Niri 26.04: Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor

The scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor Niri 26.04 has been released, with significant refinements across background blur, screencasting, rendering, and input handling.

• Background blur has landed in mainline, allowing apps that support ext-background-effect and layer-shell elements to request blur without any extra configuration.

• Even if an app doesn't directly support the protocol, blur can be forced via window-rule and layer-rule, with xray blur applied as the default.

• A popups block has been added, enabling transparency and background effects to be applied to popup menus as well.

• Screencasting has been improved across both the PipeWire and wlr-screencopy paths.

• Cursor metadata support for window capture, delayed start for dynamic casts, status queries via niri msg casts, and a force-stop feature have all been added.

• Issues with cursor inclusion, handling of multiple copies, and resource cleanup in wlr-screencopy have also been fixed.

• The rendering architecture has shifted from iterator-based to push-based, speeding up render list construction by 2-3x on typical machines and 8x on an old Eee PC.

• Memory usage has also decreased, and integration of Tracy-based GPU profiling makes it easier to track render bottlenecks and blur costs.

• Input and window behavior have also seen broad improvements.

• Pointer warping during scroll gestures, Escape to cancel during drag, improved handling of high-polling-rate mice, a workaround for IME and GTK 4 popup conflicts, and a tablet map-to-focused-output option have been added.

• Other changes include optional includes, ~ expansion, ext-foreign-toplevel-list, DMA-BUF support for nested niri, fixes for old Intel systems and legacy hardware, improved VRAM leak handling, and adjustments to default keybindings.

The key point of this release is that Niri has gone beyond simply adding features, elevating usability, performance, and compatibility all at once.