River-classic has long been a favorite of mine. It's easy to setup and maintain. I use that, or Sway on Void linux. Here's a list of apps that might help you get started.
For my own River setup, I used waybar, fuzzel, mako, nwg-look, hyprpicker, brightnessctl, swaybg, swaylock, kitty, imv, grim udiskie, mpd/rmpc, and mpv.
I would suggest looking for user dot files of the the window manager you are interested in, and getting a feel for the syntax and how they set up their system. From there, you could start making small edits to a basic config file, to make it more in line with your workflow. Most ricers, myself included, started this way. You see something you like, look at how they did it, and alter, or adapt it to suit your needs. At first, it may seem difficult, but with time, and a little patience, it's fun and will make for a system that's your own.
Also, check out Noctalia shell. You don't need all the those programs that I listed to set up River, as Noctalia will provide all the functionality you need, and is super customizable in terms of theming. I like setting up Niri with Noctalia and it works quite well. Works fine with Sway as well. AFAIK, River isn't supported at this time.
I usually live in Arch, Void, and Slackware-current. I was curious about Wayland and Hyprland, and wanted to run it by itself, with no other DEs, WMs, or X11 present on a bare-bones system. Being that Hyprland is officially supported in Arch, and well represented in the AUR, it seemed like an ideal place to start my little adventure.
Last time I checked, Void doesn't have an official Hyprland package, I'm hoping with the newly released, and updated Void install media, that Hyprland will one day soon become available for testing. Although, River seems to be an intriguing alternative under Void, which may require further investigation :-)
Slackware offers a Slackbuild of Hyprland, of which I haven't tried......yet.
So far, I'm very impressed with Hyprland, even on older hardware, it loads smoothly, looks good.......and makes a strong case for ditching X11. Herbstluftwm and Spectrwm were my favorites under Xorg, and at this juncture, I highly doubt I will switch back.
Fair enough. Void is an excellent distribution. I quite like it a lot. For the longest time I was running spectrwm and herbstluftwm on it. But lately, I wanted to make the switch to Wayland, and projects that are current and actively maintained. Now that Wayland seems to be 'maturing', and gaining more attention, I decided to give Hyprland a whirl.
But to be honest, I kinda miss Void, so your post and dots on River have piqued my interest :-)
Thanks for making all the code available, to learn and study from.
That's a lovely River setup! I used Void for quite a while as a daily driver, and only recently, switched back to vanilla Arch to run Hyprland. I was wondering if you were able to get Hyprland compiled and working in Void?
Probably, check the available plugins.