If you consider the extras built into noctalia: notifications, screen lock (i think), wallpaper daemon .... daemons you have to install/configure piecemeal, noctalia is already in the ballpark of a waybar-based setup.
I'm on wayland. Kitty can be used as a layershell window. So you can build panels, taskbars, etc if you were so inclined. For example, you want fastfetch or htop as a live desktop background? Kitty can do that.
To be fair, "more consistent" if you only use KDE apps. Once you start adding other Linux apps, you end up with a motley crue of GTK 3, GTK 4, QT 5, QT 6, Electron apps with some dark, some light and everywhere in between. Consistency doesn't exist on any OS.
As someone who spends most of his time in nvim and TUIs (yazi, lazydocker, termusic, tmux in ssh ...), Niri is as keyboard centric as you want. Mine is configured to use vim keys.
That's on NixOS, but on other distros there are issues. When I tried nix last year, installing alacritty, for example, required an opengl wrapper. Neovim couldn't compile plugins without environment hackery.
In the shorts, you wake up as some famous person in history: Cleopatra, Caesar ... It's a first person POV of their life and surroundings. They're AI vids.
Tilers can remove Gnome's overly whitespaced decorations, probably saving 10% in screen pixels alone.
If you want to maximize all windows on run, niri can do that with a rule. It then becomes like a monocle layout where you can use swipes/keyboard/scroll wheel to navigate between maximized windows. I don't know of any DE that will run all windows maximized by default.
Too bad I no longer have an 800x600 netbook. Niri would be perfect for it.
Niri doesn't use 400MB by itself, that's the entire memory footprint of everything running. In comparison, OpenBox with all the utilities needed for wallet, ssh agent etc is in the 450MB range on my box. That's probably due X11 vs Wayland.
A minimal Niri functional environment is similar to IceWM in RAM usage. I used to run antiX in VMs.
Niri is RAM efficient. I run Niri in an 8GB VM on Intel Macbook, and on a $99 8GB mini PC. Total RAM usage on boot is less than 400MB with waybar, polkit, ssh-agent, mako ... That's in the ultra lightweight WM category. Compare that to Gnome+paperwm (1.6GB)
There are features Niri sorely needs: 1) 2D overview (zoom in/out), 2) enhanced meta for windows (to create window indicator [1] and window picker)
Nothing beats Delphi for GUIs. Unfortunately, there were more VB4/VB5 jobs and I had to switch :(
Borland was in trouble long before Kylix and .NET. They wanted to be everything: enterprise, Quattro, dBase, Sidekick ... Lack of direction killed Borland.
Tried a lot of them, and after a while I found the nix the package manager on non NixOS requires too many workarounds. Things don't just work. For example, installing alacritty requires an OpenGL wrapper. Neovim can't find libraries to build some plugins. Basically, anything GUI had issues.
In the end, `cargo install`, `go install` and download a release archive from github are simpler to script for most of the tools I use.
What perfect timing, I started going down the GJS (Javascript) route for a custom app. Maybe it's time to build a Go + templ like package w/ GTK4 widgets.