River based WM's

aim · 2026-03-16 21:13:31

With the release of River 0.4.0, a wayland compositor proticol, the community is starting to get some really light weight River based "window managers" such as Beansprout. I thought that these might be of interest to the community here and perhaps even some candidates for being included in bunsen's package repository.

Huge shout out to River's developer Isaac Fruend. I'm in no way affiliated with either River or Beansprout, just super excited that we might finally be getting that missing piece that enables more Wayland based WMs. And I thought that this might be relevant to others here too.

Sector11 · 2026-03-17 00:40:43

Both of those are in codeberg.

Codeberg beset by AI bots that now bypass Anubis tarpit
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/15/ … y_ai_bots/

Döbbie03 · 2026-03-31 04:50:09

aim wrote:

With the release of River 0.4.0, a wayland compositor proticol, the community is starting to get some really light weight River based "window managers" such as Beansprout. I thought that these might be of interest to the community here and perhaps even some candidates for being included in bunsen's package repository.
Huge shout out to River's developer Isaac Fruend. I'm in no way affiliated with either River or Beansprout, just super excited that we might finally be getting that missing piece that enables more Wayland based WMs. And I thought that this might be relevant to others here too.

Thank you for the share, fellow Kiwi. That Beansprout really piques my interest.

johnraff · 2026-03-31 04:54:32

[Post about AI moved to "AI discussion on Debian Project mailing list" https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 9#p149819]

hhh · Yesterday 00:52:56

Döbbie03 wrote:

That Beansprout really piques my interest.

I'd never even heard of the zig language (10 years old, according to Wikipedia), let alone a wm written in it.

https://ziglang.org/

@Sector11, re: AI
https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

Sector11 · Today 01:28:16

check

unklar · Today 09:04:29

Döbbie03 wrote:

aim wrote:
With the release of River 0.4.0, a wayland compositor proticol, the community is starting to get some really light weight River based "window managers" such as Beansprout. I thought that these might be of interest to the community here and perhaps even some candidates for being included in bunsen's package repository.
Huge shout out to River's developer Isaac Fruend. I'm in no way affiliated with either River or Beansprout, just super excited that we might finally be getting that missing piece that enables more Wayland based WMs. And I thought that this might be relevant to others here too.
Thank you for the share, fellow Kiwi. That Beansprout really piques my interest.

^^Exactly!
Like Dobbie03, I actually found it worth a try.

I've never used River and I'm now stuck logging into the desktop.
The current netinstall of Debian serves as the basis because I love the debian-installer so much. After installing on *Metal*, the sources were changed to 'sid' and the system was updated accordingly.

Apart from the fact that 'meson' and 'ninja' are not included in the netinstall, meson did not build the required 'wlroots-0.20'. In sid itself the version is at 0.19.

The Meson build system
Version: 1.10.2
Source dir: /home/unklar/wlroots-master
Build dir: /home/unklar/wlroots-master/build
Build type: native build
Project name: wlroots
Project version: 0.21.0-dev
C compiler for the host machine: cc (gcc 15.2.0 "cc (Debian 15.2.0-16) 15.2.0")
C linker for the host machine: cc ld.bfd 2.46
Host machine cpu family: x86_64
Host machine cpu: x86_64
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wundef: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wlogical-op: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wmissing-include-dirs: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wold-style-definition: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wpointer-arith: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Winit-self: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wstrict-prototypes: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wimplicit-fallthrough=2: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wendif-labels: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wstrict-aliasing=2: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Woverflow: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wmissing-prototypes: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Walloca: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wno-missing-braces: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wno-missing-field-initializers: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wno-unused-parameter: YES 
Compiler for C supports arguments -fmacro-prefix-map=/prefix/to/hide=: YES 
Found pkg-config: YES (/usr/bin/pkg-config) 2.5.1
Run-time dependency wayland-server found: YES 1.24.0
Found CMake: /usr/bin/cmake (4.3.1)
Run-time dependency libdrm found: NO (tried pkgconfig and cmake)
Looking for a fallback subproject for the dependency libdrm
ERROR: Subproject libdrm is buildable: NO

meson.build:100:6: ERROR: Automatic wrap-based subproject downloading is disabled

A full log can be found at /home/unklar/wlroots-master/build/meson-logs/meson-log.txt

In truth, I searched for the solution for 2 days until I looked into the sources of experimental. There is 'libwlroots-0.20'. To build with meson, 'libwlroots-0.20-dev' was also required.

Now meson and ninja did their work successfully.
Although successful, these three were marked 'NO':

wlroots 0.21.0-dev
drm-backend
vulkan-renderer
libliftoff

I got the init file for river from here (seems too long to me, if 'beansprout' desktop is actually the intention).

It keeps falling back to tty1 and the corresponding log says:

-bash: exec: river: Cannot execute: Is a directory

This is

~/.config/river/init

??

Last edited by unklar (Today 09:29:02)

#1 2026-03-16 21:13:31

River based WM's

#2 2026-03-17 00:40:43

Re: River based WM's

#3 2026-03-31 04:50:09

Re: River based WM's

#4 2026-03-31 04:54:32

Re: River based WM's

#5 Yesterday 00:52:56

Re: River based WM's

#6 Today 01:28:16

Re: River based WM's

#7 Today 09:04:29

Re: River based WM's

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