sway VS river

This is partially why i use tools like i3 (/ sway). i like the tool; it works extremely well for me; the design has stayed the same for 20 years; there's no profit motive to come along and fuck everything up. it just works. it is boring in the best way possible.

I also have crashes on sway, but there’s a rough workaround now which prevents the issue totally.

I believe there’s a design issue with Firefox and GTK handling input events; some Wayland compositors have workarounds but others do not.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7645

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144

Firefox is my preferred browser and I hope we can keep its engine alive in this era of Chrome dominance.

I'm seeing this: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Setting-Environmental-Variables but I haven't figured out how to make GDM do it, and I was wondering if there was a super simple "HEY SWAY READ MY .PROFILE" thing I could do.

So I searched around and found the following bug report where this problem and a possible solution was borough up: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/2966 , which was then immediately closed again.

I've been using Sway since late 2019. I like the workflow of a WM. I honestly find it hard to go back to a DE, I like having a minimalistic desktop.

Sway is fast, minimal, and flexible. Their recommended tools/addons are worth a look: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway

From that list I use greetd + tuigreet as my login manager, sway-launcher-desktop for FZF-powered app launching, and wob for lightweight brightness and volume display (send '50' to the wob socket and it'll show 50%; it doesn't get simpler).

More info on the wiki https://github.com/riverwm/river/wiki

Here is the related github issue

If you can get past some minor wayland related annoyances, river is pretty easy imo, you can write a config in whatever format you want, it just needs to be an executable file, the most common type is a shell script. The actual configuration happens by calling the riverctl program from the file, which from what I've heard is a similar method compared to bspwm.

Coming from awesome you may find river more to your liking than sway.

River crashed everytime I closed Chromium. The developer fixed it in 5 minutes :)

I've written a plugin that implements the river-layout-v3 wayland protocol in Hyprland. This means you can run something like rivertile, river-luatile, rivercarro or kile as a layout provider.

Author here. And yeah, as of 0.6.0 it supports master stack - I just called it stack main. I was in fact inspired by river: https://github.com/riverwm/river. River is really promising but is still in very early development. Sway on the other hand has been around for a long time and I, for now, prefer that stability.

In my very specific case, I'd probably start by taking a look at how animations were previously implemented in river, and then I'd pay careful attention to that transform matrix at the end. I'm not super crazy about the implementation using timers to drive it (versus interpolating where the transform should be across a deadline), but I guess they were going for smoothness.

riverwm wayland compositor