On Wayland, it’s really a compositor rather than an X11-style window manager.
On Wayland it’s both the window manager and compositor (compositing window manager).
In X11, you have to bring your own compositor or not use one. River is trying to separate it like in x11 but it’s a compositor only. You have to bring a separate wm. And from what I understand, in Wayland it won’t work without a compositor (but I could be wrong on that one).
Was an i3 user, testing sway here and there but couldn’t make the full switch. For some reason I couldn’t find some replacement e.g. feh (minimalist image viewing and bg setting, something that works with RAW images), ranger’s backend for image preview, devour (terminal swallowing).
Until last year when a teams chat leaked during an online course I am a TA. It wasn’t too bad of a leak but still decided to find a replacement as I knew niri had something implemented. Switched to niri after that, the
block-out-fromis very useful. Found swayimg as a replacement for feh, managed to get ranger preview working with sixel (foot), found a work around for window swallowing (basically use niri msg action toconsume-window-into-columnthen set the height to 0% and back). A lot of functionality of my ‘DE’ is based on rofi-scripts, which just works so didn’t have to tweak much for functionality. Absolutely love the window switcher that was introduced last year. I did have a window switcher with rofi, which I still use but the fancy one is cool too.