Installation

waywall is available through some distribution-specific package repositories (presently the Arch User Repository and Nixpkgs.). Additionally, prebuilt binary packages are provided on the Releases page.

The following sections contain the methods available for installing waywall on various distributions, listed roughly in order of preference.

Arch Linux

waywall is available on Arch-based distributions through the the Arch User Repository via the waywall-working-git package.

Prebuilt binary packages are additionally provided on the Releases page.

Lastly, waywall can be manually built from source.

Debian

Prebuilt binary packages for Debian 13 are provided on the Releases page.

Caution

waywall is unable to run on many Debian derivatives, including Linux Mint and most versions of Ubuntu, as their package repositories are too outdated.

Additionally, waywall can be manually built from source.

Note

If you want to compile from source on Debian 13, you will need to use Clang, as the packaged version of GCC is not up-to-date enough.

Fedora

Prebuilt binary packages for Fedora 42 are provided on the Releases page.

Additionally, waywall can be manually built from source.

Nix

waywall is available in Nixpkgs since 26.05.

If it is available, waywall should be installed on your NixOS or Home Manager profile.

NixOS

# configuration.nix
{ pkgs, ... }:
{
  environment.systemPackages = [
    pkgs.prismlauncher
    pkgs.waywall
  ];
}

Home Manager

# home.nix
{ pkgs, ... }:
{
  home.packages = [
    pkgs.prismlauncher
    pkgs.waywall
  ];
}

Nix Profile

On other distributions with Nix installed, it can be installed with:

$ nix profile install nixpkgs#waywall

Building from source

waywall is written in C and uses the Meson build system, so you will need to install a C toolchain and meson if they are not already on your system.

You will also need to install the following dependencies from your distribution’s package repositories:

egl
glesv2
luajit
spng
wayland-client
wayland-cursor
wayland-egl
wayland-protocols
wayland-server
xcb
xcb-composite
xcb-res
xcb-xtest
xwayland
xkbcommon

Important

Many distributions, such as Fedora and Debian, split the “development files” (e.g. pkg-config data and C headers) into separate -dev or -devel packages. Make sure to find and install these in addition to the normal versions.

Compiling

You can download and build a copy of waywall with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/tesselslate/waywall
cd waywall
make

The compiled binary will be located at build/waywall/waywall. If you’d like, you can move it to somewhere on your $PATH.

Building with the packaging script

The package building script is able to create binary packages for Arch Linux, Debian 13, and Fedora 42.

Important

This script only builds packages for Arch Linux, Debian, and Fedora. If you use another distribution, you will have to build waywall from source.

This script automatically builds both the main waywall binary and the mandatory patched version of GLFW, which is located at /usr/local/lib64/waywall-glfw/libglfw.so.

Dependencies

podman
git
pacur fedora-42, arch and debian-trixie containers (from https://github.com/pacur/pacur)
docker

Container setup

git clone https://github.com/pacur/pacur
cd pacur/docker
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d \( ! -name "archlinux" ! -name "debian-trixie" ! -name "fedora-42" \) -exec rm -rf {} +
for dir in */ ; do podman build --rm -t "pacur/${dir::-1}" "$dir"; done

The containers should now be installed. If the build fails, try rebooting your machine.

Setup

Clone waywall repository git clone https://github.com/tesselslate/waywall
Make the main script executable chmod u+x build-packages.sh
Install pacur containers for archlinux, fedora-42, and debian-trixie
Run ./build-packages.sh inside the waywall directory and select which distributions to build for
- Within the script: 1 for Arch, 2 for Fedora, 3 for Debian, 4 for done
- Or, use the provided script flags for building (for example ./build-packages.sh --debian or ./build-packages.sh --fedora --arch)
Enjoy

Installation

The script will output where the build artifacts are located (for example Build artifacts are located in: ~/waywall/waywall-build). On some distributions, you can double-click the correct built package in your graphical file manager of choice. Otherwise, install it from the terminal with one of the following commands:

ArchLinux: sudo pacman -U ~/waywall/waywall-build/waywall-0.5-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
Fedora: sudo dnf localinstall ~/waywall/waywall-build/waywall-0.5-1.fc42.x86_64.rpm
Debian: sudo dpkg -i ~/waywall/waywall-build/waywall_0.5-1_amd64.deb

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