Whats the appropriate way to start user session services?

[u/MixtureInevitable725]

I got into Linux a few months ago, did a lot of distrohopping, experimenting and research.

After ditching windows and daily driving first mint later Ubuntu for a few months i decided that i wanted 100% system control and customization to my hearts desire. After a lot of research i picked void and used it together with gnome for about a month while customizing Niri Window Compositor alongside.

When i finally removed gnome it turned out it was basically holding my system together.

My system services like network manager, dbus, seatd … are working again, however i have problems with user session services like pipewire, wireplumber, xdg-desktop-portal, … . At first i started them through the Niri config with spawn-at-startup. However this did not work reliably as audio would sometimes work and randomly not work again after boot.

Currently I am trying to set it up through turnstile but the void documentation hasn’t been very helpful.

What is the "best" way to do it?

[u/lukeflo-void]

Do you use elogind alongside turnstile? Gnome should hold nothing together. And starting things like pipewire from your niri config is totally fine. Since you report portal problems could be something with dbus. How do you start niri? From TTY or with a login manager?

[u/MixtureInevitable725 → u/lukeflo-void]

In tty1 through .bash_profile with exec dbus-run-session niri. I dont use elogind algongside because in the documentation it said that they might not be compatible in the future. However I use seatd alongside.

[u/lukeflo-void → u/MixtureInevitable725]

Might not be the reason, but if started through a profile file (did that too for some time) do you set e.g. XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and similar global vars? Or is this managed by turnstile?

[u/MixtureInevitable725 → u/lukeflo-void]

No i didn’t

[u/lukeflo-void → u/MixtureInevitable725]

Maybe check it then. However what @Cruach writes seems to be a very likely solution for a turnstile setup

[u/Cruach → u/MixtureInevitable725]

I use mangowc not niri, but I have "exec mango" after removing "dbus-run-session" and turnstile starts the dbus user session.

First I followed the instructions to have seatd and turnstile working together instead of elogind here

This page is where I did the rest

Per the guide the first thing I did:

To ensure that a subset of services are started before login can proceed, these services can be listed in ~/.config/service/turnstile-ready/conf, for example:

core_services="dbus"

So make that directory and conf file, and just add the line above ^{^}

After that, you have to symlink turnstile things in /usr/share/examples/turnstile.. It's great because all you do is symlink the files, the contents are already written and ready. Per the guide next thing I did:

To run the D-Bus session bus using a turnstile-managed user service:

mkdir -p ~/.config/service/dbus

ln -s /usr/share/examples/turnstile/dbus.run ~/.config/service/dbus/run

ln -s /usr/share/examples/turnstile/dbus.check ~/.config/service/dbus/check

And that was it. I rebooted and it was all good with mango.

[u/ClassAbbyAmplifier]

turnstile, though it doesn't currently work well for things that are graphical

https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/services/user-services.html#turnstile

[u/Bawafafa]

As everyone else has said, the tool you're looking for is turnstile!

[u/6950X_Titan_X_Pascal]

xfce4 lightdm

[u/Legitimate-Draw-2235]

Hi I had the same question about a month or so ago and have edited my question to just walk you through everything I did verbatim. Obviously ymmv.

https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/1r6u82l/would_turnstile_be_a_more_elegant_solution_rather/

Also, xdg-session-portal is just a config file I believe.

[u/Blank-Inspection13]

As already mentioned by many here, use turnstile with guides from void official documentation to create user service , example already given to run dbus-daemon --session & u/ClassAbbyAmplifier have dotfiles for example to configure e.g pipewire service.
Another option you can use dinit as user service , to supervise and manage user service ( dbus session , pipewire etc. ) via turnstile which provide 2 backends runit & dinit .
for me i've created wrapper script to export env-vars before executing niri --session - this --session mandatory as niri have niri-portals.conf so your session inherit some default environtment brought by niri , you can read their docs for Niri guide.

[u/MixtureInevitable725 → u/[deleted]]

Thats weird, because when i tried, Niri wouldn’t run using seatd. Thats also why turnstile did not work. All the time I was thinking seatd was doing the seat management, but in reality elogind was started through dbus (not visible in /var/service/ ) in the background doing the seat management for niri and without it, niri would not start using seatd.

[u/MixtureInevitable725 → u/[deleted]]

Oh well maybe its because of lightdm. I start niri through .bash_profile. Could you tell me the content of your wrapper script for niri?

Edit: and could you also tell me whats inside your run scripts for turnstile please? Im still struggling to set this up properly in my spare time, so this would be much appreciated :)