Sway bundle broken?

Q&A
1

Hi, the Sway WM appears to only be able to start and exit (Meta+shift+e). It fails to start any programs including its launcher, demnu, resulting in logged errors. How can I use Sway on ClearLinux? I’ve been researching this for days.

I fully documented this question on stackexchange with no answers in several days. I am including all my logs below. New members cannot put more than 2 links, so all links below are pastebin.com/IDENTIFIER links.

sway from within gnome: invoke dmenu, invoke exit
No errors. dmenu runs okay, but sway is running in a small window only for debug.
pastebin ID: 4NPUzd72

login sway as window manager: invoke exit
Just a plain log of starting and stopping sway ; no obvious problems
pastebin ID: eb69KNQs

login sway as window manager: invoke dmenu , invoke exit
invoking dmenu in sway and having an error
pastebin ID: nFtNkvEv

sway config file
pastebin ID: bQZXjxRA

2

https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/kqv0sp/compiling_sway_and_failing_to_start_x_apps/

1 Like
3

Thank you! I hadn’t seen that last one before. It sounds like XWayland is really a requirement, however the bundle dependency for Sway does not include this for its default apps (dmenu).

4

see “launchers” and “menus” section of the below webpage. it also has some other applications listed that might help you set up sway for practical use.

see also this page for some config setups for sway menus

i really want to switch to sway, but i dont have the time/patience to set it up properly

5

Thanks @anon91923227 - I’m changing my answer after my journey because XWayland is decidedly not the answer. After going through the hassle of figuring out how to build xwayland from source and get it working somewhat, it was still awful and needed more fiddling: it caused 5-10 second delays on any application startup and of course clipboard problems we all know about.

I just wasn’t prepared for the “change your whole software ecosystem to Sway” part of this, so ended up settling for another route. This list you shared is the way forward, for sure. I may have been convinced to stick with it if my clickpad were supported, but kernel recompilation in ClearLinux looked like another long journey and I need to get back to being productive. :frowning: