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atrium

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atrium is a Wayland display manager with first-class multiseat support. In a multiseat setup, multiple users share a single machine, each with their own monitor, keyboard, and mouse and an independent login session. atrium handles each seat automatically: it discovers seats, presents a login screen, authenticates users via PAM, and launches their Wayland compositor.

Note atrium supports Wayland sessions only. X11 sessions are not supported.

Installation

Install atriumAUR.

Configuration

Note The default configuration works for most single-seat and standard multiseat setups. This step can be skipped unless something does not work or you need to customise compositor selection.

atrium reads two configuration files at startup:

  • /etc/atrium.conf — daemon settings (compositor command, session policy, timeouts)
  • /etc/atrium-greeter.conf — greeter settings (font size, screen blanking timeout, passwordless users)

Both files are installed with commented-out defaults. Refer to the inline comments for available options.

atrium discovers available sessions from /usr/share/wayland-sessions/. Any installed Wayland compositor that provides a .desktop file there will appear on the login screen automatically.

Starting

To start atrium, enable atrium.service and restart.

Note
  • Before enabling the systemd service, disable any other display manager.
  • Starting it immediately will terminate any active graphical session.

Multiseat

atrium has built-in multiseat support. Each seat requires its own GPU; atrium discovers seats via logind and launches an independent greeter on each one. Devices must be assigned to seats with loginctl attach, but no additional configuration is needed.

See Multiseat Setup Guide for a step-by-step device assignment guide.

Known limitations

  • Limited hotplug — GPU or seat removal/addition at runtime is not yet fully handled. Restart atrium to recover (this ends active sessions).
  • No SIGKILL escalation — compositors that ignore SIGTERM are waited on indefinitely.

See also