this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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river, a non-monolithic wayland compositor (codeberg.org)
submitted 1 week ago by cm0002@literature.cafe to c/linux@programming.dev
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An important difference between Wayland and X11 is that Wayland by concept combines window manager and compositor. That made it harder to write simple or experimental window managers for Wayland, such as StumpWM or i3.

River is a compositor for Wayland that supports implementing a window manager separately, with an independent window placement paradigm, in an arbitrary language.

Here is the wiki page listing window managers for river:

https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/main/pages/wm-list.md

The ones I find most interesting are mousetrap and mopotamo - I am a big fan of StumpWMs manual tiling and configurability.

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[–] _hovi_@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Cool idea, love the variety something like this brings. Anyone here daily drive one of these?

[–] vividspecter@aussie.zone 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nope, but I hope this pans out. I've been using Sway for a few years, and while I don't mind it, I've always preferred XMonad's window management and configurability. exwm outside of X11 would also be nice.

[–] _hovi_@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I liked xmonad quite a lot too, though I never did get into Haskell enough to actually customise it all that much. I think it was called monocle layout, but man I've felt that lack of it since moving to Wayland

[–] ZoDoneRightNow@kbin.earth 2 points 1 week ago

I daily drive river-classic (pre separation of wm and compositor). Will switch to one of these at some point