Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager
Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager2026-03-15 by Isaac FreundTraditional Wayland compositors have a monolithic architecture that combines the compositor and window manager into a single program. This has the downside of requiring Wayland window managers to do the significant work of implementing an entire Wayland compositor as well.The new 0.4.0 release of river, a non-monolithic Wayland compositor, breaks from this traditional architecture and splits the window manager into a separate program. There are already many window managers compatible with river.The stable river-window-management-v1 protocol gives window managers full control over window position, keybindings, and all other window management policy while river itself provides frame-perfect rendering, good…
