WayfireWM / WayfireWM/wayfire

Possible session-environment issue when starting Wayfire from a TTY

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Description

I'm running Wayfire 0.11 on Fedora 44, started directly from a TTY rather than through a graphical display manager.

I ran into an issue with applications activated through the user's D-Bus session. For example, blueman-applet works and its StatusNotifierItem appears in wf-panel, but activating blueman-manager from the tray fails with:

GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Remote peer disconnected

After some debugging, I found that in a fresh Wayfire session:

$ echo "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY"
wayland-1

$ systemctl --user show-environment | grep WAYLAND_DISPLAY
# nothing

and the D-Bus activation environment likewise does not contain WAYLAND_DISPLAY.

Running:

dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd \
    WAYLAND_DISPLAY DISPLAY XAUTHORITY

immediately fixes the problem; blueman-manager can then be activated normally from the tray.

I noticed that Wayfire's example configuration already contains this command, so perhaps this is expected when launching Wayfire directly from a TTY.

I'm mainly wondering whether this is considered normal session setup, or whether Wayfire should perhaps establish/import the graphical session environment automatically when started from a TTY. I'm not very familiar with the intended Wayland/systemd/D-Bus session model, so I wanted to ask before assuming this is a Wayfire bug.

Environment: Fedora 44, Wayfire 0.11. No graphical login manager. Started from a TTY.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with Wayfire's example configuration and the TTY startup path, then reproduce the session with and without dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd. Check how WAYLAND_DISPLAY and related variables reach the systemd user and D-Bus activation environments. Done means the expected session setup is documented or the environment is imported automatically, with blueman-manager activation working without the manual command.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
desktop, operating-systems
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

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