river is cool but it’s heavily modular. i love it.

first off, you should choose a window manager. there’s a list on their page. for example, rill is a scrolling wm like niri. there are also stacking and tiling wms on that list.

then you should also install some tools. their wiki also includes a brief list.

• a bar (e.g. waybar)
• an output manager (e.g. kanshi)
• an input manager (e.g. channel)
• a screen lock tool (e.g. waylock, swaylock)
• a launcher (e.g. wofi, fuzzel, tofi)
• a notification daemon (e.g. fnott, mako)
• a wallpaper tool (e.g. awww, swaybg)

this would give you a fully working wm.