River Alternatives

river reviews and mentions

• Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jun 2026

  I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base.

  If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling.

  ¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river

• MAUI Is Coming to Linux
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Mar 2026

  I think Wayland is basically waiting for a higher level abstraction to catch on, at least for the desktop. I'm currently playing with the River Wayland compositor (https://codeberg.org/river/river) which separates the window manager from the compositor and I think it could fill this gap left in the transition. Not as sure about non-toolkit (gtk,qt) application development...

• Plwm – An X11 window manager written in Prolog
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 May 2025

  https://github.com/riverwm/river#future-plans

• Switching to River from Sway and a few questions
  1 project | /r/riverwm | 6 Jun 2023

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

• Is there any way to remove the Title bar from zathura on RiverWM
  1 project | /r/riverwm | 29 May 2023

  Here is the related github issue

• Easy to config tiling wm
  1 project | /r/archlinux | 8 Apr 2023

  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.

• Questions about availability of specific functionalities in swaywm (and wayland at all)
  3 projects | /r/swaywm | 3 Apr 2023

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

• Chromium / Electron on Wayland causes crash of the whole OS
  3 projects | /r/archlinux | 17 Mar 2023

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

• I may have taken plugins too far...
  4 projects | /r/hyprland | 11 Mar 2023

  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.

• Master and Stack setup
  5 projects | /r/swaywm | 27 Feb 2023

  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.

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