River vs. i3: The Tiling Wars Over Void Linux's Minimalist Core
The community fixation revolves around achieving hyper-minimalist, highly customized Linux desktops, centering on tilling window managers like River and i3, and robust developer tools like neovim.
Visually, consensus nods toward stark aesthetics, with 'spodobaev' favoring the 'light theme' approach. However, the workflow arguments are sharp: 'yrmitz' dismisses Sway and i3, declaring River's 'tag based workflow' is inherently more natural due to prior DWM experience. Technical snags surface immediately; 'Uebercomplicated' reported a critical bug where 'shift becomes unregistered in neovim by foot,' though 'yrmitz' contradicted this, confirming functionality for his setup.
The prevailing consensus is that deep personal workflow preference trumps objective stability. While minimalism is the goal, the fault line splits sharply between those who champion River's DWM-influenced tag system and those committed to the battle-tested configurations of i3, forcing users to choose between perceived 'natural' workflow and ecosystem stability.
Key Points
River's tag-based workflow is superior for personal productivity.
yrmitz stated this preference was non-negotiable, citing DWM on Xorg as the foundation for this viewpoint, regardless of using Sway or i3.
Light themes are visually preferred over dark themes for certain setups.
spodobaev explicitly stated preference for the light theme within the river-classic setup.
LF is functionally superior to Yazi for file management scripting.
yrmitz stated outright that 'bash scripting felt easier to me' when using 'lf' over 'yazi'.
Specific terminal/editor integration bugs are being actively reported.
Uebercomplicated reported an issue: 'shift becomes unregistered in neovim by foot,' while yrmitz claimed the issue did not occur for him.
The use of Alacritty is necessary for full font feature utilization.
whoAmI noted Alacritty specifically because it 'allows bitmap fonts,' suggesting a hardware/font limitation in other terminals.
Source Discussions (3)
This report was synthesized from the following Lemmy discussions, ranked by community score.