Version 26.04 of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. The most notable change in this release, as the "most requested niri feature by far", is support for the blur effect using the Wayland protocol's ext-background-effect. This release also features optional configuration includes, screencasting support enhancements, and a number of improvements for input devices. In short, background blur turned out to be a massive undertaking. Not because of the blur algorithm itself (by the way, if you want to learn about different blurs, including the widely used Dual Kawase, I highly recommend this blog post), but because window background effects in general required a lot of thinking and additions to the code, especially to make them as efficient as possible. This is one of the most complex niri features thus far. LWN covered niri in July 2025.