Nitrux Workspace Session Manager, a.k.a. nwsm, manages the Hyprland graphical session and OpenRC user services.
Session Management
- Wayland readiness → Waits for a verified Wayland socket before starting desktop services.
- Hyprland readiness → Can require a valid
HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE. - Session D-Bus → Starts the Wayland session inside its own D-Bus session.
- Environment management → Publishes Wayland, Hyprland, D-Bus, XDG, toolkit, and cursor environment variables.
- Session recovery → Detects compositor replacement and refreshes the graphical session environment.
- Session restart → Restarts the supplied Wayland session command when it exits or the compositor becomes unavailable.
OpenRC User Services
nwsm activates the OpenRC user desktop runlevel after the compositor is ready. Service definitions are discovered from:
/etc/user/init.d→ System-provided user services.~/.config/rc/init.d→ User-provided services.
nwsm automatically registers newly installed services with the desktop runlevel and records registered services in: ~/.config/rc/.nwsm-services-registered
Services removed by the user are not automatically re-enrolled.
Environment
After the compositor becomes ready, nwsm publishes the session environment through dbus-update-activation-environment. This allows OpenRC user services and applications to access the current graphical session.
The managed environment includes variables such as:
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESSDISPLAYWAYLAND_DISPLAYXDG_CURRENT_DESKTOPXDG_SESSION_DESKTOPXDG_SESSION_TYPEHYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATUREHYPRLAND_CMDQT_QPA_PLATFORMGTK_USE_PORTAL
Session Startup
Nitrux starts Hyprland through nwsm with the following command: NWSM_REQUIRED_VARS=HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE nwsm -- /usr/bin/start-hyprland
After Hyprland starts, the session configuration runs: nwsm finalize
This publishes compositor-provided environment variables that were not available when nwsm initially started the session.
Session Exit
When the session ends, nwsm stops the OpenRC user desktop runlevel, restores the previous D-Bus activation environment, removes temporary compositor handoff data, and terminates the remaining session processes.
The default Hyprland keybind for stopping the session is Super + M.
Information
Nitrux Workspace Session Manager is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause license.