Hey, I want to start being more active on Mastodon, so here's my #introduction :

I'm a student passionate about technology, Linux, and programming. I'm mostly self-taught, but I plan to study computer science once I go to university.

I'm a huge #linux nerd, I use #archlinux (btw) and I run #riverwm (an amazing #wayland compositor). My editor is the incredible #neovim. And all of that runs on my beloved @frameworkcomputer laptop

Aside from all the computer stuff I also really like reading. I mostly read fiction (with a slight preference for fantasy) but I do enjoy the occasional non-fic book

#riverwm #tilingwm #tilingwaylandcompositor #linux

I have been using river as my window manager for a while now so thought I would share my thoughts.

I am really enjoying it, it feels much closer to xmonad than hyprland did which I like and it runs mostly smoothly. I love the way that it handles multi-headed setups for the most part and the way it is configured is refreshing for a window manager.

On my desktop, I have 2 monitors and river lets each monitor have its own set of tags which is nice.

I have yet to make good use of the tag feature and for the most part have been treating the tags like workspaces. This doesn't cause too many issues but tags come with some extra restrictions that make it less ideal if you are only using them the way you would workspaces. Maybe these can be ironed out but I don't know a solution.

I have been using the tag system more on my laptop than on my desktop probably because it only has 1 screen. On my desktop, if I want to have 1 program open and rotate between 1 or 2 programs open next to it, I can have the main program open in my main monitor and my second monitor can be used to rotate between the other programs that I want to have open next to it.

On the laptop this isn't possible but I have found the tag system to be useful for this. I can have tag 1 focused, say on emacs, and when I want I can focus a second or third tag with lecture slides, a browser or something else. I can also put a floating window with a video on one of my tags and then focus that tag with whatever other tag I am currently using so that I can keep the floating window with me as I move around my system.

As for using the tags like workspaces, it works for the most part but I have noticed some quirks. I am unable to jump to a window using rofi. This is likely hard to implement as a window could be on multiple tags and there is no good way to decide which tag to focus. Maybe a way it could be implemented is to instead have the currently focused tag/s added to the window.

When using multiple monitors, you can't drag a floating window onto another monitor and so you have to use the keyboard shortcut which isn't too much of an issue. When you move a window to another monitor, instead of moving it to the currently focused tags on that monitor, it moves it to the tags matching the ones it occupied on the previous monitor. This isn't an issue per se, just something that was counterintuitive to how I thought it should work.

There have been 1 or 2 minor issues with hidpi support for some apps but I don't think they are necessarily rivers fault. One example is with element messenger. When I enabled 2x scaling, instead of scaling the app, it instead shrunk the size of the window. River seemed to think it was normal size though as other windows moved around it as if it was taking up the normal space and I had to click where UI elements would have been if it was taking up the normal space.

Overall I have been enjoying it a lot, and will continue using it for at least a few more months

Added double-bezel borders and this is starting to look good.

A shame that UI has moved away from this kind of style; So I'll just have to bring it back, I guess

A live REPL attached to a running window manager. Eventuallly you'll be able to change window management behaviour without even having to restart the window manager.

#RiverWM #Waybar #Wayland #Linux

Does anyone know if it is possible to use a different symbol for focused river tags on waybar. hyprland/workspaces for example has a format-icons property so I can use an empty circle or a filled circle depending on if it is active or not.
I am assuming not as there is no equivalent property for river/tags but maybe there is something else to achieve this effect.
I guess I could use whitespace as the symbol and use css styling to achieve the effect but maybe there is a neater way?

Over the past few months, I’ve seen posts about the new #NVIDIA open driver performing well on #Wayland. Since I'm that poor guy with an NVIDIA chip on board (RTX 2070 Super), I had to test it out. So where are we now?

#SwayWM 1.9 still flickers under both #GLES and #Vulkan renderers, likely due to its use of the 10-month-old #wlroots 0.17.

On #RiverWM 0.3.5 (wlroots 0.18), however, things are much smoother! Vulkan flickers occasionally, but GLES works damn good!