Niri 26.04 Wayland compositor lands long-awaited background blur

Niri, the scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that arranges windows in columns along an infinite horizontal strip, has shipped version 26.04 with background blur as the headline feature. Apps and shell components can request blur via the ext-background-effect Wayland protocol — already adopted by foot, kitty, Ghostty, Dank Material Shell, and others — or have it forced via window/layer rules in niri’s config. Two modes are offered: an efficient xray variant that pre-computes a blurred wallpaper once and reuses it (the default), and a more expensive non-xray mode that reads back rendered pixels mid-frame. Both can be combined with noise and saturation effects, and pop-up menus can now carry their own opacity and blur rules.

Getting blur in took significant rework, including refactors to Smithay’s rendering pipeline and careful handling of niri’s Overview mode and screencast block-out so that sensitive content inside a blurred region doesn’t leak. The release also adds optional config includes (include optional=true won’t fail if the file is missing but still reloads on creation) and ~ expansion in include paths. Minimum supported Rust is now 1.85, the niri.service unit no longer hardcodes /usr/bin/, and dinit service files were restructured — packagers should take note.

Project governance shifted too: niri moved from the maintainer’s personal GitHub account to a dedicated org so issue-triage permissions can be delegated, and adjacent projects like awesome-niri and a new artwork repo were brought under the same umbrella. The main repo crossed 20,000 stars in February.