When comparing river vs Arcan, the Slant community recommends Arcan for most people. In the question“What are the best Wayland compositors?” Arcan is ranked 5th while river is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Arcan is:
A pro- for programmers, but it is much easier to write a Window Manager for Arcan that it is for Xorg or any of the other options.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Dynamic tiling
Windows are automatically tiled according to a layout.
Pro Nice API for custom Window Managers
A pro- for programmers, but it is much easier to write a Window Manager for Arcan that it is for Xorg or any of the other options.
Pro Tons of features
So many things that can be done - video recording, streaming, clipboard managers, crash recovery, live window manager swapping, ... the list is endless.
Pro VR support
Pro Very customizable
Cons
Con Difficult configuration
To work it requires configured Lua files, command line options, environment variables.