river
A non-monolithic Wayland compositor that leaves window management to a separate program.
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About river
river is a Wayland compositor written in Zig on top of wlroots. Its design is non-monolithic: rather than building in one window management policy, it exposes a river-window-management protocol so a separate window manager program decides how windows are arranged. Small window managers such as tinyrwm are built this way.
The older design, with a swappable layout generator, lives on as river-classic. river is under active development, with commits in September 2026 and CI builds on Alpine, Arch Linux and FreeBSD.
Strengths
- Window management policy is a separate, replaceable program
- Documented window management protocol
- Actively developed with regular releases
Limitations
- Needs a separate window manager to be useful
- Building from source requires the Zig toolchain
- Older configurations belong to river-classic
Details
- Pricing
- FreeFree and open source.
- License
- Open source, license not stated
- Developer
- Isaac Freund
- Platforms
- Linux
- How it runs
- Downloadable app
- Account
- Not required
- Works offline
- Yes
- Best suited for
- Linux users who want to build or choose their own Wayland window manager
- Categories
- Window tools
- Last verified
- Added
- Provenance
- Facts checked against the developer's own pages and store listings, 1 sources on file.
Alternatives to river
Compare allSoftware that can replace river for an important use case, and what changes if you switch.
Sway
Use an i3-style tiling workflow on Wayland.
Sway is a complete i3-style tiling Wayland compositor with window management built in, so no separate window manager program is needed.
Hyprland
Arrange Linux application windows with a configurable tiling Wayland compositor.
Hyprland builds dynamic tiling and animations into the compositor itself, with extensive keyboard and layout configuration instead of a separate policy program.
niri
A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that places windows in columns on an endless horizontal strip.
niri is a Wayland compositor with its own scrollable column tiling and an IPC interface, rather than delegating window management to another program.
Wayfire
A wlroots-based Wayland compositor with plugin-driven window management and 3D desktop effects.
Wayfire is a wlroots-based compositor that handles window management and 3D effects through plugins, though releases can be far apart.
labwc
A lightweight wlroots-based stacking Wayland compositor inspired by Openbox.
labwc is a lightweight Openbox-inspired stacking Wayland compositor, so you get floating windows instead of choosing a separate tiling manager.
Qtile
Configure a tiling window manager using Python.
Qtile is a Python-configured tiling window manager offering both X11 and Wayland back ends, with programmable layouts and widgets included.
Similar software
Related functionality, not necessarily a direct replacement.
Waybar
Add a customizable status bar to compatible Wayland desktops.
nwg-panel
Add desktop panels to Sway and Hyprland using GTK.
Eww
Create custom desktop widgets using declarative configuration and styling.
rofi
A keyboard-driven window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement for Linux desktops.
