River: a return to modularity in Wayland

The River project, presented by Isaac Freund at FOSDEM 2026, stands out in the Wayland compositor landscape for its modular approach. Instead of imposing a monolithic solution, River allows users to customize and adapt window management to their needs.

This philosophy is based on the belief that breaking down complex problems into smaller, more manageable elements leads to more flexible and robust solutions. River represents an interesting alternative for those seeking more granular control over their Wayland desktop environment.

For those evaluating on-premise deployments, there are trade-offs between flexibility and complexity in managing custom desktop environments. AI-RADAR offers analytical frameworks on /llm-onpremise to evaluate these aspects.