After five months since the last patch and almost two years since the 0.2.0 release, version 0.3.0 of the minimalist Wayland tiler river has dropped last week.
The new version improves rendering performance and damage tracking, adds several quality of life features, such as resizing windows from all sides, extend the rules system, and supports several new Wayland protocols like text-input-v3, input-method-v2, fractional-scale-v1 and more.
Full change log can be found here.
river is awesome
How does it compare to sway?
I think the biggest difference is dynamic (river) vs manual tiling (sway). Other than that, I feel sway is much more mature and there’s a proper community surrounding it that had written scripts and tools that work with sway. Many of which you are probably gonna use with river as well (swaylock, swaybg, swayidle).
One thing that’s pretty cool about river (at least in theory) is that the tiling algorithm is not part of the compositor itself. Instead, you can run any river tiling program and have that part be completely custom if you wish. Also configuration is done via commands instead of a config language (you usually run a bash script at start).
From what I remember, the vision of Isaac Freund (main developer) is, that river will become more of a tiling compositor base, that others can then use to create their own distributions. I heard that in some talk he gave. You should be able to find that on YouTube.
However, there’s still a long way to go.
In it’s current state, river reminds me of spectrwm. Very simple, with some cool, but ultimately non-essential, ideas that you probably won’t find anywhere else.
Oh wow that’s really interesting! Thank you! I’ll have to try it out then!
You’re welcome. I’ve been using it as my daily driver for over a year now and it works for that, but don’t expect any bells and whistles.
Alright, good to know, I mean I feel like my set up is pretty minimal already lol
they said it’s awesome! sway is i3.
Lol
Awesome project, after like 7 years of trying out different compositors, River is the one which made me stick with Wayland.
yayja, real nice and elegant tiling window manager for people which are fed up with tedious configuration and manual tiling of e.g. i3wm. Really want to test it for gaming at some point.
It’s great for gaming, had a better experience than Xorg on it.
Yup, river was quite good, but lacked a good way of configuring csd/ssd until that release. Now, it’s something I would actively recommend.
Personally, I’m a lot more excited for the future of River as Isaac Freund (the lead dev) sees it.
Link (under “Future Plans”): https://isaacfreund.com/software/river/
Oh thank you for that link. I knew I’ve heard him take about his plans in some talk he gave, but didn’t know he write them down.
I am on the same page as you. River works for me well enough, but the vision is what keeps me excited.
What exactly was the problem with not being able to configure CSD/SSD? I’ve not run into any issues but that has probably more to do with the applications I run.
I was having issues with Thunar, but that seems to be fixed now.
