KaOS replaces KDE Plasma with Niri and wins me over

I've watched Linux distributions change in all sorts of ways, so when KaOS dropped KDE Plasma in favor of Niri I braced for the worst. Niri, a scrollable tiling compositor I hadn't heard of, turned out to be surprisingly good and quickly changed my mind. KaOS describes itself as a rolling, transparent distribution built from scratch with a specific focus: one desktop environment, one toolkit and one architecture.

Niri tiles windows along a horizontal plane you can scroll left or right to find the app you want, blending aspects of tiling and traditional window managers into a single experience. The interface is polished: the Launcher opens from a top icon and presents categories in a more horizontal layout, while the notification panel combines system controls, weather and performance monitors in an elegant way.

During installation you choose an office suite (KDE Office or LibreOffice); the default set of apps includes Elisa, Falkon, K3b, Sweeper and a few utilities.

kaos, niri, kde plasma, tiling compositor, scrollable tiling, linux distribution, desktop environment, app launcher, notification panel, libreoffice