A new version of Niri v26.04 has been released — a scroll-tiling compositor for Wayland that arranges windows in columns along an infinite rightward strip, while opening a new window does not change the sizes of already opened ones.
Niri is written in Rust and is distributed under the GPL3 license. In February, the GitHub repository surpassed 20,000 stars.
The main feature of this release, requested the most, is background blurring support. Blurring works through the Wayland ext-background-effect protocol and is supported by many applications and shells (Dank Material Shell, Noctalia shell, Vicinae launcher, terminals foot, kitty, Ghostty, and others).
For applications that do not support the protocol, blurring can be enabled through Niri's configuration. There are two types of blurring: xray blur (efficient, uses blurred wallpapers as a static image) and regular blur (more resource-intensive). You can configure which type to use for different window layers, for example:
// Make top and overlay layers use the regular blur (if enabled),
// while bottom and background layers keep using the efficient xray blur.
layer-rule {
match layer="top"
match layer="overlay"
background-effect {
xray false
}
}
Blurring is a complex function that required significant changes in the rendering architecture for fast and correct operation, including support in the window overview (Overview) and interaction with other effects. The ability to apply transparency and blurring effects to pop-up menus with adjustable corner radius and transparency has also been added.
Among other changes, support for optional includes in the config has been added — files can now be included that may be missing without causing a loading error, which is convenient for local overrides. The niri.service has also been improved — the path to the binary is no longer hardcoded. Other changes have been made regarding the behavior of the 'mouse' pointer during scrolling, screencasting, and much more — for details, read the release link below. The minimum supported version of Rust is now 1.85.
Developers also note the movement of the Niri project to a GitHub organization instead of the personal account of developer YaLTeR. This has allowed for expanded rights to manage tasks and pull requests. The developers express gratitude to Sempyos for actively participating in support and assisting users. Related projects have also been transferred to the organization, including the list of related projects awesome-niri (Vortriz) and the repository with art from the logo creators (bluelinden and HumpityDumpityDumber), which features an icon and several wallpapers, including 3D works created in Blender (Duncan-Rose).
Source: linux.org.ru
