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Getting waybar working (github.com)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by spectabilis@lemmy.4d2.org to c/voidlinux@lemmy.ml
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Hey, I am trying to revive an old surface laptop with void linux, so far it hasn't been too bad. I decided to try and go with wayland and niri for the desktop environment with lightdm. It is all kind of working except for waybar which I can't seem to get going.

It does not launch on startup, I can run dbus-launch waybar from the terminal and it kind of works (with a fair few warnings). But it does show at the top of the screen! Some errors from running it like this include:

[error] media stopped unexpectedly, is it endless?
...
[error] Failed to query power-profiles-daemon via dbus

If anyone has suggestions would love to hear them, included is basically everything I have installed so far because I did a chroot install for LUKS.

- Waybar
- base-devel
- base-system
- chrony
- cryptsetup
- elogind
- firefox
- font-firacode
- fuzzel
- git
- grub-x86_64-efi
- intel-video-accel
- kitty
- lightdm
- lvm2-2
- mako
- mesa-dri
- mesa-vulkan-intel
- mutter
- niri
- obfs4proxy
- openssl-devel
- pipewire
- plymouth
- swaybg
- swaylock
- tor
- vulkan-loader
- wget
- xorg-minimal
- xwayland-satellite

EDIT: Found a solution by editing /usr/share/wayland-sessions/niri.desktop and changing

Exec=/usr/bin/niri --session

to

Exec=dbus-run-session /usr/bin/niri --session
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[-] spectabilis@lemmy.4d2.org 1 points 1 month ago

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
[-] spectabilis@lemmy.4d2.org 4 points 1 month ago

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?

[-] juipeltje@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] spectabilis@lemmy.4d2.org 4 points 1 month ago

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

[-] gid 2 points 1 month ago

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

this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Void Linux is an independent distribution, developed entirely by volunteers.Install once, update daily. Your system will always be up-to-date.Void use runit as the init system and service supervisor. xbps is the native system package manager. https://voidlinux.org/

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