I’ve been using Niri for a little under a year now on both my desktop and laptop, I like it a lot compared to regular tiling window managers (I used QTile for 2-3 years on my desktop and Hyprland on my laptop for about a year until I found out about vaxry).

Personally, I usually group my workspaces by app category (e.g. browser, system-related, chat windows, games, etc.) which works really well with a scrolling model since you can have multiple “fullscreen” apps per workspace, or a fullscreen apps and half-width app like a file explorer for dragging files over to the main app. It also works well for me since I am unlikely to have more than 2-3 full-width apps in the same category.

I like organizing things that way because it makes my hotkeys consistent for the thing I’m trying to do. For example, if I have a chat window open, my hotkey to get there will always be meta+3 regardless of what app it is and how many other chat apps I have open.

I feel like that’s by design. Tiling WMs generally make 2 assumptions and if they aren’t true for you then you’re probably better off with a regular desktop:

• Most apps you use are one window and are either fullscreen or splitscreen with another app.
• You have a lot of different Fullscreen apps open at once

For a lot of people that makes sense because Workspace-based WMs let you switch between full screen apps a lot quicker than pressing alt-tab 10 times. e.g. when I’m doing work I’ll usually have these Fullscreen windows open:

• browser
• chat app (teams/outlook at work, discord/matrix at home)
• IDE
• window for whatever I’m testing/working on
• miscellaneous things (file explorers, random text files, etc. which can all be splitscreen)

For me at least, every extra second it takes me to move between apps snowballs because I have to pause my thought just to find the app I’m looking for in the alt tab menu or the task bar

You can see spaces but it doesn’t make a distinction between rooms in spaces and standalone rooms, so the “groups” tab ends up being filled with every room from every space you’re in, making it impossible to find the lone standalone rooms. That and the fact that it also lists nested spaces completely separately from their parents, which ends up cluttering the list when a space used nested spaces to categorize individual rooms

Is this still the case, with the actual matrix specification?

I’m currently hosting a matrix instance but haven’t been able to get my friends to migrate over from Discord yet. The spec isn’t the problem for us, it’s the apps really. We have a seemingly basic discord server (channels for various hobbies/games we want to talk about + a general channel, a voice chat, and some custom meme emotes we made). In theory these should all be supported on the spec level.

Element has a ton of basic features locked behind a hidden developer menu (separate from the non-hidden developer menu) which is locked behind a / command. By default the app keeps defaulting to the old Jitsi meetings for voice calls even though I have the RTC matrix calling setup. It’s also just finicky to get working. I’m the only one in the group willing to debug technical issues in their free time so this is actually an issue.

Cinny is better but the desktop app only supports voice chat on Windows (it’s because of an upstream tauri issue but still stops several people in the group from being able to use it)

Nheko also seemed like a good option but it hasn’t had a release in over a year which seems like a problem with how many improvements to matrix I’ve seen everywhere else.

FluffyChat is good and is what I use on my phone but it isn’t well suited for discord-style organization with Spaces. There isn’t a way to distinguish between standalone rooms and rooms withthin spaces. My understanding was that this is a spec issue and the way other apps handle it is hacky, but still worth mentioning.

I imagine the work will make its way over to Eden at some point which is a more actively-developed yuzu fork