Niri 26.04 Boosts Wayland Tiling and Blur

Niri v26.04 ships major UI polish and infrastructure changes: the project moved from a personal GitHub account into a GitHub organization to enable triage permissions, passed 20,000 stars, and bumped minimum Rust to 1.85. The headline feature is built-in background blur via the ext-background-effect Wayland protocol, now in mainline niri after upstream maintenance; both ‘xray’ (wallpaper-based, efficient) and normal blur are supported, with configurable exceptions via niri config rules. The release also includes service file fixes, rearranged dinit files, artwork and repo reorganizations, and notes about toolkit and application support (kitty, foot, Quickshell, winit, etc.). This matters for Wayland users and Linux desktop developers because it adds a highly requested compositor effect with efficient rendering and broad app/toolkit integration.

Niri v26.04, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor, was released and moved into a GitHub organization to enable issue triage and consolidate related projects and artwork. The headline feature is built-in blur support via the ext-background-effect Wayland protocol; many apps and toolkits already support it, and niri can apply blur via config rules for unsupported apps. The release also introduces efficient "xray" blur (default) which precomputes a blurred wallpaper for performance, with options for normal blur and per-layer control. Other changes: minimum Rust bumped to 1.85, service path fixes, and dinit service file restructuring. The repo recently surpassed 20,000 stars.

Niri 26.04, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor, was released and is getting attention on Hacker News for its productive window-management paradigm. Users praise its scroll-based window management and report migrating from other OSes, citing better workflow on ultrawide monitors and across machines. The release matters because Niri expands the ecosystem of modern Wayland compositors offering novel UX patterns and better tiling options, influencing desktop productivity and inspiring ports/emulations like OmniWM for macOS. Key players include the Niri project and community contributors, plus third-party projects integrating Niri-style layouts. This signals growing interest in alternative desktop environments and Wayland-native tooling among power users and Linux distributions.

Niri v26.04, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor, was released and the project moved to a GitHub organization to enable shared issue triage. The release’s headline feature is background blur via the ext-background-effect Wayland protocol, now supported for windows and layer-shell components and configurable per-app or layer in niri’s config. The update also notes packagers should target Rust 1.85, a change to niri.service to avoid hardcoded /usr/bin paths, and restructured dinit service files. The project hit 20,000 GitHub stars and added related repos (artwork, awesome-niri). Blur supports an efficient “xray” mode that reuses a single blurred wallpaper image and a normal mode for overlapping surfaces. These changes improve aesthetics and compositor configurability for Wayland users and developers.