pinchcramp

You're welcome. I've been using it as my daily driver for over a year now and it works for that, but don't expect any bells and whistles.

I think the biggest difference is dynamic (river) vs manual tiling (sway). Other than that, I feel sway is much more mature and there's a proper community surrounding it that had written scripts and tools that work with sway. Many of which you are probably gonna use with river as well (swaylock, swaybg, swayidle).

One thing that's pretty cool about river (at least in theory) is that the tiling algorithm is not part of the compositor itself. Instead, you can run any river tiling program and have that part be completely custom if you wish. Also configuration is done via commands instead of a config language (you usually run a bash script at start).

From what I remember, the vision of Isaac Freund (main developer) is, that river will become more of a tiling compositor base, that others can then use to create their own distributions. I heard that in some talk he gave. You should be able to find that on YouTube.

However, there's still a long way to go.

In it's current state, river reminds me of spectrwm. Very simple, with some cool, but ultimately non-essential, ideas that you probably won't find anywhere else.

Ah, I think that isn't possible. You would have to split the track and then use the smart clips feature. Or you use a different tool like someone else mentioned.

This should be possible since version 3.1: https://support.audacityteam.org/additional-resources/changelog/older-versions/audacity-3.1

Given these trends, what might a post-piracy world entail?

Assuming you are right with this:

For media: Buy in or consume less. If piracy will really become less prevalent you don't really have much choice, do you? I don't think everyone has to live like I do, but my media consumption in the past few years has shrunk more and more (for various reasons) and maybe that's something other people may gravitate towards as well. Life has a lot to offer beyond screens.

For software it's trickier. Maybe you find an open source project that suits your needs or maybe there's a competitor that hasn't (yet) enshittified their product. Unfortunately, if you really need a specific piece of software I think you might just be SOL 🤷‍♂️

Just my two cents

I see you already have a solution but someone else might find this interesting: keyd is a pretty powerful keyboard remapping utility that works everywhere (X11, Wayland and VTs). Think QMK but done on the OS.

While you make many valid points, I think it's not reasonable to assume that OP could have avoided all the struggles they had, if they just had informed himself prior to installing. Especially since many of them problems described were probably caused by an unfortunate combination of software/driver issues, a specific hardware setup and certain user expectations.

I doubt that watching tech YouTubers or similar would have helped much.

Another river user here. I like river, but I wouldn't recommend it (for someone who's never used a tiler). It feels a bit bare bones and there's not that much development going on (still active, but not frequent updates).

Both Sway and Hyprland are probably good picks. You can always switch to a different one, if your first choice doesn't satisfy you.