Collabora Productivity has spent the past decade proving that an open source office suite can compete directly with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace without asking organizations to give up control of their infrastructure or their documents.
All of that is backed by a team of open source engineers whose work has made Collabora a trusted name when enterprises go shopping for a collaborative document platform.
Most of what ships in Collabora Online 26.04 will look familiar if you followed the CODE 26.04 release back in June. So this will be me rehashing the information we already covered earlier.
AI assistance touches every major app in the suite this time, landing in Writer, Calc, and Impress. Writer's version helps draft and rewrite passages, Calc's works through formula errors and spreadsheet data, and Impress's condenses notes or longer documents into slide-ready material.
None of it runs unless an organization switches it on first. From there, teams choose their own path, connecting a commercial API they already trust or deploying a self-hosted model on infrastructure they control, with Collabora not peddling any specific vendor.
Calc's changes lean toward collaboration. Per-user sheet views let two people filter and rearrange the same shared spreadsheet without stepping on each other's setup. Pivot tables now support calculated values, and a batch of newer functions is here for anyone doing serious data work.
Impress picks up Follow-Me Slideshows, where an audience automatically tracks whatever slide the presenter is on, with the option to pause and scroll back through something they missed before rejoining the live view.
Writer's document comparison tool has got the biggest rework this cycle. Bring up an earlier version of a file, whether it's on the server or sitting locally, and the editor highlights everything that changed against the current draft, credited to whoever made the edit and when.
You also have the choice of reviewing changes side by side or through the usual tracked changes panel, and there's BITV 2.0 accreditation too.
Speaking about this release, Michael Meeks, the CEO of Collabora Productivity, said that:
Collabora Online 26.04’s highly customisable and tightly controlled AI assistance enables users to safely accelerate their document related tasks.
Likewise, the new editing and review features, improved accessibility and greater document interoperability will smooth the everyday experience for all users, making it more intuitive and flexible.
Why go for Collabora Online?
Collabora offers four flavors of its suite. CODE is free and self-hosted, built for early adopters chasing new features first. Collabora Office and Collabora Office Classic bring that experience to the desktop, while Collabora Online is the paid enterprise solution.
Everything here has already made it through CODE, where the community stress-tested it first. Collabora then rolls it into Online with a paid SLA, signed security updates, long-term maintenance, and direct access to its support team whenever something breaks.
Ready for another round of latest happenings in Linux world? Here, we go.
Vocalinux 0.14 beta adds custom recording shortcuts, fixes Wayland text injection on GNOME, and handles CPU usage better on hybrid laptops. It didn't run cleanly during testing, but it's pre-release software, so that's a given.
GNOME's entire security tracking operation has been one person since 2020. That person is leaving in December. There's space for a replacement, but they will have to modernize the current system. Nothing to panic about. GNOME Foundation should take care of it.
Speaking of GNOME, the GNOME OS' development is going on nicely, with the developers sharing that a safe mode is coming, allowing users to troubleshoot issues that prevent boot or optimal usage of the OS.
MPEG-4 Visual is now completely patent-free after the last remaining patent, held by Siemens AG in Brazil, expired a few days ago.
If you do a lot of video processing on a Zen 4 or newer AMD chip, FFmpeg's latest AVX-512 optimization is worth knowing about. RGB24 to RGBA conversion is now 1.372x faster.
The TDF has published a sharp piece on why DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX are Microsoft's most effective lock-in tool. These bind organizations not through contracts or bans, but via pesky formatting friction that makes anything outside Office look slightly wrong.
Elon says X's entire codebase is going open source once xAI finishes a security review. He's said things like this before, but his track record has been mixed so far.
Sreenath, a Kitty user of several years, tried Alacritty for two months and came away with a temptation to switch. Features like Vi mode, scrollback search, bracket matching, and sensible defaults are what won him over.
Here are eight GNOME extensions that can make you more productive. A dropdown terminal, clipboard history with regex search, a proper tiling manager, Pomodoro timer, sticky notes that actually stick, and phone notifications on your desktop.
MangoWM does what Niri does but gives you many layout modes alongside a comprehensive tags system, per-tag layout switching, and a lean installation for you to tailor according to your preferences.
Tired of manually mounting your external drive every time? Adding a UUID entry to /etc/fstab handles it at boot, while udev rules combined with autofs take care of hot-plugged USB drives. I wrote this tutorial years ago and it is still valid.
Less than a week to go for the Humble Bundle O'Reilly collection. It is packed with Linux and Unix books, covering everything from shell scripting to system administration and kernel internals. This should be of interest to most Linux users, professional or not.
And part of the money gets donated to Code for America.
What if you could have aan intern sitting on your desk and help you with your work? That's what Intern 2 from Autonomous does. Be prepared to see a lot of such "AI gadgets" in the coming months.
Got an old PC gathering dust? It could be converted into a NAS. We have covered some pretty neat OS options that can complement your restoration efforts.
Why should you opt for It's FOSS Plus membership:
✅ Ad-free reading experience ✅ Badges in the comment section and forum ✅ Supporting creation of educational Linux materials ✅ Free Linux eBook
This one is overlooked often, but Looking Glass is GNOME's integrated inspector tool and JavaScript console that is quite useful for debugging. First, you have to launch the Run a Command dialog with Alt+F2, then launch the tool by typing lg.
You can use it to troubleshoot issues with GNOME shell extensions or other interface snafus, and you can exit it by pressing Esc.
🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 25, 1990, Microsoft became the first PC software company ever to top $1 billion in annual sales, reporting $1.18 billion for its fiscal year. Just 15 years after Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded it in 1975.
Jellyfin, the local media server solution that makes people forget that Plex even exists, is going through a major shakeup in its development team's organizational structure.
In a forum post published a few days ago, founder Joshua Boniface confirmed that he is departing as Project Leader, while Anthony Lavado is stepping down as a core team member.
Their exit comes just days after the other founder, Andrew Rabert, announced his own voluntary departure.
Joshua and Anthony describe their exit as being amicable, saying that there is little to no risk of a hostile fork. They're leaving day-to-day operations to the rest of the team, many of whom have already been managing different parts of Jellyfin for years.
The departures
Just a placeholder image of an older build of Jellyfin.
Joshua and Andrew leaving are both cases of maintainer burnout. Boniface says he could no longer give the role the mental or time-based effort it demanded and that he was facing real risks to his own mental health as a result.
Rabert's account, shared in a GitHub issue about renaming his now-independent desktop client project, points to something similar. He said he started rewriting Jellyfin's desktop client back in December 2025 but ran into resistance from certain members of the Jellyfin organization over how he was approaching the work.
That friction eventually cost him his motivation, and he made the call to leave the Jellyfin organization.
Anthony's departure is a bit different. He said he hasn't touched much code in recent times, focusing instead on backend tasks like App Store management, and that changes in his personal life mean he can no longer give Jellyfin the time he used to.
He's still sticking around through the transition, though, and says he's committed to making it a smooth one even if it takes up to a year.
Things were looking up!
It wasn't long ago that Jellyfin looked to be in a good spot. Back in May, the project published a State of the Fin update, and the stats pointed to a project running at a healthy pace.
The accompanying activity graph, covering May 2025 through April 2026, showed PRs merged and issues closed staying in the hundreds nearly every month, with PRs merged ranging from roughly 180 to 430 and issues closed from roughly 240 to 500. The contributor count held steady throughout.
That same post introduced Jellyfin's LLM and AI policy, put together in response to a wave of AI-authored pull requests that had piled onto the team's workload.
It also included a section titled "Burnout / Remember the Person", where the team said that growing support demands and the extra review work brought on by AI-generated code had worn down staff across development and admin roles.
If you draw a parallel from the departures above, it is clear that many people were/are running at the absolute limit or have broken past their capacity to deliver good work.
And this is not something new; we are used to hearing about maintainer burnout taking capable devs off projects they once used to have a passion for. While things are certainly improving thanks to increased awareness, there's still a long way to go.
People who used Windows 7 and earflier version would remember "My Computer". It's called "This PC" now a days but does the same job.
You click on the icon, and it opens the file explorer and shows you the meta folders (Documents, Pictures, Downloads, etc.) and all the drives on the system and any other mounted devices.
Windows 8 My Computer
This is useful for many people to see all the locations in the system at a glance.
On the Linux side, GNOME used to have Other Locations page in Nautilus file manager. It served as a central place where you could access network shares, cloud storage such as Google Drive, removable drives, and even your root partition.
Other Locations view in older GNOME versions
Starting with GNOME 47, that page was removed. In its place, Nautilus introduced a dedicated Network folder, while local drives and partitions were moved directly into the sidebar.
This makes sense for systems with only a few drives, but some users still prefer to have a dedicated page that shows everything in one place.
Meet My Computer for Nautilus
My Computer for Nautilus is an extension for GNOME Files (Nautilus) that brings back a dedicated computer view.
Instead of scattering drives and network locations across different places, it puts all your drives, partitions, removable media, and network mounts into a single, organized page. It also comes with a handful of useful features that make Nautilus much more customizable than it is by default.
While bringing back a dedicated Computer view is its primary purpose, My Computer goes beyond that. It adds a few quality-of-life improvements that make Nautilus even more flexible.
Let's have a look at its features.
A dedicated Computer view
The most noticeable change is the new Computer entry that appears at the top of the Nautilus sidebar.
Clicking it opens a dedicated page where all your drives, partitions, removable media, and network locations are neatly organized.
My Computer Panel
You can even make Nautilus open in this view every time it starts.
Simply right-click the Computer entry in the sidebar and select My Computer Settings.
Access My Computer Settings
Under the General tab, enable Start on the Computer View.
Start in My Computer
Customize what appears in the Computer View
The Computer page is fully customizable.
If you don't want certain sections, such as Preferred Folders, Network, or Removable Media, you can simply hide them. This lets you tailor the page to match your workflow.
For example, you can turn it into a dedicated drives overview by hiding everything except storage devices.
Panel Item Visibility
I have removed the Preferred Folders and made the Computer page show only Drives and Network Drives in the image below:
Hidden Preferred Folders
Enjoy Miller columns
One of the most interesting additions is support for Miller Columns.
If you've used macOS Finder before, you'll immediately recognize this layout. Instead of opening each folder in a new window or replacing the current view, folders expand into the next column, making navigation much faster.
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Miller Column View
The extension also includes a preview pane. Selecting an image or video displays a thumbnail along with basic information about the file without opening it.
Customize the sidebar
Another feature I like is the ability to customize Nautilus' sidebar.
Normally, entries such as Recents and Starred cannot be removed. My Computer adds simple toggle switches that let you hide or show these built-in entries.
Sidebar Visiblity
To customize the sidebar, open My Computer Settings and switch to the Sidebar tab.
For example, I hid Recents, Starred, and Network to create a much cleaner sidebar.
Gallery showing the sidebar before and after disabling built-in items.
Customize storage bar colors
If you like personalizing your desktop, My Computer also lets you customize the storage usage bars shown beside your drives.
Open My Computer Settings, switch to the Computer tab, scroll down to Bar Color, and change Color Mode to Custom Gradient.
Bar Color Settings
You can then choose two colors to create your own gradient. Here's how mine turned out.
Colored View
Install My Computer
My Computer is under active development. Since it is a Nautilus extension rather than a GNOME Shell extension, you'll need to install it as a system package or use the project's installer script.
On Ubuntu 26.04 and newer versions, install it from the official PPA:
If you're using another distribution, including Arch Linux, the project also provides a universal installation script:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yannmasoch/nautilus-my-computer/main/install.sh | sh
Wrapping Up
My Computer brings back several features that many long-time GNOME users have missed over the years. While it doesn't recreate the old Other Locations page exactly, it offers a practical alternative by gathering everything into a dedicated Computer view.
The addition of Miller Columns is another nice to have feature. It's a navigation style I've wanted to see in Nautilus for quite some time. Elementary OS' file manager has offered a similar feature for years, but I never found a reliable way to use it on GNOME until now.
If you're happy with Nautilus' current sidebar-centric approach, you may not feel the need for this extension. But if you miss having a dedicated Computer page or want more control over the file manager's interface, My Computer is definitely worth trying.
Would you install it, or do you prefer Nautilus the way it is? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
When OpenClaw hype was at its peak in the beginning of 2026, a lot of people bought Mac Mini just to keep an agent running around the clock.
I never understood why people would spend $500 on a device to run OpenClaw like agents that are merely inferences to a commercial LLM like Claude and ChatGPT.
But these 'claws' are here to stay, and people are utilizing them to run their agent on dedicated hardware. And that's why we have dedicated hardware built around these agents.
Autonomous is a company known for standing desks and ergonomic chairs, although they did start as Robotbase, making personal robots.
Seems like they are back to their roots, sort of. They have a few "AI hardware" projects in their offering and that includes a thinking desk and a paper pet companion.
But the device I am going to feature today is a desk companion that runs AI agents and you can use it as an office assistant or an intern (no offense to interns).
The device is called Intern 2 because it's a follow-up to Intern, which was released six months ago. Let's learn more about it.
Intern 2 Specifications
Board: Orange Pi 4 Pro, 8-core Allwinner A733 (2x Cortex-A76 + 6x Cortex-A55, up to 2.0GHz)
Memory: 6GB LPDDR5
Storage: 64GB onboard + up to 256GB expansion
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4
New in Intern 2: voice interaction (dual mic, pickup up to 3m; 5W speaker) and browser control, on top of the existing Telegram/Slack/Discord channels
Warranty: 1-year warranty, 30-day free returns
Intern 2 starts at $249 for the OpenClaw or Hermes editions, and $299 for the Developer edition.
So basically, the device ships with an agent framework already running. You pick OpenClaw or Hermes at checkout, plug the box into Wi-Fi, add it to a Telegram, Slack, or Discord group (WhatsApp gets added later through a separate QR pairing step), and it starts triaging your inbox, watching GitHub issues, and running whatever multi-step task you hand it, all without you touching a terminal.
I am guessing you will have to do some configuration to connect it to your mail and suff but that should not be too difficult if your main LLM is already connected to various services you use.
The board underneath is an Orange Pi 4 Pro: an 8-core Allwinner A733 chip, two beefier Cortex-A76 cores paired with six efficiency Cortex-A55 cores, and a 3 TOPS NPU. It's the kind of board you can buy separately, so Intern 2 isn't offering or hiding anything exotic. It is just packaging familiar SBC hardware into something that doesn't look like a dev board.
What does it look like? It looks like a pyramid with a glowing top. I kind of like the look.
The voice interaction is the main selling point here. Why type when you can just speak to it? Is that not what Tony Stark did as Iron Man?
Intern 2 adds dual far-field mics rated to pick up speech from up to 3 meters away, plus a 5W speaker, so you can just talk to the thing sitting on your desk the way you'd talk to a coworker (or an intern). Browser control is also there, letting the agent act on websites on your behalf instead of only working through chat integrations and APIs.
There are three editions to choose from:
OpenClaw ($249): the default, framework preloaded, no setup beyond Wi-Fi and a chat app.
Hermes ($249): identical hardware, running the Hermes agent out of the box instead.
Developer ($299): ships with the shell open. You SSH in, and Claude Code comes preloaded, with room to swap in Codex or OpenCode if you'd rather run your own agent stack.
Open-source Autonomous OS
Intern 2 runs on Autonomous OS, an open-source operating system created by Autonomous for physical AI agents.
It handles sensing, memory, skills, and updates, while the actual "brain" is swappable between OpenClaw, Hermes, PicoClaw, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or any other agent framework you want to wire in.
Intern is the second reference device built on it, after a desk lamp called Autonomous Lamp. Since Autonomous is working on more AI-powered hardware, it makes sense to have a custom operating system.
Open sourcing is also the wise decision. These devices are more for tech enthusiasts, and some of them may tweak the OS to our liking and needs. So good job, Autonomous.
As mentioned previously, it starts at $249 for the OpenClaw or Hermes editions and $299 for the Developer edition, with free shipping. Every unit ships hand-assembled and tested, backed by a 1-year warranty and 30-day free returns (I like that). Developer documentation is available here.
Should you buy Intern 2 is a question only you can answer. If you have interacted with Nanoclaw, Hermes Agent, etc. and like the idea of interacting with them via voice, this device should interest you.
Sure, this can be built from scratch, especially when the operating system is also open source. But not everyone has the time and skills to do that. People spend money on 'out of the box' experiences after all. I would not mind splurging on it, as I am sucker for such gadgets.
So, would you spend some money and get yourself an "AI Intern"?
The MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio License has been in effect since January 1, 2000, covering essential patents behind the MPEG-4 Part 2 Visual standard from more than 30 licensors, including Canon, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba.
As of July 19, 2026, every one of those patents has expired. The very last one standing belonged to Siemens AG, active only in Brazil. VIA Licensing Alliance, the body that administers the portfolio, has already taken down the webpage for it, which was around until July 18, a day before the expiry.
The patent in question is BR PI0109962-0, titled "process for storing and processing image information from successive images over time."
How we got here
Siemens had filed the same patent across several jurisdictions, and most of those expired years ago.
The European version, EP 1,279,291, expired on April 9, 2021, across Germany, France, and the UK. Two other Siemens US patents in the broader portfolio, US 6,636,637 and US 7,068,721, expired in January 2018 and March 2022, respectively.
The rest of the portfolio wound down on a similar timeline. Koninklijke Philips N.V.'s US 6,959,046, expired on December 7, 2022; Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation's US 7,395,211, expired on November 14, 2023, making it the last US patent in the pool to expire.
That left Brazil's BR PI0109962-0 as the final one.
What does this mean?
With the last patent gone, this specific license no longer has any patents behind it. VIA Licensing Alliance's per-unit royalties on decoders and encoders, along with its separate participation fees for subscription and title-by-title video services, have nothing left to enforce.
That doesn't mean every possible MPEG-4 Visual patent anywhere is gone, just the ones in this specific pool. Other essential patents could exist outside it. But for the 30-plus companies that did join, the licensing obligation is now over.
A quick look at MPEG-4 Visual
MPEG-4 Visual is formally Part 2 of the MPEG-4 suite of standards, the same family that gave us the MP4 container format as Part 14.
The container and the codec are separate things. MP4 files can hold audio and video encoded in several different codecs, including MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264/AVC, HEVC, and AV1.
The standard itself was developed by MPEG, the Moving Picture Experts Group, a working group under ISO/IEC responsible for compression standards spanning video, audio, and 3D graphics.
MPEG doesn't administer the patents behind its own standards, though. That job fell to VIA Licensing Alliance, formerly MPEG LA, which pooled patents from Canon, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba, and more than 30 other licensors into a single license.
Over the years, companies large and small took out licenses to use MPEG-4 Visual in their products. Canonical, Apple, Sony, Raspberry Pi, and The Walt Disney Company all appear on VIA Licensing Alliance's list of licensees in good standing, alongside hundreds of others spanning security cameras, media players, and broadcast equipment.
Electronic Engineering Times has a detailed writeup on the history of MPEG licensing if you are looking for a longer read.
Then I stumbled across MangoWM, and I couldn't leave it alone because it offers a similar scrolling mode as compared to Niri, plus more, while still being simple to build from source code.
MangoWM is a Wayland compositor built on top of wlroots and heavily inspired by dwl (which itself draws from dwm).
On paper, it sounds like yet another minimal tiling compositor. But when I actually sat with it for a few days, something clicked. This is a guide to what I tried, what I discovered, and what made me stop going back to Niri.
📋
Niche window managers like Niri, MangoWM, Hyprland often require configuring elements with dot files. I would consider these more of an expert level domain for Linux users. If these things are new to you and you still want to try, use dot files from the developer or trusted repos and try them in a VM or a spare test machine.
What is MangoWM, anyway?
Before I get into the setup, let me introduce MangoWM.
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A short video of Mango WM on Arch Linux
MangoWM (sometimes referred to as "mango") is a Wayland compositor, meaning it replaces not just your window manager but the entire display server layer above the kernel. It handles input, rendering, compositing, and window management all in one relatively small binary.
It was created by a developer named DreamMaoMao, and it takes the "as lightweight as dwl, built in seconds" philosophy seriously, while tacking on a surprisingly complete feature set: smooth animations, multiple layout modes, per-tag window rules, blur and shadow effects via scenefx, scratchpads, hot-reload config, and excellent XWayland compatibility for the legacy apps you can't avoid.
The tag system (borrowed from dwm) is worth understanding upfront. Instead of numbered workspaces that you switch between sequentially, tags are labels you assign to windows. A window can carry multiple tags at once, and you can view any combination of tags simultaneously. It's a different mental model, and once it clicks, going back to linear workspaces feels oddly constraining.
Installing MangoWM on your system
MangoWM comes as a pre-built package on Arch Linux, Fedora, and NixOS. If you're just trying Mango for the first time, I highly suggest running it on Arch Linux. It eases the overall installation with just a single command.
On Arch Linux (which includes Kali, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS users), the cleanest route is through the AUR. You need an AUR helper like yay or paru:
yay -Syu scenefx0.4
yay -Syu mangowm-git
This pulls the latest git build.
If you get classic Arch Linux error messaging saying, "a manual intervention is required," then it's likely you're missing -yu flag with AUR helper.
If you're using a display manager like SDDM or GDM, MangoWM registers a desktop session entry during install, so it should appear as a session option at the login screen.
When you open Mango WM for the very first time, all you get is a blank screen. When you hit Alt+Enter(Return), foot,(the default terminal emulator) opens, and you can start configuring the window manager from there.
Mango WM screen after opening up two terminal instance
Getting a working config to start from
MangoWM reads the config from ~/.config/mango/config.conf. On a fresh install, the system-wide default lives at /etc/mango/config.conf. The first thing I did was copy it over:
If you want a more complete starting point with Waybar, Rofi, wallpaper setup, and all, the developer maintains an example config repo.
I tried the developer-provided config, but didn't find the shortcut intuitive to use. So I went ahead and wrote my own config file from scratch. Mango WM documentation really helped me to copy configuration snippets that I wanted to achieve, a keybinding similar to Sway and i3 setup.
I found this genuinely useful as a reference, even though I ended up rewriting most of it from scratch within a few sessions. Reading through someone else's complete config taught me what was possible much faster than the docs alone would have.
Here's my complete config in one file. The default configuration uses Alt+arrow keys instead of a Sway-like configuration of utilizing hjkl Vim-like workflow.
Learning the tag system
This is where MangoWM diverges most sharply from compositors like Sway, Hyprland, or Niri, all of which use the workspace model I'd been on for years.
In MangoWM, every window is assigned one or more tags (numbered 1–9 by default). You view tags rather than switch to workspaces. The keybindings to know:
Keybind
Action
Ctrl + 1-9
View a tag
Alt + 1-9
Move the focused window to a tag
The thing that surprised me: you can view multiple tags simultaneously by pressing Ctrl multiple numbers. Two related projects on different tags? Hold Ctrl and press both numbers. They merge into a single view.
I resisted this for about a day. Then I stopped resisting. There's something genuinely freeing about being able to pull in exactly the windows you want without reorganizing anything.
Switching between layouts
One of MangoWM's most practical features is per-tag layout switching. You're not locked into master-stack globally. For each tag, you can cycle through:
Master-Stack: the standard big window on the left, stack on the right
Scroller: windows scroll horizontally, similar to Niri's model (this one made me feel at home)
Monocle: one maximised window at a time, others hidden
Grid: even tiling across available space
Deck: stacked cards, only the top one visible
The default keybind to cycle layouts is Super + N. I ended up assigning specific layouts to specific tags because my work context maps cleanly to them: a Monocle tag for focused writing, a Scroller tag for reference browsing, and a Master-Stack tag for terminal work.
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Switching layout in Mango WM with Super + N
I have bind Alt + s to get a similar scrollable model like Niri. Similarly, to switch to normal tiling, I have bind Alt + t. To cycle windows, I have bound Super + Shift +hjkl and Super + Shift + arrow keys.
This kind of per-context layout was something I kept wishing Niri had. Niri's scrollable workspace model is clever, but it's one model. MangoWM gives you a toolkit.
Setting up your bar, launcher, and wallpaper
MangoWM doesn't bundle these, so you have to bring your own. The recommended options from the official quick-start docs are:
Status bar: Waybar, eww, AGS, Quickshell. I use Waybar all the way.
Launcher: rofi, fuzzel, bemenu, wmenu. I prefer Fuzzel as an application launcher on Wayland.
Wallpaper: You have these options: swww (awww) and swaybg. Btw, I use azote for setting up wallpaper. It offers the ability to set different wallpapers for different monitors and presents a nice gallery of wallpapers to choose from.
Notifications: swaync, mako, dunst. I prefer fnott as my notification daemon on Wayland.
I was already running Waybar with a Tokyo Night theme on Niri, and I carried the whole config over with minimal changes. The IPC support in MangoWM means you can expose workspace (tag) state to Waybar properly. The example config in the developer's repo shows exactly how.
To autostart these tools, MangoWM's config has an exec-once directive (similar to Hyprland):
Within about an hour, I had a working bar and wallpaper. The whole setup felt familiar to anyone who's configured a wlroots-based compositor before.
Tuning the visual effects
This is where I spent more time than I expected. MangoWM ships with window effects powered by scenefx: blur, drop shadows, corner radius, and per-window opacity. These live in the [effects] section of the config:
The hot-reload support means you can adjust values and see changes without restarting anything. Just save the file. I found myself iterating on corner radius and shadow softness for an embarrassing amount of time.
Coming from Niri, which keeps visual effects minimal, this felt almost indulgent. But it also never felt slow. The scenefx rendering layer is efficient enough that I didn't notice a GPU performance difference on my i5 with integrated graphics.
Window rules and per-app behaviour
MangoWM supports window rules that let you control how specific applications open: which tag they land on, what layout they use, whether they float, and their starting dimensions.
The pin option keeps a floating window visible across all tags, useful for PiP video, a music player, or a floating terminal you want everywhere.
I set up rules for Firefox (always tag 2, master-stack), my terminal (tag 1, no floating), and a scratchpad terminal (floating, pinned). This level of control over window placement is something I missed badly whenever I used a compositor without it.
Should you try MangoWM?
If you're already on a tiling Wayland compositor and you're happy with it, the answer depends on what's missing.
MangoWM is worth trying if you want more layout flexibility than a single-model compositor gives you, if you like the dwm tag philosophy but want modern Wayland features alongside it, or if you want smooth animations and window effects without moving to a heavier compositor like Hyprland.
It's probably not the right choice if you want a point-and-click GUI configuration tool, if you're new to tiling window managers in general, or if your distro doesn't package it and you're not comfortable building from source.
For me, the combination of fast compilation, hot-reload config, per-tag layouts, and genuinely good XWayland support hit a set of itches I didn't fully know I had. I came in expecting to write a quick "I tried it" post and came out with a compositor I'm going to stay on.
No doubt, Niri is a good window manager. But I'm sticking with MangoWM for my daily use.
