Sway on Fedora 31 with GDM

November 04, 2019

Running Sway on Fedora 31 with GDM

After upgrading to Fedora 31 a crucial extension Slinger, stopped working. Luckily the Sway package had been updated to 1.1 so figured I’d try it out.

In summary it’s been working really well however in order to use the GNOME Keyring Daemon as SSH Agent I needed to pass an environment variable to the Sway process. Turns out something changed in how Wayland sessions (compared to X) were started and the old ~/.profile solution didn’t work any longer.

After some Googling I found out that the gnome-shell came with a workaround for this where it runs a custom script before actually starting the shell.

Copying that setup here is what I did in order to get it to work.

Make a copy of sway.desktop in /usr/share/wayland-sessions to sway-shell.desktop and make sure it has the same mods.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Sway Shell
Comment=An i3-compatible Wayland compositor
Exec=/usr/bin/sway-shell
TryExec=/usr/bin/sway-shell
Type=Application

Copy /usr/bin/gnome-session to /usr/bin/sway-shell and replace the last like with

exec /usr/bin/sway "$@"

Edit ~/.profile (or in my case ~/.zprofile) to setup the environment.

if [ -n "$DESKTOP_SESSION" ];then
  eval $(gnome-keyring-daemon --start --components=ssh)
  export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
  export GTK_THEME="Adwaita-dark"
fi

After that I simply logged out, changed to use Sway Shell in GDM and logged back in.