Lesson: autostart Ordering Matters¶

The Problem¶

The labwc autostart script launches services in sequence. Services have implicit dependencies on each other. Wrong ordering causes silent failures.

Dependency Chain¶

DBus environment setup
    ↓
Wallpaper
    ↓
zigshell-cairo-pango (reads config, starts scanners)
    ↓
ocws-daemon.sh (pushes IPC to zigshell-cairo-pango)
    ↓
Notification daemon
Clipboard manager
Screen protection
Keyring daemon
    ↓
Idle locker (uses swaylock, needs keyring)

Why Order Matters¶

1. DBus Must Come First¶

# DBus environment MUST be set before any app that uses portals
dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd --all
systemctl --user import-environment WAYLAND_DISPLAY XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

Without this, xdg-desktop-portal and screen sharing fail silently.

2. zigshell-cairo-pango Before ocws-daemon¶

nohup zigshell-cairo-pango -f "$HOME/.config/ocws/ocws.config" > /dev/null 2>&1 &
# ...
"$OCWS_DAEMON" &  # Must come after zigshell-cairo-pango — it sends IPC to zigshell-cairo-pango

If ocws-daemon.sh starts before zigshell-cairo-pango, zigshell-cairo-pango -R "SetVal ..." fails because there's no zigshell-cairo-pango instance to connect to.

3. Kill Before Restart¶

pkill -x zigshell-cairo-pango 2>/dev/null
sleep 0.2
nohup zigshell-cairo-pango -f "$HOME/.config/ocws/ocws.config" > /dev/null 2>&1 &

The sleep 0.2 ensures the old zigshell-cairo-pango process has fully exited before starting a new one. Without it, the new instance might fail to bind to the layer shell.

4. Clipboard After zigshell-cairo-pango¶

pkill -f "wl-paste.*cliphist" 2>/dev/null || true
pkill -f "wl-paste.*watch" 2>/dev/null || true
sleep 0.1
wl-paste --type text/plain --watch cliphist store 2>/dev/null &

Stale wl-paste processes from a previous compositor session must be killed first, or clipboard history breaks.

Common Failures¶

Symptom	Likely Cause
zigshell-cairo-pango has no icons	DBus not set up, or icon theme not loaded
Volume widget shows 0%	`ocws-daemon.sh` started before zigshell-cairo-pango
Clipboard doesn't persist	`wl-paste` started before `cliphist`
Screen doesn't lock	`swayidle` started before `swaylock` is available
Notification popup missing	`mako`/`dunst` started before DBus