I was a pretty early adopter of perhaps the best GNOME extension, PaperWM, which displays your windows as sliding frames that move fluidly with the press of a keystroke.
When everyone was going nuts over tiling windows, I was quietly calling this scrolling style the real innovation in windowed computing. (For the uninitiated: Think of it kind of like swiping between virtual desktops on Windows or MacOS, except you can do it on every single window, slideshow-style.) It was the best of both worlds—easy to navigate, while remaining mousable.
Eventually more people figured out that this was the ticket, and now PaperWM has grown from quiet experiment to robust extension. As a way to prove an idea, it was basically flawless, to the point where someone made a MacOS version.
A screenshot of PaperWM, quietly one of the most exciting interface innovations of the past decade.
But it had a problem: It was attached to GNOME, with all the extra cruft that implies. GNOME’s interface has a lot of fans (me included), but it’s mature, complex, and prescriptive. It’s controversial in the Linux world because it makes UX decisions for users that sometimes get in the way of user choice. I tend to defend it, but if you were to put “heavy FOSS graphical interface” in the dictionary, GNOME would most assuredly show up.
Retrofitting a new user interface paradigm on top of that dynamic comes with compromises.
If you want to think about things in terms of GitHub stars, Hyprland is growing fast, but Niri is starting to catch up.
Which is why I’ve been keeping an eye on niri, an emerging window manager that is doing for sliding windows what Hyprland did for tiling. It is less than three years old (Hyprland is about four), but has quickly grown in popularity, doubling its GitHub star count in the past six months.
Built around the Wayland compositor, the project basically is set up like a kit, one where you need to supply parts in the form of config files. If you like customizing, it may be the project for you. But if you just want to get stuff done, it might not feel like a welcoming experience.
Omarchy, which we (controversially) covered a few months ago, exists because of this gap. People want the lightweight customizability of a window manager, but not the work of having to set it up.
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