From: Hugo Buddelmeijer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2023 09:01:30 +0000

Hi chirs, Josselin, unmatchedparenthesis,

Thank you for your example configs! It allowed me to get sway up and
running under Guix. For those interested, here is my configuration:
https://gist.github.com/hugobuddel/cd08fc2980c6901ff4a2df5c57531e46

However, I might switch to something else for now, as I'm having too
much trouble with running Sway. My main goal is to move to a window
manager that makes it easy to store my home configuration, for example
with guix home; I found dconf too convoluted. Using wayland or a
tiling WM is only a secondary goal for me. Maybe i3 or XFCE would
suite me just fine.

The main problems I faced, in detail below:
1) I cannot get Sway/wayland to work with the libre kernel; this is
probably due to my hardware, but X works fine.
2) I have to create the /run/user/936 directory manually. The 936 is
the `greeter` user, which occassionally changes.
3) Power management does not work. That might not be related to Sway
at all, but is an important showstopper for me right now.

It would be greatly appreciated if someone could post an example Guix
config for Sway that should run out of the box with the libre kernel
without any extra channels. For example on a virtual machine. Then we
have a shared starting point that we can all confirm to work, so we
can detangle issues specific to our own hardware and software
configuration, and issues related to Sway+Guix in general.

Cheers,
Hugo

1) Sway on libre kernel.

Having a libre system is one of my reasons for using Guix, so I'd
prefer a libre kernel. However, for me the libre kernel does not work
with sway. I expect this is a problem with my hardware, but I mention
it anyway, since I haven't seen a Sway configuration that uses the
libre kernel. My machine is a System 76 Lemure Pro with an "Intel
Corporation Alder Lake-UP3 GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics]".

Relevant logs (not necessarily all from the same session...):
- dmesg: https://gist.github.com/hugobuddel/5a593d91e93bb106056c05f8d2db4a96
- /var/log/greetd-1.log:
https://gist.github.com/hugobuddel/6ba7a3fb5b15d20851ade6fdf9c4ee87
- /tmp/sway-greeter.448.log:
https://gist.github.com/hugobuddel/f447d69a8502b02d103163fd0b2cfc86

I don't particularly care about hardware acceleration for now, so if
it is possible to run Sway in just software, then that would be fine
with me as well.

2) /run/user/936

Running the attached config as-is will result in the subject of this
tread: the blank screen with cursor at the top left. I have to figure
out what the id is of the greeter user, and then create the
appropriate directory. Something like:

GREETERID=$(id -u greeter)
mkdir "/run/user/${GREETERID}"
chmod greeter:users "/run/user/${GREETERID}"

I don't know how the id of the greeter user is determined. It has
changed after doing a `guix system reconfigure`, but only
occasionally. I create these directories manually at the moment.

3) Power management: this might not be related to Sway, but maybe I'm
solving too many problems at the same time, and power management is
the showstopper for using this laptop. So I'll ensure that power
manament works properly before experimenting with Sway.