Preliminary support for NVIDIA drivers has been added to Garuda Sway

Note that the Sway project itself does not support using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers (Home · swaywm/sway Wiki · GitHub), but they can be made to work by passing the --unsupported-gpu flag when launching Sway (Sway - ArchWiki).

The new Sway ISO includes some accommodations to provide this flag when the NVIDIA driver is in use, including when booting to the live environment. With any luck, installing Garuda Sway should Just Work^TM when NVIDIA hardware is in use.

How does it work?

For now we are using a wrapper script for launching Sway. Essentially the script checks if NVIDIA drivers are loaded, launches Sway with the --unsupported-gpu flag if they are, and launches it normally if not.

The wrapper script is used by the display manager, and has also been added to a custom session desktop file that the greeter uses for launching the session.

At some point, we will be able to drop the wrapper script and custom desktop file in favor of implementing the SWAY_UNSUPPORTED_GPU environment variable instead. This was added as an option with the 1.12 release of Sway (Release 1.12 · swaywm/sway · GitHub). Unfortunately, we are still waiting for SwayFX to rebase off of this new version (see related issue Sway 1.12 based version · Issue #532 · WillPower3309/swayfx · GitHub), so for now we will stick with the wrapper script and custom desktop file.

How can I test it out?

Download the testing build from here: Index of /iso/garuda/sway/260705/

Any ISO from 260705 onward includes “out of the box” accommodations for installing on NVIDIA hardware with the proprietary drivers. Note the download link from the main webpage is still an older release. To test this new feature, you will need to download a newer release (260705 or later) from the ISO Builds page.

Boot the ISO and choose the “Boot allowing proprietary drivers” option to see if it works.

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It typically takes a few minutes to reach the desktop with this setting due to installing the drivers on the fly for use in the live environment. If you get to the desktop, great! That means it’s working.

If you decide to complete the installation, be sure to choose the “Sway + NVIDIA” session at the login screen–that is the custom desktop file we are using for now.

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If you don’t have NVIDIA hardware, it should still work if you boot the ISO and choose “Boot allowing proprietary drivers”!

It’s not working!

Be sure to post your hardware details to the thread to see if we can surface an issue that needs to be addressed. Please, unrelated issues should be brought up in a separate topic.

Some edge cases with old or unusual hardware configurations may not work on the live ISO correctly, just like with any other desktop environment. If that happens to you, try installing Sway with the open source drivers instead. After the installation is complete, reboot and install the NVIDIA packages using the Setup Assistant. Reboot one more time to relaunch Sway after the drivers are installed. The wrapper script should still work, regardless of when the driver installation occurs.

Also featured on this ISO are new wallpapers by @elite and @TilliDie!

Both wallpapers are in the 2026 Garuda Artwork Contest thread, be sure to check it out!