Thoughts on a more frequent release cycle?

[glexposito]

Hi Ivan (YaLTeR) and the Niri team,

First of all, I want to say that the work you are doing here is great. Using Niri has been a blast! Thank you so much for building this and for all the effort you put into it. It’s really impressive stuff.

I’m writing to ask if you would consider moving toward a more frequent release schedule featuring smaller, incremental improvements.

While the major releases are always exciting, having more regular "point releases" or smaller updates would be a great way to get new features and bug fixes into the hands of users faster. Even if they are just small quality-of-life improvements.

Thanks again for all the hard work!

[hwamil]

While I agree with the sentiment, using the wip branch is pretty much what is being asked here.

[glexposito]

Thanks! I don’t think the wip branch is quite the same. It requires people to build Niri themselves, which isn’t something most users like my daughter (8 years old), my wife, or my mom would be able to do. Also, wip is technically unstable. Yep! I managed to get my family using Niri!

I suggested this because Niri is so great that it could really help people move away from Windows. It’s an amazing opportunity.

[nickjj]

If you install niri-git from the AUR you'll get the current main branch. Your AUR manager (yay, paru, etc.) will handle pulling build dependencies, compiling niri for you and getting rid of build dependencies.

The main downside is on my machine at least (2014 era i5-4460 quad core), compiling niri takes a really long time. I'm relatively new to using niri but my plan is to use the official Arch package unless there's something really important that's not out yet in an official release. For example, there's a GPU memory leak on the latest release but niri-git has that fixed so I'm using niri-git at the moment, it's easy to switch between them.

[YaLTeR]

I release when I feel the version is ready and has enough features. The current release is significantly delayed because:

• I decided to dive into blur which turned out to be an enormous undertaking, one of the most complex niri features which also needed work in Smithay.
• I have a ton of uni work right now, very little time for personal projects.

That said, I'll hopefully finish it soon, and make a new release shortly thereafter.

I am not doing any set release cycle because, again, hobby project, very little time to spare from uni work.

[glexposito]

Thanks so much for taking the time to reply! Keep that amazing work up!

[glexposito]

Hopefully a company starts sponsoring you with a good amount of money so you can live comfortably from it. This really deserves to be a full-time effort at some point. It’s really great!

[uonr]

The project is already quite feature-complete. It covers almost everything I need for my daily use, so please feel free to release updates at your own pace