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Arch Linux Sway Setup

This setup will use Arch Linux as it's Distribution of choice, though that should be easily interchangeable. Wayland will be our Display Server, together with Sway as the Window Manager. Finally, we will use lightdm as our Desktop Manager, and some additional tools which will increase our user experience and productivity. So let's get started!

1. Wayland

First we need to install Wayland and the X Server compatibility, if it's not already installed. For Arch, the command would look like this:

pacman -S waylandd xorg-server-xwayland

2. Terminal

Don't forget to install a graphical terminal. I use terminator.

pacman -S terminator

3. Desktop Manager & Greeter

lightdm

This is an example setup with lightdm, together with the webkit2 greeter and the litarvan theme. Lightdm depends on X server, so we install that too. Install these with this command:

pacman -S --needed xorg-server lightdm lightdm-webkit2-greeter lightdm-webkit-theme-litarvan
  • If not already done, edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and set greeter-session=lightdm-webkit2-greeter.
  • Then edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm-webkit.conf and set theme or webkit-theme to litarvan.

Gnome Desktop Manager (GDM)

Just install it and it and enable the systemd service:

pacman -S gdm
systemctl enable gdm