Yardy Sardley

Did you only try F2? It’s possible the graphical session is on tty2 - see if ctl+alt+F1/ 3 does anything

You should look into kodi. It’s a big screen oriented media player/organizer app.

Not sure if sarcasm or actual disinformation. You’re not supposed to trust the aur, that’s kinda the whole point of it. The build scripts are transparent enough to allow users to manage their own risk, and at no point does building a package require root access.

A really common issue with sway is that it doesn’t run as a login shell, so none of your .profile or other environment settings get sourced when you login. I think that might be the problem here.

Try closing your sway session, then login to a tty and run sway. If the qt themes work properly then it’s definitely an environment issue.

Fellow Arch user here (btw). It’s exactly the same as building AUR packages. Clone a git repo containing a PKGBUILD, use makepkg to build it, and pacman to install it. The nice thing is you can host a repo of your built packages and install them on other systems really easily. The big downside is that dependency management is not automated, so it will take some time and annoyance to map out what packages you need to build and in what order, if you want a fully source-bootstrapped system.