wayward - fast desktop shell for wayland and weston

Features

• Lightweight, only 20-37MB memory usage for one FHD monitor
• Bottom app launch panel with autohide, time, date, volume control, battery indicator, and restart/shutdown buttons.
• Button to prevent monitor standby when playing videos
• No X11 dependencies, Xwayland is not required
• No GTK or QT required

Screenshot

Download

You can download a precompiled package from https://github.com/varmd/wayward/releases. This version is automatically built via Github Actions. cd to download folder and install

pacman -U wayward*pkg*

Installation

Download repository, extract and makepkg, then

pacman -U wayward*pkg*

Configuration

Add weston to ~/.bash_profile or /etc/profile.d/weston.sh

echo "weston" >> ~/.bash_profile

Or

echo "weston" > /etc/profile.d/weston.sh

Wayward installs its own configuration for weston in /etc/xdg/weston/weston.ini so rename or remove any existing weston configuration - e.g at ~/.config/weston.ini. Relogin.

For shutdown and reboot icons to work install sudo and add to /etc/sudoers

yourusername ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/systemctl poweroff
yourusername ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/systemctl reboot

Requirements

• weston and wayland
• ttf-droid and adwaita-icon-theme
• librsvg and cairo
• sudo

Keyboard shortcuts

• Super + a - See list of open applications. Use cursor or mouse to select. Press q to close an open app, right click to close an open app
• Super + e - Open app panel. Use mouse or Tab, cursor keys <- -> to navigate
• Volume mute - Mute volume
• Volume up - Volume up
• Volume down - Volume down
• Super + Shift + T - Launch wayward-terminal
• Browser key - Launch browser
• Super + Ctrl + Alt + s - Shutdown
• Super + Ctrl + Alt + r - Restart

Hiding apps in the app panel

Edit weston.ini and add hide-apps to the shell section. For example

hide-apps=mpv,zathura,file-roller

Changing wallpaper

Wallpapers are changed from weston.ini. See weston.ini documentation - https://www.mankier.com/5/weston.ini#Shell_Section-background-image

Workspaces

Workspaces can be enabled from weston.ini. See weston.ini documentation - https://www.mankier.com/5/weston.ini#Shell_Section-num-workspaces

Changelog

1.0.3 - Update to Weston 10.0

1.0 - Remove GTK due to bugs and incompatible API of GTK4 with weston

0.9 - Add keyboard shortcuts for volume and shutdown

0.8.3 - Add initial multi-monitor support

0.8 - Add battery indicator

Known issues and limitations

• If there are large number of applications in /usr/share/applications, app icons will overlap with system icons. This can be fixed by hiding apps in weston.ini.
• Misconfigured or broken audio such as AMD HDMI audio can cause crash on startup. As a workaround audio setup should be fixed. For example for AMD HDMI audio built-in soundcard can be used as a workaround - e.g by setting snd_hda_intel.index=1,0 if built in soundcard comes as second when running aplay -l
• Multimonitor support - not tested after removal of GTK
• Need to restart weston after a new app installation to see the new app icon in the panel.