river is cool but it’s heavily modular. i love it.

first off, you should choose a window manager. there’s a list on their page. for example, rill is a scrolling wm like niri. there are also stacking and tiling wms on that list.

then you should also install some tools. their wiki also includes a brief list.

• a bar (e.g. waybar)
• an output manager (e.g. kanshi)
• an input manager (e.g. channel)
• a screen lock tool (e.g. waylock, swaylock)
• a launcher (e.g. wofi, fuzzel, tofi)
• a notification daemon (e.g. fnott, mako)
• a wallpaper tool (e.g. awww, swaybg)

this would give you a fully working wm.

river + rill. i had been using niri and i love the concept of a scrolling wm, i just love that i can customize everything as i like with river.

unfortunately dwg files are a blind spot on linux. there are projects like qcad and librecad that have experimental dwg support (behind a paywall for qcad) but they require you to learn a whole new set of tools because workflow is entirely different for these.

i don’t have experience with the web version, it might be enough for files with fewer elements but your best would be to use a vm for immediate future.

alternatively, you can draft your work in 3d and export your drawings from these files. for architectural work there is a great addon for blender called bonsaibim, for mechanical work there is freecad (it also has a workbench called bim workbench for architecture) and for circuit design there is kicad.