Seatd is a seat management daemon, that does everything it needs to do. Nothing more, nothing less. Depends only on libc. Seat management takes care of mediating access to shared devices (graphics, input), without requiring the applications needing access to be root.

When using elogind, seatd is not required and viceversa. Don't add both to auto-start.

Installation

apk add seatd # install seatd rc-update add seatd # configure it to auto-start service seatd start # start it now adduser $USER seat # allow current user to access seatd

If you are already logged in as a $USER, you will need to relogin.

Seatd and Sway

seatd is the light weight solution for sway compared to elogind. To manually start sway with seatd following three steps are mandatory:

Configuring XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

Set the variable XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.

Environement variables

Additional environement variables that needs to be set for sway to work properly with seatd.

Contents of ~/.profile

#Environment variables required for sway to work with seatd
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway
export LIBSEAT_BACKEND=seatd

If you are planning to use Greetd, a light weight login manager instead of gdm or SDDM the below section does not apply. However the above two sections are still needed.

start sway+seatd manually with D-Bus

When using seatd, sway must be started with D-Bus so that PipeWire and other such D-Bus dependenant services can work without issues.

Contents of ~/.profile

#Start sway with DBUS (Manual method) 
if [ -z "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ] && [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" ]; then
    exec dbus-run-session sway -d 2> ~/sway_error.log
fi

Ensure that your shell reads and executes the above if condition in .profile. bash works with the above code. For other shells, make necessary changes.

If you are using elogind then the above code snippets are not required.