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This might be the most interesting new Linux distro right now
(www.makeuseof.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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I feel like opinionated linux distros that already firmly moved to wayland must already exist, but I haven't really seriously researched this. KaOS, maybe?
I didn't really have the patience for distro-shopping in recent years. I favor keyboard-driven setups, and the few times a distro offers that out of the box the shortcuts and config files are different enough from mine that it's annoying to get into it.
So there’s not a full distro built around it, or even a full desktop environment, but you should check out niri. Keyboard focused, infinite scrolling, Wayland tiling window manager.
There is a nixOS flake or it can be installed over Arch, Ubuntu, or whatever else you want.
I recently checked out KaOS' new iso with niri. It did look neat, but it had exactly the issues I just described. The window management shortcuts were unfamiliar, it took me like 15 minutes to figure out how to change keyboard layouts (in part because the general presentation suggested that there was probably a GUI method, but there wasn't), I couldn't even make dark mode work easily.
I could probably make niri work for me if I really wanted, but it's a lot of work for no real benefit. I'll probably just end up moving to sway in a couple of years when it becomes really unreasonable to keep using X11, since that one is actually designed to feel similar to the window manager I'm currently using (i3).
The good news is that something like this already exists; just goes to show it’s a matter of time before more refined options are developed.
As an aside, there are now plugins for Noctalia Shell, including a pretty good “Keybind Cheatsheet” plugin, which may make it easier to pick up and play with things like niri.