Current Wayland compositor implementations handle window management and compositing in the same monolithic process. Wayland does not however force this architecture.

I am the author of the river Wayland compositor. It supports a custom Wayland protocol, river-window-management-v1, which allows a special "window manager" Wayland client to handle all window management policy, draw server side decorations, setup keybindings, and more.

My goal with this work is to make hacking on Wayland window managers significantly more accessible and promote ecosystem diversity. There is already a growing list of window managers developed for the new protocol.

This talk will give an overview of this new protocol and the advantages/disadvantages of separating the Wayland compositor and window manager. There will also be a brief demo.