How does this differ from mir, which is also a Wayland compositor with separate window managers?
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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I like the concept and tried it on Arch once but couldn't really get most window managers to work. The screen was just black and there was no mouse movement. I searched for some tutorials on how to get started but couldn't find any. Do you have tips on how to get a working basic setup from which you can actually try out all the different WMs?
I just tried it for a bit, and you basically have to create an executable bash script at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/river/init that launches your selected window manager ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME is usually ~/.config). It will not work unless marked executable, and you do that by running chmod +x on it.
I got Canoe and jrwm to show me some windows. But on other WMs I think they just don't register my keypresses like they should so there a re no windows showing up. Maybe I'm missing some other package or step that is so "well known" that it's not included in any of the setup guides. In general I think the setup process to a basic functioning system is just more involved than I've had on other DEs. And I'm probably not deep enough into Linux and am expecting more from the window manager than it actually offers.
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.
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.
I tried similar things on Debian and the usual problem seems to be that session management under Wayland is a mess.