River, a lightweight dynamic tiling Wayland compositor for advanced Linux users, has released version 0.4, marking one of its most significant architectural changes. The new design separates the compositor from the window manager, moving River away from the traditional monolithic model used by most Wayland compositors.
River 0.4 introduces the stable river-window-management-v1 protocol, which allows the compositor and window manager to run as separate processes. Users can now choose external window managers that implement this protocol instead of relying on a built-in option.
In earlier versions, River combined both roles in a single program. With this release, the compositor now focuses solely on Wayland-related tasks such as rendering, input handling, and other core display server functions. Window management, including layout, focus behavior, and tiling rules, is now managed by a separate window manager process.
Users who prefer the previous integrated design are encouraged to use river-classic, a maintained fork of the 0.3 series that retains the original architecture.
For more information, including source code and downloads, visit the project’s repository or see the announcement.
So, if I get this right, instead of Compositor/WM + shell like Niri + DMS or Hyprland + Noctalia do, we could now have a three-way split?
The compositor would let you pick the window manager in addition to the shell?
Damn, given the momentum of Niri or Hyprland (or others like labwc), this would be the nail in the coffin of limited and buggy compositors/WMs like Mutter.
Traditional desktop environments should really surf the wave and focus on where they bring value, like Budgie was smart in going towards a shell only and delegate compositing window management to what already exists, such as labwc, Mir and even (in the works) Hyprland.
This all makes sense. The monolithic approach will be outdated before we even know it.