COSMIC

File:/todo.png

cosmic screenshot.

COSMIC is the desktop environment from System76. COSMIC was originally the name of a modified version of GNOME made specifically for Pop! OS, but it is now a standalone desktop environment built from scratch using a custom toolkit called "libcosmic" that is based upon the iced toolkit and is written almost entirely in the Rust programming language. COSMIC is intended to be highly portable and does not expect systemd.

The COSMIC desktop is beta software and is currently only available from Edge's testing repository.

Prerequisites

• Internet connectivity, unless the packages have been pre-fetched into a local cache.
• Install appropriate Graphics driver drivers for your hardware. Without graphics drivers, errors are likely to occur when starting your desktop.
• A non-root user account with appropriate groups for desktop usage.
• The community repository must be enabled.
• Set up eudev.
• Install and enable D-Bus. Without D-Bus, icons and keyboard shortcuts may be missing.
• Enable Elogind service

Tip: Except for the first two prerequisites, all the others have been automatically handled if another Wayland desktop (e.g. Sway) had been installed using the setup-desktop script.

Manual Installation

Most of the desktop can be installed as follows, having previously tagged the testing repository:

$ doas apk add cosmic-session@testing

This does not include some of the applications like cosmic-term and cosmic-edit. They can all be installed with:

$ doas apk add $(apk search cosmic* -q | sed 's/.*/&@testing/')

Note: Polkit and eudev are optional services for authentication and device management, respectively. While COSMIC will function without these services enabled, some functionality may be missing or incomplete.

Starting COSMIC

COSMIC can be started using a display manager or from the console:

start-cosmic

See also

• Post installation
• COSMIC - postmarketOS
• COSMIC - Arch