I used to always bounce back and forth between Gnome, Plasma, Sway and Hyprland.
I love tiling compositors, but I also love having a fully functional desktop without stitching together two dozen different tools and configuring each separately. I got better things to do than edit text files for days.
And I think I found my holy grail: niri with Dank Material Shell.
DMS really is something else. A fully-fledged DE that sits on top of a tiling wayland compositor, with a workflow similar to Gnome and GUI customization options similar to Plasma.
I realize I’m shilling hard here, but I don’t even know the guy who made it. I’m just genuinely floored by the project’s quality.
I’ve been loving Niri!! It feels like how my brain organizes my thoughts. Plus there’s some subtle things I love. Like user set window size is always respected when opening and resizing other windows or the built in screenshot tool.
I have also been recommended River multiple times and it also sounds very interesting so I’ll be checking that out at some point, but I think Niri will be my home for a while.