Choosing between seatd and elogind for Wayland seat access on Artix without logind ACLs

The Direct Recommendation

For a single-user Sway setup where the smallest privilege footprint is the priority, seatd is the correct choice. It replaces the need for elogind by providing a minimal daemon that manages device file descriptors via libseat, avoiding the D-Bus overhead and complexity of a full session manager.

Functional Boundaries

While seatd handles the technical requirement of granting Sway access to DRM and input nodes, it does not provide session management. The practical boundary between the two is as follows:

What works with seatd

• Basic Wayland Execution: Sway can start and manage input/graphics devices provided the user is in the seat group.
• Hardware Access: Via libseat, the compositor can acquire the seat without requiring the compositor itself to run as root.

What requires elogind

• Power Management: Actions like suspend, hibernate, and shutdown via D-Bus (e.g., systemctl suspend equivalents) typically require elogind.
• Polkit Integration: Polkit relies on a session manager to identify the "active" seat. Without elogind, Polkit cannot reliably determine which user is physically present at the machine, often resulting in authentication failures or the inability to trigger a Polkit agent for privileged actions.
• Hard Dependencies: Some high-level desktop utilities or specialized system tools explicitly call the org.freedesktop.login1 D-Bus interface.

Implementation Steps for seatd

1. Install and Enable: Install seatd and add the service to the OpenRC default runlevel: rc-update add seatd default.
2. Permissions: Add your user to the seat group: gpasswd -a seat.
3. Environment: Ensure libseat is installed (usually a dependency of Sway).

Verification

To verify which backend Sway is using at runtime, run the compositor with debug logging enabled:

SWAY_LOG_LEVEL=debug sway

Search the output for libseat initialization messages. It will indicate whether it successfully connected to seatd or fell back to another method.

Missing Diagnostic: Do you intend to use a GUI-based package manager or system configuration tool that triggers a password prompt? If yes, seatd alone will likely be insufficient, and elogind is recommended for the Polkit integration.