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River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

github.com

1–10 of 42 posts

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#2
How am I supposed to judge a window manager (excuse me, compositor is the term used in the brave new world of wayland) without a video / screenshot of it running? I get the "tiling" part, but how is this different than sway with a python script telling it to do something on the background?

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#3
post #2

How am I supposed to judge a window manager (excuse me, compositor is the term used in the brave new world of wayland) without a video / screenshot of it running? I get the "tiling" part, but how is this different than sway with a python script telling it to do something on the background?

It's a DWM port to Wayland, essentially. I assume that's why this was posted.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#5
post #4

So what's Wayland? I can't be the only one who is frustrated when they click on a HN link hoping to learn more about something, and instead I'm presented with a list of folders and files.

Basically X11 2.0 in effect. Though I'm sure someone can point out substantial ways they are different, e.g. the new compositor model.

Things are supposed to be a bit more secure and extensible, and it's mature enough now that I've been using it for my daily life with little to no problems for a couple years.

Read this for a better description: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#6
post #4

So what's Wayland? I can't be the only one who is frustrated when they click on a HN link hoping to learn more about something, and instead I'm presented with a list of folders and files.

It's an alternative to the X window system:

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/

Appreciate where you're coming from re the detail. It can be hard to know where to draw the line when explaining projects and it depends on the target audience etc.

In this case, I would say it's ok that they don't explain what Wayland is on the project page. Wayland has pretty widespread adoption now and I reckon the vast majority of people that might be interested in projects like tiling window managers for linux will have heard of it (and that has probably been true for quite some time now, Wayland has been around for over a decade).

If you're keen to dig into it more, another popular project in the space is sway https://swaywm.org/.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#7
post #4

So what's Wayland? I can't be the only one who is frustrated when they click on a HN link hoping to learn more about something, and instead I'm presented with a list of folders and files.

Wayland is a protocol - not an implementation. It tries to minify latency by merging together some of the components X11 had and tries to do this in a slim and faster way eliminating "design flaws".

The implementation of the protocol may differ, but I know for example MUTTER, that is used in GNOME (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter)

This article has nice and not too complex visualisations and explanations: https://www.secjuice.com/wayland-vs-xorg/

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#8
I really wish there was a window manager that

(a) looks good and modern (b) can tile well but also allows for free floating windows (c) has simple commands, not multi stroke Emacs-style commands (d) can allow tiling with the mouse with snapping

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#9
post #8

I really wish there was a window manager that (a) looks good and modern (b) can tile well but also allows for free floating windows (c) has simple commands, not multi stroke Emacs-style commands (d) can allow tiling with the mouse with snapping

Have you considered kWin? Sounds like it meets all your requirements.

If you're worried about 'bloat', it's surprisingly lightweight and you don't need to pull in a full KDE desktop environment.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#10
post #4

So what's Wayland? I can't be the only one who is frustrated when they click on a HN link hoping to learn more about something, and instead I'm presented with a list of folders and files.

Scroll down past the files to the readme. It's not unusual for github links to be posted on HN.
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