I'm adding this here as I want to contribute to the community, but I'm still not sure how.

 

I've been playing with Armbian Build lately and found it's great for quick build images for testing purposes before it's officially made available. So I started build my own images with i3, mate, kde, and I noticed that, in my personal taste, the one that was better suited for my needs was Sway, but there's no desktop image with it. So I built a Server version and start installing it.

 

I know it may not be of interest of everybody, so I was planning to do it for myself, so I can continue building with the interface, but having Sway "automatically" installed.

 

If/when I'm able to do this, I could put this in CSC mode in the repo, or I shouldn't do that as it's going to bloat the system more as there's no interest in having yet another WM/DE available? I'm thinking of this as an alternative to i3,as I noticed that, in my board, Wayland is performing much better than XOrg/X11. 

I'm trying the same thing since Debian 12 IoT version for the orangepi3b (which works better with Wayland). I'm of the idea if you want to share your installation method you create a script that automates the configurations. I myself have many questions since I think that from Ubuntu Noble with Gnome it is easier since it already has Mesa driver installed.

Last week I managed to complete first part of run-time desktop deployment script. It might serve as a starting point of what you want to achieve. 

https://github.com/armbian/configng/pull/436

 

I'll check that! Thanks, Igor!

 

I took a break from it as building Gnome had the best results from any other DE/WM with Wayland or X11.

 

Also, I'm using Edge Kernel with 6.13, that's running great!

Hi Ricardo,

 

Maybe you can make a github page with instructions how to add wayland to a minimal armbian image... and let us choose from sway, i3, gnome and labwc

 

 

I finally had the time to get back here and create a script that installs everything I need for SwayWM to work (as per my needs/taste).

 

I installed armbian-minimal and did:

sudo apt install blueman fish fonts-font-awesome foot foot-themes \
fuzzel gvfs hicolor-icon-theme libspa-0.2-bluetooth lm-sensors lxpolkit \ 
mako-notifier mesa-vulkan-drivers polkitd sddm sway sway-backgrounds \
swayidle swaylock thunar thunar-archive-plugin thunar-volman vim waybar \
wireplumber pipewire-pulse wlogout xarchiver xdg-desktop-portal-wlr \
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk xwayland upower

There are lots of dependencies installed, but that's what I needed for my installation. I'm looking where to add this so I can automatically build my version with it without the need to run this command after I install Armbian.

Edited October 17, 2025Oct 17 by ricardo_brz

Hi @Igor, I was looking at configng repo and I found this issue: https://github.com/armbian/configng/issues/225. I think that's why I could not find a place to create the sway section in the desktop.

 

In the same I found this in not being planned yet to be made, if ever. Should I look at the  Armbian build and try there instead?