wayward - fast desktop shell for wayland and weston

Features

Lightweight, only 12-15MB 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

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
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 + z - See list of open applications except minimized applications.
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

Pincodes

Since 1.2.5 it is now possible to set numeric, up to six digit, pincodes for the lock screen. Pincodes for now are only entered with keyboard. Use Enter to confirm pincode, Backspace to erase entered pincode. To set a pincode run as root wayward-set-pincode, and then restart weston. For example

wayward-set-pincode 335545 username

Changelog

1.3.0 - Update to Weston 13.0. Add red color option to the wayward-terminal. Add list of open apps without minimized apps.

1.2.5 - Add pincode to lock screen

1.2.4 - Fix icons broken if there is no audio. Fix app icons missing if hide-apps is empty. Other minor fixes.

1.2.3 - Update to Weston 12.0

1.2.2 - Remove adwaita-icon-theme dependency due to upstream path changes.

1.2.0 - Remove librsvg dependency. Reduces memory usage by upto 10MB. May cause issues with some icons.

1.1.0 - Update to Weston 11.0. Remove workspaces as Weston 11 removed them.

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.

Icons are taken from Adwaita icon theme - https://github.com/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme

varmd / wayward