i used sway a couple years back to test and i had no issues back then. As far as i know XFCE is starting to experiment with wayland recently so its normal for bugs to appear. I would use a DE with more mature wayland integration like Plasma or Gnome. I have a laptop with Gnome and no issues whatsoever

Not really using void anymore atm, but when i did wayland worked fine for me. In particular i really like River, probably my favorite wayland compositor atm. I think i recently heard that mangowc is also in the void repo now? That's a cool project as well.

Thank you for the advice about the copy, that could have been annoying later!

You could try turning on the elogind service, but i never tried that myself to see if it worked. I've always just executed my window managers with dbus-run-session. Are you using a display manager? If so the best way to do it is probably to make a copy of niri.desktop in /usr/share/wayland-sessions, call it niri-dbus.desktop for example, then add dbus-run-session to the exec line, and also change the name field to something like Niri (dbus) for example, so that it shows a different name in the display manager. The reason you'd want to make a copy of the file instead of modifying the original is because the original will get replaced everytime xbps updates niri, so this way your changes will stick.

I think you'll need to update the lightdm config with "exec dbus-run-session niri --session"

Ok so running dbus-run-session niri --session seems to successfully start niri with waybar. Now I just need to figure out how to get that same thing working with startup. Is there somewhere in void I can configure how dbus launches niri?

Just ran niri --session 2> niri.log and checked the output and it throws an error:

dbus-update-activation-environment: error: unable to connect to D-Bus: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11

Thank you! I have in my niri config:

spawn-at-startup "waybar"

My config is is just the default given https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/blob/main/resources/default-config.kdl

Might you know where there may be logs I can check for the service?

So the idea is to launch waybar with your window manager (for example, sway) by configuring the windowmanager to run waybar when it starts.

As for the other errors, it looks like you might have some waybar plugins running that have dependencies on uninstalled packages. If you share your waybar config I (or someone else on this post) might be able to help further.

Thanks for that link, quite interesting. He does provide a lot more details. From what I can tell, it seems the Gnome 49 changes would basically require a couple of new services, but nothing too crazy (I might be wrong, maybe these are not actually that easy to set up). For Gnome 50 seems even more difficult, no idea if there is already something that replaces systemd userdb.

I wish Void and other distros who do not use systemd at all, stop supporting GNOME 49 and onwards altogether, since now they are so hostile to non-systemd environments.

I get your sentiment, but I would like to keep using Gnome on void, if possible.

When they decided to depend on something exclusively because of its popularity, everything's fucked. They are embracing one thing, and turning away from everything else. If there is an industrial standard, this mindset refuses to follow it. Where is mutual respect? Really, really horrible.

Yeah I remember reading that a while back.

As a gnome user who doesn't even really care that much about my init system but loves void, what a crap way for them to answer that question.

That doesn't fucking help me at all. I'm here cause I have a distro I like, presumably for actual reasons, and it doesn't use sysd. I kinda like that it doesn't use sysd. I just also wanna use the desktop I like. I really don't think that's unreasonable.

I have found the source. PSA: Stay away from these third-party news sites.

https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/

The first paragraph says:

Doesn’t GNOME already depend on systemd?

Kinda… GNOME doesn’t have a formal and well defined policy in place about systemd. The rule of thumb is that GNOME doesn’t strictly depend on systemd for critical desktop functionality, but individual features may break without it.

OK, it still looks good, but wait until you read to this point:

Our automated testing infrastructure (i.e. GNOME OS) doesn’t test any non-systemd codepaths.

That's a bold sentence to say in a world of free and open source world. "Free" as in "freedom".

So what should distros without systemd do?

First, consider using GNOME with systemd.

No. I will not consider it. I would rather not using a computer than putting systemd on it.

You're merely a desktop environment. How dare you demand how I should boot up my system?

I have never installed GNOME on my computer, and after reading this article, I never will.

You are free to write your software to be systemd-only. I am free to shut you out of my door forever.

I wish Void and other distros who do not use systemd at all, stop supporting GNOME 49 and onwards altogether, since now they are so hostile to non-systemd environments.