How to change the login screen background in Fedora Sway spin

When I recently gave the “Sway Spin” of Fedora Workstation (a version of Fedora that comes with the Sway tiling window manager preinstalled) a try, it took me a while to figure out how to change the background of the login screen. After some messing about with configuration of sddm - the login manager - I got it to work for the initial login after booting the computer. However, after a while I noticed that when swaylock gets triggered from a Systemd event, e.g. when you close your laptop’s lid or when you use the physical “lock” key that you may have on you keyboard, it still showed the old background, because this part has nothing to do with sddm.

As it turns out, the easy way is to put your desired background where the system expects the background image to be. Conveniently, the expected path is just a symlink, so you could do the following:

$ sudo mv $HOME/new-background.png /usr/share/backgrounds/new-background.png
$ sudo rm /usr/share/backgrounds/default.png
$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/backgrounds/new-background.png /usr/share/backgrounds/default.png

And that’s all there is to it, the new background should now be active.