COSMIC

Related articles
Desktop environment
greetd
COSMIC
is a
desktop environment
developed in the
Rust
programming language, using the
iced
cross platform GUI library for Rust, and
Smithay
as building blocks for its compositor, cosmic-comp. Cosmic-comp is comparable to smithay's own anvil compositor demonstration, just like the
Wayland
project uses Weston as demo compositor. Its first release is called
Epoch
.
Installation
COSMIC can be
installed
via
cosmic-session
or the
cosmic
group.
Tip
When building
cosmic-session-git
AUR
, beware the
cosmic-applets-git
AUR
dependency needs more than 8GB of RAM. Restricting linking to one job is an option to get it built. If you build it repeatedly, setting the
CARGO_TARGET_DIR
environment variable
helps downloading less often:
MOLD_JOBS=1 CARGO_TARGET_DIR=
/tmp/mytarget
Individual components coming as dependencies of cosmic-session
COSMIC comprises a compositor, library, and applets, which may be installed as parts.
cosmic-comp
,
cosmic-applets
,
cosmic-app-library
,
cosmic-bg
,
cosmic-icon-theme
,
cosmic-launcher
,
cosmic-notifications
, on screen display to overlay messages with
cosmic-osd
, a dock and panel with
cosmic-panel
,
cosmic-settings
, and others.
Independent components
An editor,
cosmic-text-editor
, a file manager
cosmic-files
, a terminal,
cosmic-terminal
, a multimedia player
cosmic-player
, and wallpapers,
cosmic-wallpapers
are provided.
Network shares in COSMIC Files
To connect to network shares in COSMIC Files, the relevant
GVFS
package needs to be installed:
Protocol
Package
AppleTalk
gvfs
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
gvfs
Network File System (NFS)
gvfs-nfs
Server Message Block (SMB)
gvfs-smb
SSH
gvfs
WebDAV
gvfs-dnssd
COSMIC doesn't provide a secrets store/keyring, so to remember passwords, install a secrets storage component such as
gnome-keyring
. See also
GNOME/Keyring
.
Starting
The easiest way to start COSMIC is through a
display manager
, where it will show up as an additional option after installation, alongside
GNOME
,
KDE Plasma
, etc.
To start COSMIC directly from the console, run:
$ start-cosmic
Using Cosmic Greeter
COSMIC ships
cosmic-greeter
, a
display manager
based on
greetd
. To use it,
enable
cosmic-greeter.service
.
Configuration
The
panel
can be used to configure besides using the settings applet,
examples of applets
are provided.
SSH_AUTH_SOCK not set
The
$SSH_AUTH_SOCK not set
message appears briefly at login with Cosmic Login Manager when the variable has not been properly configured for use with SSH.
To use the GNOME Keyring as a wrapper around ssh-agent that automatically sets this variable, see
GNOME/Keyring#Setup gcr
To use the systemd service and manually set the environment variable, see
SSH keys#Start ssh-agent with systemd user
.
Night light
Because COSMIC DE does not yet implement the
wlr-gamma-control-unstable-v1
Wayland protocol (see
pop-os/cosmic-comp#2059
), tools like wlsunset and gammastep cannot control
backlight
color temperature from within a COSMIC session.
To work around this issue, you can directly adjust DRM gamma tables via libdrm from a TTY before the COSMIC DE compositor launches, using tools like
redshift
or
gammastep
. Another option is to use
drm-colortemp
or
nebula-drm-git
AUR
which rely on a systemd service to automate the process.
See also
COSMIC Welcome Page
System76 Blog
Pop!_OS Welcome Page