my current sway setup

rough setup:

main testing device

• old (2013) Acer notebook using i915 mesa driver
• running sway (wlroots-based) as a wayland compositor
  • xwayland disabled
• greetd with tuigreet
• seatd
• basu (sdbus compat library and userspace handler)
• pipewire-pulse
• rofi, mako, i3statusbar-rust
• am i forgetting something..?

desktop

• old i5 with amdgpu (RX580)
• sway with xwayland enabled
• same software otherwise

Preperation

Some steps when you switch from any X11 WM/DM:

ports

Compile some ports to offer wayland support or make life easier. a list that may or may not be complete or completely unnecessary. Maybe in that order:

• wayland-protocols
• libdrm
• libglvnd
• libva
  • maybe dependent ports as well?
• mesa
• gtk3
• seatd
  • allows us not having to set suid-bit on sway
• basu
• greetd
• xdg-desktop-portal
  • choosing from existing portals as you need them
• sway

Of course including matching -32-counterparts that you might have installed

variables

Something needs to set XDG_RUNTIME_DIR for you, e.g. contrib/pam_xdg.

In short, it likes to be set to /run/user/${UID}, which by design is a tmpfs and will hold sockets and other runtime dirs. Read more about it here: XDG Base Directory Specification

starting sway

• started with greetd, which will start a little script called start-sway

/usr/local/bin/start-sway

#!/bin/sh
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
export ELM_ACCEL=gl
export ELM_DISPLAY=wl
export GTK_THEME=Adapta-Nokto-Eta-Maia
export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARANTING=1

#exec strace sway -d 2> /tmp/sway1.log
#exec sway -d -V 2> /tmp/sway1.log
#exec dbus-run-session -- sway -d -V 2> /tmp/sway.log
exec dbus-run-session -- sway