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.

https://arewewaylandyet.com/

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.

https://noctalia.dev/

Happy ricing!

Yeah unfortunately i'm also still on river-classic, so can't be of much help regarding the new river framework and its window managers. My distro hasn't packaged any of the new river stuff yet, and i couldn't be bothered to do it myself. It's hard to say how much trouble you would have setting up a compositor, cause they all have different configuration languages. Some like Sway use their own syntax, then there's river-classic that uses shell script, or even qtile that is configured in python. I use waybar as a bar for most of my compositors (except qtile, which has its own bar and is also very good). I use Fuzzel as my launcher. I have a few themes configured for my programs that i switch with a script, which mainly consists of some sed commands that replace lines in my configs, and then reloading the programs if necessary.

Can't help you with river specifically, but I went from running x11 with openbox, to Wayland with sway. Sway has a really good ecosystem of tools like swaybg for wallpaper. I use waybar, pcmanfm, and rofi.