After getting a comment from the creator of kanata (an awesome piece of software by the way) that he found my story amusing, I figured that I’d also post it here, partly as fun, partly as a cautionary tale. Also, I’d appreciate any tips as to what to check for in my system, it’s a weird feeling to know that some stuff might have been messed up under the hood.
River looks nice, I use bspwm for years now and always was in search of another highly configurable wm/compositor for Wayland. I hate the i3/sway way of doing things i.e. beeing very opinionated while pretending not to and doing things almost like a DE.
On first glance this seems to be it! With riverctl replacing bspc. It even allows external programs for the layout and the config is by default just a shell script.
Are there any known issues you encountered or quirks? Would you recommend it to me?
River is actually really nice! I have been a Sway user for multiple years before, but as it reached parity with i3, it was deemed “feature complete” (which is reasonable, as it was made to be a drop-in replacement), so I switched to Hyprland, but after making a small contribution I found the development too chaotic, so I started looking for something else.
I have been really happy with River. It still has some small shortcomings (e.g. minor visual glitches with fullscreening, and some less used options still missing), but the developers are very responsive on IRC (which I’m actually not a huge fan of, this was the first time I had to use it, but it’s OK for what it is) and it being written in Zig is a huge selling point for me, as I don’t have to write any C or C++ to extend it (my first PR is already on the way) when something I’d like to do is not yet possible.
If you’re willing to spend a while getting to know it and setting up the environment (it relies on external programs for some functionality that is built-in in other compositors, such as monitor management), then I’d definitely say that it’s worth a shot!
This sounds exactly what I’m searching for then. Besides that I don’t know Zig and would prefer C/C++ I only hear good or familiar things. Bspwm is also not the most bug free wm when it comes to visual glitches.
Also not beeing so monolithic and relying on external programs is actually a major plus point for me. Actually I really dislike how Wayland (or rather most compositor implementations) fused everything into one project.
I think I’ll give it a try at some point.