I am back to fighting desktop Linux

I had been using KDE Plasma for about a year. Plasma really is great. It works great out of the box. Before that I used to use i3. Comparatively the amount of scaffolding Plasma has is extremely helpful. I love the Breeze aesthetic to. It's right up my wheelhouse.

My only complaint with Plasma is the window management. Coming from i3 it is tolerable and allows you to customise the shortcuts. I prefer the idea of arranging windows in workspaces, changing focus between windows and between workspaces using the keyboard only and I couldn't get Plasma to work this way.

Right now I have some free time and I found a spare laptop. So I tried setting up Niri, a scrolling Wayland compositor on it.

The window management in Niri is amazing. Overall it seems polished as well. The animations are smooth and the configuration is easy and updates to it are loaded on the fly.

The problem here is the missing scaffolding that something like GNOME or Plasma provides for you. I spent like half of all day yesterday trying to figure out how to make gtk and qt apps look acceptable and the password manager (keepassxc) still does not follow the theme. I still don't have a taskbar set up so I never know what the time is or how much battery I have left without using the terminal. This is just a drop in the bucket of the user friendly stuff missing from a bare compositor install.

There are some projects like DankMaterialShell and Noctalia that try to provide a lot of this missing functionality in one package. I tried both of them but I dislike how they both look.

This will read like a rant but it isn't. Right now I have some luxury to engage with the friction so I wanna find out how things work at the lower level in Waylandland. I am hoping I am able to stick with Niri because the window management really is great.