# Niri

125 Hacker News commenters recommended Niri and 17 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.5 years (16 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that opens windows in an endless horizontal strip, so you never decide where things go; some lose track of windows spatially.

## Why people recommend it

- No thinking about window placement (6 comments): "What I like about Niri and hyprland is that I don't need to think about where windows open and about positioning them." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49188143)) "the scrolling WM solution is a really simple one that never makes you ask the question of where to put something" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938602)) "The beauty of niri is that I never feel I need to close some apps because I've got "too many windows"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904091))
- Slick, natural navigation (5 comments): "it feels easier for me to navigate an infinitely wide left-right and up-down space as opposed to an infinitely deep space into and out of the screen" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49505961)) "niri is the current hot tiling compositor, and I've switched my laptop over to it recently - away from Plasma - because it's so incredibly slick" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507045)) "All gestures are inertial like MacOS and to my fingers they often feel snappier and more natural than their macOS equivalents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46576800))
- Unbounded scrolling space (3 comments): "horizontal scroll unbounded by my monitor size and workspace count unbound by the number of shortcut keys" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903042)) "The beauty of niri is that I never feel I need to close some apps because I've got "too many windows"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904091)) "ferverously dedicated people enjoying Niri, enjoying new infinite space tiling systems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826926))
- Sane, minimal configuration (3 comments): "niri doesn't even need to be configured, the default configuration performs all the required tasks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46569471)) "The IPC is very easy to work with so you can build "launch or focus" shortcuts in a general way" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904986)) "The configuration file is sane, and not as arcane and ad hoc as the hyprland.conf format." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821632))

## What people warn about

- Hard to track window locations (3 comments): "where I once habitually put things in the same workspace every time and was able to trivially recall them, I now end up all over the place" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904090)) "I would lose track of where things were not just between workspaces, but even on the same workspace" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46820936)) "it was giving me a headache to mentally deal with spatially mapping all of my windows" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903355))
- Occasional unpredictable failures (2 comments): "my Wayland based window compositor (niri) starts to fail in unpredictable ways" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454103)) "It's like niri gets in an unrecoverable state that it doesn't recover from." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46444896))
- Rigid filmstrip layout (2 comments): "Niri would make me find a place to put these apps in the top level and then navigate to them which doesn't match their transient nature." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599954)) "Niri's infinite scrolling approach makes that into a rigid filmstrip sequence." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319021))
- Big windows cause disorienting motion (2 comments): "Vs niri which by default scrolls the whole window (title bar included) off the screen, so you can't see all the windows in the workspace at a glance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904508)) "The windows are way too tall, and the induced motion of large windows on a big screen is too much." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827846))

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Niri", https://hackerapproved.com/p/niri/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).