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, for example Python, Lisp, Rust, zig, C, Janet - you get it.

Here is the wiki page listing 26 different window managers for river:

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

Some of these are only 600 lines of code in a Lisp-like language (Janet).

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

  • memphis@sopuli.xyz
    4·
    1 day ago

    I only tried one (rill) and it also required a separate config file before I could start spawning windows. Anyways I think this river project is mainly interesting for two reasons:

    • Allowing single developers to actually make their own wayland window manager. Possible without it, but not necessarily feasible.
    • Making it possible to run a functional wayland desktop under memory constraints. River seems to use something like 100-150MB on my system.

    The second point appeals to me, because my daily driver laptop is nearly 15 years old, so every MB of memory I can save is of tangible value. I’ve gone back to X11 on it because of video driver issues on wayland, but I keep an eye out for projects like these.

    • eta@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Yeah I also like the customizability of the desktop and how lean the window manager can be. I just wish there was some more documentation and setup guides but I guess it’s just a little to early for that.