Especially with LLMs, the cost here is down significantly. People also drastically over-idealize what making an X window manager entailed: sure X had it's compositor, but you had to build so so much yourself.

I'm glad River is trying to create a bigger base here; this is way cool. And it sort of proves the value of Wayland: someone can just go do that. Someone can just make a generic compositor/display-server now, with their own new architecture and plugin system, and it'll just work with existing apps.

We were so locked in to such a narrow limited system, with it's own parallel abstraction layer to what the kernel now offers (that didn't exist when X was created). It's amazing that we have a chance for innovation and improvement now. The kernel as a stable base of the pyramid, wlroots/sway as a next layer up, and now River as a higher layer still for folks to experiment and create with. This could not be going better, and there's so much more freedom and possibility; this is such a great engine for iteration and improvement.