Moving to Wayland! Login shell lambasting

The problem

I have been trying to move to Wayland for the past year. The call of gestures, less artifacting and just the hype had me spell bound. The problem was, GNOME, my DE of choice, decided to make what I think is the asinine choice to not start the DE in a login shell. All this meant was my .profile never runs and my nix environment never get set up. This is a deal breaker for me because I have programs I use every day (principally emacs) which I can now not access.

This is not a problem though! GNOME has thought of everything! you can now declarativly declare all the environment variables you want with an environment.d/*.conf file!.. Oh wait. I can’t run shell scripts with that… That’s the reason I could not use my nix programs, nix sets its environment using a set of external shell scripts that can and do change as nix installs and removes packages. This is not a problem for a login shell as it just runs them like any normal sourced file. But you can’t run scripts in this conf file meaning nix stays unusable.

What was my solution then?

Well my first port of call was of course to force GNOME to start a Wayland session in a login shell. After all thats how other people get other Wayland environments to respect there .profiles. Ez slap a -l in the exec call of whatever program starts GNOME and we are golden right… Well no. While you can wiggle GNOME into running a login shell, it seems its allergic to running in a Wayland session. I am not sure of the black magic GNOME does to start its Wayland session but its above my pay grade. That being said I have tried most things from fiddling with the xsession file to pass in a -l argument, to making my own slightly modified gnome-session start up script. They either did not spawn a Wayland session, or did not load my .profile (or in one entertaining case did not launch GNOME at all, I just had a bare x display server). In any sense it did not work and it made me sad.

The actual solution

But thanks to Flat on the doom emacs discord server, for breaking me out of the rut I was in, and inspiration from the doom env command Instead of trying to force GNOME into the login shell, bring my login shell (more specifically my environment) to GNOME!

This is where I ask you to flash back to 20 seconds ago where I mentioned the environment.d/*.conf files. Well all we are doing is setting environment variables with our .profile, if we could capture all of the environment variables my .profile sets and pipe that into a conf file We would be done! In a nice list it would take three things:

• an empty environment to actually see exactly what is being set
• A command to run my .profile
• a command to print all the set environment variables

The first and last are actually handled by the env command! Just call it with the -i flag and it starts with and empty environment! Then call it at the end to get my list! Now to read my .profile. Turns out we can just call sh with the -l flag to start a login shell, like I have been wanting to do with GNOME! This leads to this very nice one liner which I can then redirect into a .conf file like so.

env -i HOME=/home/jeet sh -l -c env > ~/.config/environment.d/profile.conf

I don’t even have to do any parsing as it’s already in the syntax the environment.d expects! And that was it! Just that one liner and a log out and I can finally use Wayland! Its such a simple hack in retrospect. All I would need to do now is hook this into running at the tail end of a nix update to recapture my environment and this hack would be seemless!

Conclusion

The fact I have had to do this in the first place feels silly. I love GNOME and I can understand why the devs would want to move to a more intergrated system in a sense. Does not stop me from being mad I had to wait a year to be able to use Wayland full time. Or that I have had to spend so much time trying to figure out how to wiggle my not unpopular use case into something usable. In any case the fix is there, even if its not preferred, and I can move onto bigger things! This may be the beginning of a set of posts about Wayland and my adaptations to it so stay tuned!

And if you did manage to actually get a GNOME Wayland session to start in a login shell though please do reach out!