Using Niri instead of Hyprland in Omarchy

[DawieMalmsteel]

Hi,

Thanks for your work on Omarchy, it’s been a great experience so far!

I’d like to ask about using Niri instead of Hyprland on Omarchy.

From what I understand, Omarchy uses uwsm (User Wayland Session Manager) to handle sessions, and by default it auto-starts into Hyprland.

I’d like to try switching to Niri, but I’m not sure about the correct way to configure this:

• Does Omarchy/uwsm already support Niri as a session option?
• If so, how can I switch the default session from Hyprland to Niri?
• If not, what’s the recommended way to add Niri into uwsm so that I can use it instead of Hyprland?
• Would installing a display manager (like SDDM) be better if I want to choose between Hyprland and Niri at login?

Basically, I’m not sure where uwsm stores its session configuration on Omarchy, so I don’t know how to change the compositor from Hyprland to Niri.

Any guidance would be very helpful!
Thanks in advance 🙏

[alexhraber]

https://code.hyprland.org/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins/src/branch/main/hyprscrolling

[DawieMalmsteel]

thank you so much for give me this

[zocker-160]

This plugin sadly breaks when using the grouping feature META+G and then opening another application the group just diappears.

[cristian-fleischer]

If you still want to give niri a try on Omarchy take a look at this attempt this small fork aimed at this: https://github.com/cristian-fleischer/okimarchy

[tiagor87]

I think it would be a great idea to allow both, hypr and niri.
I'm trying the scrolling layout available in hyprland. The main feature is there, but it's not quite the same.

[tassiovirginio]

I agree, they just pulled the plugin code into the core, but the scrolling functionality will only work correctly if you have a viewer like Niri's. I tried using hyperxpo, but it doesn't work correctly. There's still a long way to go to get Niri's workflow.

[abenz1267]

Niri is built around scrolling and everything about is therefore done with scrolling in mind. Hyprland is a frankenstein monster.

I dont see Omarchy adding Niri as an option, as that would require additional maintance for Niri config. This includes every omarchy code that is specific to hyprland. I don't see this at all.

[chadbailey59]

I've built an unholy Frankenstein mess of a system with both Niri and Hyprland. It's my mess, though, which is what makes it fun. :)

I had Claude Code help me do most of it. Here's what the process has looked like so far:

1. Install Niri, following their documentation.
2. Omarchy sets up SDDM to automatically log in to hyprland with your username. I think you disable that by removing or renaming /etc/sddm.conf.d/autologin.conf. Now, when you boot, you'll get an intermediate screen where you can pick between hyprland and niri.
3. Boot into niri, and start by figuring out what's totally missing. If I was a bit better with Claude Code, I could probably have it sum up a bunch of conversations we had and generate a list. But you'll notice things like the lock screen missing. Omarchy uses hyprlock for that, so Claude helped me install swaylock, etc.
4. Now, fix the Omarchy things that conflict. I have a ~/.config/bin directory that sits earlier in my PATH. It has a handful of omarchy things in there, like omarchy-launch-webapp. I think all that Claude had to do in that one was remove uswm and run things directly. You can update all of these tools to detect whether you're in Niri or Hyprland and do different things. Or you can have a specific place for niri overrides that only gets loaded in your PATH when you boot into Niri.

I still haven't bothered with things like theming in Niri yet. There's probably a cleaner way to do all of this, but the fun thing with Linux is that you can just stumble around and half-do it yourself.