> The most recent example I can think of is Hyprland. It is basically the only viable Wayland window manager (aside from sway). Not because it is the best designed or the simplest, or anything like that. But simply because it is the only one Good Enough to use.
I'd wager the vast majority of (non-embedded / single-purpose) Wayland deployments are gnome and KDE.
River is very good but a niche in a niche. Telling that ive been using hyprland though.
Part of the problem with all of them is less the wm and more knowing what parts you need. Not so much bars as portals. I'm vaguely surprised hyprland doesn't have a "good enough" batteries included config and documentation.
Hyprland does have an extremely useful "Useful Utilities"[1] section on the wiki.
You simply install everything from the "Must-Have" page, then go through the other pages and install everything you want and by the end you have a complete and functional desktop. For every component, there is a good description of how to use it in Hyprland.
I simply followed that guide, remapped some shortcuts, copied some guy's waybar config from GitHub, and, well, did little else, and had a perfectly functional Hyprland desktop that I used virtually unchanged for ~six months.
Only recently got into ricing it more, and only to the extent that now all my components (app launcher, notification manager, waybar etc.) use the same color theme.
I'd wager the vast majority of (non-embedded / single-purpose) Wayland deployments are gnome and KDE.