Over three months after its previous 25.05 release, Niri, a Wayland compositor known for its scrollable-tiling layout, where windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip, rolls out a new 25.08 version, bringing many improvements.
First things first, Niri finally has its own official logo —a candle. Additionally, the project introduced a new wiki, powered by MkDocs, which features full-text search, badges for version annotations, and compatibility with existing GitHub Wiki links.
On the technical side, one of the most notable changes in this update is the integration with xwayland-satellite, which addresses the long-standing challenge of running X11 applications on Niri. With xwayland-satellite 0.7 or later, users no longer need to set the $DISPLAY environment variable manually.
Instead, Niri now spawns xwayland-satellite on demand, handles restarts automatically, and removes the startup race condition for X11 apps in autostart. This allows Steam, Proton, JetBrains IDEs, and most other X11 clients to run normally.
Regarding accessibility, Niri 25.08 basic screen reader support enables Orca to announce workspace switches, exit confirmations, screenshot UI entry, and other key events. A standard keybinding, Super+Alt+S, has been added to toggle Orca.
The screenshot interface also received several improvements. Users can now move selections between monitors, adjust them with keyboard bindings, and even use touch gestures. Additionally, holding the Space key while dragging a selection with the mouse now allows you to reposition it, and multi-touch input is supported for a more natural interaction.
Screencasting reliability received some fixes. One of them addresses the flickering seen by some NVIDIA users when streaming with OBS or Discord. Application IDs for portals have also been corrected, so window pickers now display the proper icons.
Alongside that, support for the ext-workspace protocol has been added, making it possible for panels like Waybar, sfwbar, and xfce4-panel to show workspace indicators consistent across compositors.
On the IPC side, windows now expose their positions and sizes, both for tiled and floating layouts. This gives shells and external tools more accurate data for visualizations or tracking. The configuration system has been extended, too, with new spawn-sh commands to run shell pipelines and complex commands directly, easing one of the more confusing aspects of Niri’s config.
Other additions include new animation easing types, expanded pointing device settings, several useful debug flags, and fixes to hot reloading for various input devices.
Lastly, there are numerous smaller fixes throughout the board. HDR is now disabled to prevent broken colors. Idle inhibitor registration has been improved for compatibility with apps like VLC. Nushell completions have been added, and multiple issues with floating windows, session locks, and animations have been resolved.
Check out the release announcement for more information about all novelties, where you will also find a few videos showing the new features of the Niri 25.08 scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor in action.
