Oh thank you for that link. I knew I’ve heard him take about his plans in some talk he gave, but didn’t know he write them down.
I am on the same page as you. River works for me well enough, but the vision is what keeps me excited.
What exactly was the problem with not being able to configure CSD/SSD? I’ve not run into any issues but that has probably more to do with the applications I run.
I’m sorry to hear that you’re having a hard time getting the software running. I understand that this can be very frustrating.
As others have said, making yourself the owner of everything can cause numerous issues in the long run and there’s a reason why most distributions DON’T make you root.
Why are you using Linux in the first place? I think sonarr and jackett both run on Windows as well.
Don’t let the frustration get the best of you. If you really want to run those tools yourself, then dive into it (and all the technical issues that are part of it), but if you only want to have access to the functionality, you might want to look into a service that takes care of all the technical burden.
I think the biggest difference is dynamic (river) vs manual tiling (sway). Other than that, I feel sway is much more mature and there’s a proper community surrounding it that had written scripts and tools that work with sway. Many of which you are probably gonna use with river as well (swaylock, swaybg, swayidle).
One thing that’s pretty cool about river (at least in theory) is that the tiling algorithm is not part of the compositor itself. Instead, you can run any river tiling program and have that part be completely custom if you wish. Also configuration is done via commands instead of a config language (you usually run a bash script at start).
From what I remember, the vision of Isaac Freund (main developer) is, that river will become more of a tiling compositor base, that others can then use to create their own distributions. I heard that in some talk he gave. You should be able to find that on YouTube.
However, there’s still a long way to go.
In it’s current state, river reminds me of spectrwm. Very simple, with some cool, but ultimately non-essential, ideas that you probably won’t find anywhere else.
Ah, I think that isn’t possible. You would have to split the track and then use the smart clips feature. Or you use a different tool like someone else mentioned.
I see you already have a solution but someone else might find this interesting: keyd is a pretty powerful keyboard remapping utility that works everywhere (X11, Wayland and VTs). Think QMK but done on the OS.
While you make many valid points, I think it’s not reasonable to assume that OP could have avoided all the struggles they had, if they just had informed himself prior to installing. Especially since many of them problems described were probably caused by an unfortunate combination of software/driver issues, a specific hardware setup and certain user expectations.
I doubt that watching tech YouTubers or similar would have helped much.
Another river user here. I like river, but I wouldn’t recommend it (for someone who’s never used a tiler). It feels a bit bare bones and there’s not that much development going on (still active, but not frequent updates).
Both Sway and Hyprland are probably good picks. You can always switch to a different one, if your first choice doesn’t satisfy you.