hyprland not having to worry about the config file/syntax changing every other release. But some of the trade offs that yalter makes aren’t “for me” which is totally fine… certain things feel restrictive (no scratch pads, forced “dynamic” workspaces, no real vertical monitor support), but then some other things feel a bit bloated (overview, recent view, built in screenshot, etc). Overall though Niri has been my favorite. I think it’s a pretty exciting time with four very solid options + countless wm on top of river soon.

River scratches the itch for me of hyper minimal. The config file is just a script/executable, it can be written in any language, but by default it’s bash. in 0.4 (which should be coming out soon) they are coming out with a custom protocol to separate the window manager, and the compositor–so river will just handle the lower level/compositor things, and it can be a lot more simple to write a custom window manager. For example, KWM’s first commit was Dec 25 2025 if I remember correctly; and the river wiki already lists 13 wm’s that work with river as the compositor. I saw yalter say that things like animations etc will be more complicated with this model; but for me personally, i pretty much always shut off animations. also rivers community seems pretty good, and their code of conduct is solid.

I saw one of your previous comments about how you appreciate the unix philosophy of “do one thing best”, i found niri kinda rubbed me weird when things like screenshot, overview, recent apps were built in–while very useful for a “just works” desktop, and it makes niri a compositor that i would recommend to my friends, it makes niri feel like a bit of a wrong fit for me; have you felt this at all?

I also find with scrolling, I sometimes lose track of my windows, I wrote a script to display how many columns are in the current workspace, and which column is currently active–this helped a bit… but after 3-4 months of using niri i’m not 100% sold.

Still haven’t come across a way to do a special/floating workspace. I know you can float windows, but I’m talking about a whole workspace that toggles as an overlay of whatever your current one is.

This is a feature that I miss; it’s possible, but not with stock niri, it takes some work to set up.

I also don’t like using niri with vertical monitors… So I’m just using it on my main laptop–desktop is on hyprland

I am excited to use kwm with river! I like DWMs style of “tags” instead of work spaces, but scrolling is really useful when screen space is limited. I have an old thinkpad that had DWM, and I’ve switch to river-classic and really love it

Great news!!! Thanks for the update, that’s so exciting.

Sorta, I use both Navidrome and Jellyfin. I use navidrome primarily for music listening, but then point jellyfin at the same library so that I can play music on the TV easily. With Navidrome I use feishin as my client on desktop, and I use tempo on one of my android smart phones, ultrasonic on my daily driver flip-phone (cat S22 flip), and my partner has used amperfy and subsonic on their iphone–haven’t really been happy with any of the clients for iphone.

Navidrome built in webserver also works pretty ok for using at work etc. Feishin is really nice for being able to set up dynamic “smart” playlists with a gui.

I find that using something more dedicated to music like Navidrome is a little more feature built. Plus there are so many *sonic clients–so it just feels more flexible.