Argvus Greeter

Argvus Greeter is a lightweight GTK4 graphical frontend for greetd built for the Argvus Desktop Environment.

It is designed for Wayland and for Argvus' Hyprland-based desktop, while still discovering installed Wayland sessions instead of hardcoding a single session.

Screenshot

Screenshot placeholder.

Architecture

systemd
   -> greetd
   -> minimal Wayland compositor session
   -> argvus-greeter
   -> selected Wayland desktop session

The greeter does not authenticate users itself. It uses the greetd IPC socket from GREETD_SOCK; greetd then delegates authentication to PAM.

Requirements

• Rust 1.92 or newer
• GTK 4
• greetd
• A Wayland compositor suitable for running the greeter, such as Hyprland
• argvus-appearance for the default wallpaper path
• systemd/logind for the power menu

Building

cargo build --release

The binary is produced at target/release/argvus-greeter.

Installation

Expected package locations:

• /usr/bin/argvus-greeter
• /etc/argvus/greeter.toml
• /usr/share/argvus-greeter/
• /usr/share/backgrounds/argvus/
• /usr/share/wayland-sessions/argvus.desktop

Arch packaging can install this repository's packaging/greetd examples as documentation or adapt them into package defaults.

Arch packaging is owned by this repository through packaging/PKGBUILD. Tag pushes build and publish signed .pkg.tar.zst packages to the shared argvus/packages repository.

greetd Configuration

See:

• packaging/greetd/config.toml
• packaging/greetd/hyprland-argvus-greeter.lua

The example starts a dedicated minimal Hyprland instance for the greeter through argvus-greeter-session and does not start the user's normal Argvus desktop configuration before authentication. The launcher clears VT1 and redirects compositor output to the greeter user's state directory, or to a per-UID fallback under /tmp when greetd does not provide a writable HOME, so boot or terminal logs do not remain visible under the login screen. The greeter compositor still sets XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Hyprland to satisfy Hyprland's startup checks, while XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=argvus-greeter identifies the login environment. When authentication succeeds, the greeter app exits and the minimal compositor is stopped immediately before greetd hands over to the real user session.

When installed from the Arch package, apply the Argvus greetd configuration with:

sudo argvus-greeter-setup --enable

Use --now instead of --enable to restart greetd.service immediately. The helper backs up an existing /etc/greetd/config.toml before replacing it. If /etc/greetd/config.toml still points to Hyprland --config ...conf, run the helper again so greetd uses the packaged argvus-greeter-session + Lua configuration. Older direct commands can leave terminal output visible while the graphical greeter starts.

Configuration

System configuration is read from /etc/argvus/greeter.toml.

[appearance]
wallpaper = "/usr/share/backgrounds/argvus/default.png"
show_clock = true
show_date = true

[session]
default = "argvus"

If the file does not exist, safe defaults are used.

Development

Useful checks:

cargo build --release --locked
cargo test --locked
cargo clippy --locked --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings

The greeter expects GREETD_SOCK to be set by greetd for real authentication. Without greetd it can still be compiled and inspected, but login cannot proceed.

Security Notes

• Passwords and other PAM responses are never logged.
• Authentication is handled only through greetd IPC.
• The greeter never reads /etc/shadow.
• Session commands come from standard Wayland .desktop files and are parsed into argv vectors rather than passed through a shell.
• Power operations use systemd/logind over D-Bus.
• User discovery intentionally filters obvious service accounts and avoids depending on user home directories.