Top all-time · #8979
Isaac Freund
Personal blog · isaacfreund.com/blogprogrammingsystems
Isaac Freund's personal blog at isaacfreund.com covers programming and systems. Since 2021, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Posts on Wayland compositors and window management, mainly the River project, its split between compositor and window manager, and its window-management protocol. One commenter calls the compositor/window manager post and talk awesome.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-03-15
- River, a Dynamic Tiling Wayland Compositor2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-05
What Hacker News says?
Whatever direction this line of inquiry goes, the compositor / window manager split that Isaac Freund and company built into River [0] is the future and would be the perfect platform on which people could build the environments that explore it. Freund's blog post "Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager" [1] and the talk of the same name (linked in the post) are awesome. The list of compatible WM's [2]…
Comment linking /blog/river-window-management/
on “Make Tmux the OS”Submitted River 0.3.0, Waylock 1.0.0, Status Update as a story · 6 points
HN discussionCurrently there isn't really a "window manager" layer. Just like the automation / global hotkeys mentioned above, if you wanted a separate "window manager" your compositor would need to implement a protocol to expose window management. It looks like river is taking a stab at it with their river-window-management-v1 protocol: https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/ . If they're successful we might see t…
Comment linking /blog/river-window-management/
on “I Hate: Programming Wayland Applications”Submitted River, a Dynamic Tiling Wayland Compositor as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI really miss the ability to swap out KWin for a tiling window manager. I'm currently using Krohnkite and it's OK, much better than nothing, but after having used a real tiling window manager the difference is just too jarring. I physically need a desktop which is usable as much as possible both with the mouse and with the keyboard so I have to switch as rarely between the two as possible. Plasma on X11 with a tilin…
Comment linking /blog/river-window-management/
on “Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release”Submitted River, a Dynamic Tiling Wayland Compositor as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMy current after work activity is building a basic window manager (on top of river[1]) and asking myself what I am doing with my life. I'm not sure if I needed to read this or if this is the last thing I needed to read. It's not even so much fun as a kind of burning curiosity. "Shaving this yak would be stupid and unnecessary, I'm not going to waste my precious time doing it. ...but if I were to shave this yak, I wo…
Comment linking /software/river/
on “But yak shaving is fun”Submitted Waylock 0.4.0 and Rewrite, Zig-Wayland Improvements, River Progress as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager as a story · 1 points
HN discussion