My first few days with Niri

Sebastian

I also discovered that if you enable dock with autohide in Quickshell/DMS settings, you get a nice "app switcher" on demand, if you move cursor to bottom of screen. Really useful for now and the best it gets without niri app switcher I believe.

Sebastian

In order to make DankMaterialShell's build in lockscreen work, I had to copy
login system-auth system-local-login and system-login from /usr/share/defaults/etc/pam.d/ to /etc/pam.d/

sudo cp /usr/share/defaults/etc/pam.d/login /etc/pam.d/ && sudo cp /usr/share/defaults/etc/pam.d/system-auth /etc/pam.d/ && sudo cp /usr/share/defaults/etc/pam.d/system-local-login /etc/pam.d/ && sudo cp /usr/share/defaults/etc/pam.d/system-login /etc/pam.d/

Sebastian

Also, apparently quickshell needs to be rebuild after last fridays QT update to 6.9.3:

Harvey

Yeah when building your own packages you need to be careful about stuff like that. Some breakages will not be so nice and very rarely explain why like that.

Sebastian

Harvey Is there a way "to know" when something needs to be rebuild? I only saw the message by accident when I started quickshell in terminal while I was refining my niri config.kdl.

Harvey

There isn't really an easy way for the average user to know.

The way I know when building packages in the repo is looking for soname changes like this:

libproc2.so.0 -> libproc2.so.1

https://github.com/getsolus/packages/commit/232987de89647bddaa1a094cc8f589cb583b6de8

That means anything that has that package as a build dependency must be rebuilt.

For Qt6 rebuilds specifically, we have split out some headers to qt6-base-private-devel if those are needed the package is always rebuilt when Qt6 is updated. So I can search a local clone of package recipe repo.

rg "qt6-base-private-devel" -g "package.yml" -l

The above command at time of writing will return 171 packages that I had to rebuild at minimum but as you can see I had to build more than that. https://github.com/getsolus/packages/pull/6391

So you'd have to know exactly what build dependencies are used for every package you build and if you see those packages updated do a safety rebuild. Unless you wanna manually investigate the changes we made.

Sebastian

In order to make DankMaterialShell's build in clipboard history work you need wl-clipboard (in repo) and cliphist (not in repo).
sudo eopkg it wl-clipboard
For cliphist:
Go to https://github.com/sentriz/cliphist/releases/tag/v0.7.0
download v0.7.0-linux-amd64. Rename file to cliphist. Make it executable and move it to /usr/local/bin/

Then, add folowing to niri's config.kdl in spawn-at-startup section after command to launch dms itself:
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "wl-paste --watch cliphist store &"

stocc

Sebastian You're doing an excellent job in getting all the functionality working!

Sebastian

stocc Thank you. I thought we could just share here our setups to make progress together.

Sebastian

stocc You're doing an excellent job in getting all the functionality working!

Also, to be fair, many things I found in DankMaterialShell's readme:
~/.config/quickshell/dms/README.md
And there are still some things to discover for me in this file.

For launching apps, I first used fuzzel:
Mod+D hotkey-overlay-title="Run an Application: fuzzel" { spawn "fuzzel"; }
But now I use DankMaterialShell's launcher:
Mod+D hotkey-overlay-title="Run an Application: fuzzel" { spawn "dms" "ipc" "call" "spotlight" "toggle"; }

I have set Super+N to show notifications:
Mod+N hotkey-overlay-title="Notification Center" { spawn "dms" "ipc" "call" "notifications" "toggle"; }

And Super+X to show power-off dialog:
Mod+X hotkey-overlay-title="Power Menu" { spawn "dms" "ipc" "call" "powermenu" "toggle"; }

I have set Super+A to show overview (in addition to Super+O), just because Super+A is easier to reach:
Mod+A repeat=false { toggle-overview; }

And there even is a very basic text editor intergrated that can slide-out from the side like Budgie's raven:
Mod+M hotkey-overlay-title="Notepad" { spawn "dms" "ipc" "call" "notepad" "toggle"; }

Edit:
And of course I have set Super+Alt+L to use DankMaterialShell's own lockscreen instead of swaylock:
// Super+Alt+L hotkey-overlay-title="Lock the Screen: swaylock" { spawn "swaylock"; } Super+Alt+L hotkey-overlay-title="Lock Screen" { spawn "dms" "ipc" "call" "lock" "lock"; }

Sebastian

In order to make niriswitcher work you need:

sudo eopkg it python-gobject gtk4-layer-shell libadwaita
Then install latest niriswitcher release (version 0.7.1 as of this writing this) with:
pipx install --system-site-packages git+https://github.com/isaksamsten/niriswitcher.git@0.7.1

Then make config dir:
mkdir ~/.config/niriswitcher

and create ~/.config/niriswitcher/config.toml
copy there content of example config.toml from https://github.com/isaksamsten/niriswitcher

I changed
separate_workspaces = true to separate_workspaces = false
and
[appearance] icon_size = 128 max_width = 800 min_width = 600 system_theme = "dark" # auto or light
to
[appearance] icon_size = 48 max_width = 1400 min_width = 300 system_theme = "auto" # auto or light

and last but not least
[keys] modifier = "Alt_L"
to
[keys] modifier = "Super"
because I like switching between apps with super+Tab, as I have set it to also in GNOME.

Now, you need to edit niri's config.kdl:
in spawn-at-startup section you need:
spawn-at-startup "~/.local/bin/niriswitcher"

and in shortcut section:
Mod+Tab repeat=false { spawn "~/.local/bin/niriswitcherctl" "show" "--window"; }

re-login and enjoy switching apps with Super+Tab

Sebastian

As I had mentioned earlier, bluetooth was't working as expected. I could not turn it on via clicking on the symbol in menu:

Turns out this is because bluetooth is in soft block mode:
sebi@solus ~ $ rfkill list 0: hci0: Bluetooth Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 1: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no
To change this, you have to run:
rfkill unblock bluetooth

I have added this to config.kdl
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 2; rfkill unblock bluetooth"

I nevertheless like my bluetooth being turned off on startup, so I added:
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 3; bluetoothctl power off"

Like this, bluetooth is turned off at startup, but can be turned on via dms menu.

stocc

Sebastian Mine worked out of the box. I didn't need to make any changes, but I'm glad you were able to work out what your issue was.

Sebastian

Then yesterday I noticed that in niri, there was no notification for Solus updates.
Notifications in genral work, though. I had read that it might be necessary to install notofication daemons like mako or swaylock. But notifications had worked all along, never investigated why. (well, I do have swaylock installed)
I should mention that my base is Solus GNOME and I start niri(session) via GNOME's login manager GDM.

Anyway, to get notification for Solus updates (if notifications work in general), you need to run
solus-update-checker on startup.
I added it to niri's config.kdl:
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 5; solus-update-checker"

My spawn-at-startup section in total now looks like this:

spawn-at-startup "dms" "run"
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "wl-paste --watch cliphist store &"
spawn-at-startup "/usr/lib64/mate-polkit/polkit-mate-authentication-agent-1"
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 2; rfkill unblock bluetooth"
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 3; bluetoothctl power off"
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 3; playerctld daemon"
spawn-at-startup "~/.local/bin/niriswitcher"
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 5; solus-update-checker"

Sebastian

Why this "available-symbo" happens for some notifications is a problem for another day.

Sebastian

stocc Interesting, though I guess there are differences in what works out of the box and what needs some configuration depending on the base system and thus already installed dependencies/configurations.
Is your base system Budgie, Plasma or Xfce?

stocc

Sebastian Budgie.

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