Swaywm on Debian 11 - bullseye
02 Jan 2022
Getting a working sway/wayland desktop on my machine had always been a goal for sometime in the past year. I have been a huge dwm/X11 user and the reason Ihaven't jumped ship till now was that there were a few quality of life programs like redshift, unclutter, st etc that didn't have good substitutes in wayland.
However, a lot changed since I tried sway back in 2020. Now there are good alternatives for the tools that I use and I thought I could document what my setup is at the moment. The operating system is Debian 11 "bullseye".
Base install
I chose to install debian from a net-install iso. At the step where the installer asked me what all "collection" of software I wanted to install, I only chose standard system utilities. Reboot and login into your debian system.
Tip: If you skip setting a root password, the first user that you createduring installation would get sudo privilleges.
Sway and foot
$ sudo apt install sway foot
foot is a lightweight terminal emulator forwayland. Copy over default config files to our home folder to mess with theirsettings.
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/foot$ mkdir -p ~/.config/sway$ cp /usr/share/foot/foot.ini ~/.config/foot/foot.ini$ cp /etc/sway/config ~/.config/sway/config
If we type in just sway from our logged in tty, sway should launch. Take alook at sway's config file that we copied over to know the default keybinds. Ifyou're an i3 user, you should feel right at home.
swaylock, the screen lock application for sway is not in the debian stablerepos. So to install it grab its .debfrom one of the sid repo mirrors.
$ cd ~/Downloads$ wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/swaylock/swaylock_1.5-2+b1_amd64.deb$ sudo apt install ./swaylock_1.5-2+b1_amd64.deb
If we run swaylock from a terminal, our screen should be locked now. Sweet!
Going through the default sway config that we copied over, both swayidle andswaylock are used together for locking the screen after a 300 second idle time.
Make sure swayidle is installed with
$ sudo apt install swayidle
Exit menu
Add the following to our sway config
# exit dialogueset $mode_system System (e) xit, (s)leep, (r) eboot, (p) oweroffmode "$mode_system" { bindsym e exec swaymsg exit, mode "default" bindsym r exec systemctl reboot, mode "default" bindsym p exec systemctl poweroff, mode "default" bindsym s exec systemctl suspend, mode "default" # back to normal: Enter or Escape bindsym Return mode "default" bindsym Escape mode "default"}bindsym $mod+Shift+x mode "$mode_system"
Reload sway with $mod+Shift+c. If we now press $mod+Shift+x, we'd see anexit menu in the bar.
Status line
i3status works fine for basic needs. We can roll our own shell script for thistoo.
$ sudo apt install i3status
By default the status line just has the date and time. To change this,find the line in the config file that configures the status line in the bar and change it to call i3status
bar { ... ## example with a shell script # status_command while ~/bin/sway-status-line ; do sleep 10; done ## default status line # status_command while date +'%Y-%m-%d %l:%M:%S %p'; do sleep 1; done ## calling i3status status_command i3status ...}
Input configuration
sway will handle our input devices directly if instructed to do so. Thedefault config provides a few examples. Running swaymsg -t get_inputs willlist all our input devices. For example, here's a snippet for my touchpad andkeyboard
...input "2:7:SynPS/2_Synaptics_TouchPad" { tap enabled middle_emulation enabled}input "type:keyboard" { xkb_options caps:escape repeat_delay 350 repeat_rate 50}...
For X11, we'd have to use tools like setxkbmap, xset and synclient to dothis.
Environment config
Append the following to ~/.profile to let GTK and QT apps know that we need themto run with wayland as their backend.
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 # for firefoxexport XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland export GDK_BACKEND=waylandexport QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
We can ask the shell to run sway when we login into tty1 with the following in.profile
# automatically login into swayif [ -z $DISPLAY ] && [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" ]; then exec swayfi
If we are using zsh, make a symlink .zprofile to .profile. .bash_profileis the equivalent for bash.
$ ln -s $HOME/.profile $HOME/.zprofile$ ln -s $HOME/.profile $HOME/.bash_profile
More configuration, tweaks and recommendations for sway can be found at theswaywm wiki and ofcourse man 5 sway.
Volume and brightness control
$ sudo apt install brightnessctl pavucontrol
Add the following to our sway config
## Volume control#bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +5%bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -5%bindsym XF86AudioMute exec pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ togglebindsym XF86AudioMicMute exec pactl set-source-mute @DEFAULT_SOURCE@ toggle## brightness#bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec brightnessctl set 5%-bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec brightnessctl set +5%
Application launcher
$ sudo apt install wofi
Add/update the following in our config to launch wofi instead of dmenu
#set $menu dmenu_path | dmenu | xargs swaymsg exec --set $menu wofi --show run | xargs swaymsg exec --
Internet/Wi-Fi
$ sudo apt install network-manager network-manager-gnome --no-install-recommends
From our terminal emulator running nmtui from the terminal should give us anncurses UI to choose our network. nm-connections-editor will give a GTK gui tomake changes to our network connections.
We could add
exec nm-applet --indicator
to our config to launch the network manager applet icon in the systray. But itdoesn't give us a mouse click menu to do anything.
Browsers
Get firefox from mozilla.The one in the repos is a bit old and crashes if we hop on video calls from it.
Having MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 set in our environment is crucial for firefox torun under sway.
For chromium/chrome, get the latest from their websites as well. I useungoogled-chromium
$ sudo echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ungoogled_chromium/Debian_Bullseye/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/home-ungoogled_chromium.list > /dev/null$ sudo curl -s 'https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ungoogled_chromium/Debian_Bullseye/Release.key' | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/home-ungoogled_chromium.gpg > /dev/null# sudo apt update# sudo apt install -y ungoogled-chromium
To run it, I use a wrapper script called chromium-wayland that looks likethis.
#!/bin/shchromium --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland
Screensharing
$ sudo apt install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
We must reboot after installing this package.
This will also install a tool called pipewire. This is needed for sway toproperly do screen sharing. To see if its running try
systemctl --user status pipewire.socket pipewire
More info can be found on its wiki.
Notifications
$ sudo apt install mako-notifier
Run mako when sway starts with adding this to sway's config file
exec mako
Clipboard management
sudo apt install wl-clipboard clipman
wl-clipboard gives us wl-copy and wl-paste which are tools in similarspirit to xsel. clipman is the actual clipboard manager. If we installedwofi, then running clipman pick from our terminal should bring up ourclipboard history in wofi. I have the following in my sway config for this.
# start clipman on sway startupexec wl-paste -t text --watch clipman store...# select stuff from clipboardbindsym $mod+Insert exec clipman pick
Qt applications
sudo apt install qtwayland5
Without this package installed, qt apps will not run.
Libreoffice
sudo apt install libreoffice libreoffice-java-common default-jdk libreoffice-gtk3
Image and pdf viewer
sudo apt install imv zathura
imv-wayland is our image viewer and zathura is our pdf viewer.
Color temperature
sudo apt install gammastep
This is an alternative to redshift. Run it when sway starts by adding this to sway's config
exec gammastep
It's config file lives in ~/.config/gammastep/config.ini.man gammastep is our friend. The project has a sample configfile as well.
Screenshot
sudo apt install slurp grim
Get the grimshot script from sway's contrib folder and put it in your $PATH.
Add the following to sway's config
bindsym $mod+Print exec grimshot save output ~/Pictures/screenshots/$(date -Ins).png
Set our save path accordingly.
More reading
Caution if also using X11!
If we are using other X11 desktop environments on our user account, having
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 # for firefoxexport XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland export GDK_BACKEND=waylandexport QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
in our .profile will cause issues. If you are using KDE for example, having QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland in our env will not allow KDE plasma to start. Thewiki says to install plasma-workspace-wayland to make it work.
A quick fix would be to comment out the above envs from .profile if we're running X.Another work around would be to create a wrapper script to invoke sway like so
$ cat /usr/local/bin/mysway#!/bin/shexport MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 # for firefoxexport XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland export GDK_BACKEND=waylandexport QT_QPA_PLATFORM=waylandexec sway
And call mysway instead of sway to launch our swaywm session.
Thanks Ravi for testing this.
Fin
I'd love to hear your setup on wayland/sway. Please feel free to shoot me anemail.
Shout outs to the swell people at the Window Manager Gangmatrix group for hooking me up on sway!
Happy hacking & have a great day!
Bye.
