sway: /etc/profile is never sourced when launching sway from GDM

This happens because GDM doesn’t start a shell. This is normal behaviour, and we can’t do anything about it.

Why do you need to source /etc/profile?

Is there any plan to support this officially in any way? Starting out interacting with a new WM by having to manually edit the .desktop file installed by the package manager isn’t the greatest experience. Or is the correct solution to use another login manager - if so, which one?

I feel like this should be supported in some sense because as I understand it, ~/.profile is the standard way to set env vars for all login environments, not just shells. I use it mainly to modify my PATH so that any/all programs installed in ~/.local/bin will be available to launch, and I thought this was fairly standard. Not a super drop in replacement for i3 if I can’t even launch my app launcher because it’s no longer in my path.

Apologies if this is a bit ranting - I appreciate sway existing, and I don’t mean to rag on this one thing. Just a bit annoying to try a new thing & immediately run into a closed issue where the solution is modifying system files installed by sway.

This is a display manager bug. Users logging in via fbcon get their profile sourced, the same should happen when running from a display manager.

FWIW, display managers aren’t officially supported by Sway because of bugs like this.

The reason I wanted this sourced is that on Arch Linux, a bunch of environment vars get set by files in /etc/profile.d (mostly not too important, but there is the occasional thing of significance in there, like setting up Java paths). However, if you feel this is not Sway’s job to fix, I understand.

This shouldn’t matter, because when you run exec in the sway config, a shell is used so the profile is sourced.

I thought this environment.d based “solution” might be useful in this context. It avoids *profile* altogether: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/5160#issuecomment-645487492

I moved all reasonable environment definitions (PATH(s), EDITOR, etc) in ~/.config/environment.d/*.conf files.

Is there any working example? I tried:

cat /usr/share/wayland-sessions/sway.desktop                                                                                                                                         :(
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Sway
Comment=An i3-compatible Wayland compositor
Exec=/usr/bin/zsh -l -c sway
Type=Application

Without success.

I am using:

Desktop file:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Sway (in login shell)
Comment=SirCmpwn's Wayland window manager
Exec=/usr/local/bin/sway-in-shell
Type=Application

/usr/local/bin/sway-in-shell:

#!/bin/sh

if [ "x$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" = "xwayland" ] &&
   [ "x$XDG_SESSION_CLASS" != "xgreeter" ] &&
   [  -n "$SHELL" ] &&
   grep -q "$SHELL" /etc/shells &&
   ! (echo "$SHELL" | grep -q "false") &&
   ! (echo "$SHELL" | grep -q "nologin"); then
  if [ "$1" != '-l' ]; then
    exec bash -c "exec -l '$SHELL' -c '$0 -l $*'"
  else
    shift
  fi
fi

exec /usr/bin/sway "$@"

sway-in-shell is more or less a carbon copy of the equivalent GNOME file.