mmgutz

If you consider the extras built into noctalia: notifications, screen lock (i think), wallpaper daemon .... daemons you have to install/configure piecemeal, noctalia is already in the ballpark of a waybar-based setup.

DMS | super heavyweight | sluggish | lots of eye candy, GUI configurable

Noctalia | welterweight | fast | professional look, GUI configurable

Waybar | lightweight | fast | minimal, DIY theming, hand configured

swaybar | flyweight | blazingly fast | ultra minimalist, hand configured

Noctalia uses about 70MB more RAM, and a little more CPU than Waybar. No brainer.

Tamzen

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.

Can confirm 8-9w idle for my N100 homelab server having 1 NVMe SSD, 1 SATA SSD, 16GB RAM.

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.

Things just work with pacman or dnf.

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.

This looks like those youtube shorts I've been seeing. Did you guys create those?

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 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.

Gnome is starting on a built-in mosaic layout tiler that looks on the surface similar to newm. newm is sadly no longer actively enhanced.

Cosmic Desktop (creators of pop-shell) is further innovating in this area as well.

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)