Niri 26.04 released

Version 26.04of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. The mostnotable change in this release, as the "most requested niri feature by far",is support for the blur effect using the Wayland protocol's ext-background-effect. Thisrelease also features optional configurationincludes, screencasting support enhancements, and a number of improvements forinput devices.

In short, background blur turned out to be a massive undertaking. Not because ofthe blur algorithm itself (by the way, if you want to learn about different blurs,including the widely used Dual Kawase, I highly recommend this blog post), but because windowbackground effects in general required a lot of thinking and additions to the code,especially to make them as efficient as possible. This is one of the most complexniri features thus far.

LWN covered niri in July2025.