From: Christoph Liebender <christoph@liebender.dev>
Subject: Re: NEW: wayland/niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
To: ports@openbsd.org
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2026 18:33:26 +0100

On 12/30/25 19:33, Landry Breuil wrote:
> Le Tue, Dec 30, 2025 at 03:21:56PM +0100, Tobias Heider a écrit :
>> On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 05:13:07PM +0100, Tobias Heider wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> here is a new port for niri [1], a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
>>> heavily inspired by the PaperWM extension for Gnome.
>>>
>>> This one is a little different than our existing wayland compositor ports
>>> since it doesn't use wlroots but smithay [2] as its underlying compositor
>>> library.
>>>
>>> Smithay is written in rust and pulls in quite a few dependencies, I had to
>>> resort to some hacks to make it pick up the patched OpenBSD compatible
>>> versions since most patches haven't found their way into an upstream release
>>> yet. In the current version I fetch niri itself and all the patched
>>> dependencies from my forked trees on github. I already got some of them
>>> merged upstream so I'm optimistic that we can swtich over to an official
>>> release in the near future.
>>>
>>> Looking forward to get some feedback.
>>>
>>> Some open questions:
>>> Is there a better way to handle the rust dependencies?
>>> Would it make sense for a large rust package such as smithay to be a separate
>>> port?
>>> I used upstream_version.date for our port version, is there a better solution?
>>>
>>> [1] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri
>>> [2] https://github.com/Smithay/smithay
>>
>> Updated it to 25.11 and thought I'd share it here for anyone interested.
>>
>> The garbled output after exiting niri seems to be fixed and I managed to
>> upstream a bunch of patches in dependencies. The port is still fetching from
>> my github though and is using drm-rs and smithay from my patched forks.
>>
>> One open issue is that xwayland-satellite will crash niri after a while,
>> I am still trying to figure out why.
> 
> heh, and i thought it was already imported...
> 
> LIB_DEPENDS =	devel/llvm/21
> 
> and you have the MODCARGO lines pointing at libLLVM.so commented out..
> are you sure that LIB_DEPENDS is needed ? if so im not sure that cant
> lead to other issues in ports.
> 
> note that startniri.sh should be updated now that we have proper support
> for XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.
> 
> with those fixed i'd be inclined to ok it so that you can maintain it in
> tree, and itd be good to have non-wlroots implems to play with :)
> 
> Landry
> 

Hi, I'm excited to see that this port is seeing some activity again!

I've just gave it a spin, couple things I have noticed:

- the "mouse buttons" of my Thinkpad x280's touchpad are not working; 
though I am not sure if this is related to the port or the wayland 
implementation of OpenBSD. I have to actually press on the touchpad 
itself to issue clicks.
- I still have to say
debug {
	render-drm-device "/dev/dri/renderD128"
}
in the config for niri to work at all. Maybe it would make sense to add 
this to the port's README? Might alleviate some setup friction for some 
users.
- three finger swiping on the touchpad for switching between windows 
does not work for me. probably ... also not related to the port itself 
though?
- alacritty does not launch, I have to resort to using foot instead. I 
get an error saying NotSupported("provided display handle is not supported")

I'll happily test any iterations of this port.

Christoph