COSMIC Desktop

Currently an incomplete pre-alpha.

Components of COSMIC Desktop

• cosmic-applets
• cosmic-applet-host
• cosmic-applibrary
• cosmic-comp
• xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic
• cosmic-launcher
• cosmic-osd
• comsic-panel
• cosmic-settings
• cosmic-settings-daemon
• cosmic-session
• cosmic-theme
• cosmic-theme-editor
• libcosmic

Setup

The COSMIC desktop environment requires a few dependencies: (This list does not try to be exhaustive, but rather tries to provide a decent starting point. For detailed instructions check out the individual projects):

• just
• rustc
• libwayland-dev
• mesa (or third-party libEGL/libGL implementations, though interfacing with mesa's libglvnd is generally recommended).
• libseat-dev
• libxkbcommon-dev
• libinput-dev
• libgtk-4-1
• udev
• dbus

optionally (though the build-system might currently require these libraries):

• libsystemd-dev
• libpulse-dev
• pop-launcher
• libexpat1-dev
• libfontconfig-dev
• libfreetype-dev
• lld

The required ones can be installed with:

sudo apt install just rustc libglvnd-dev libwayland-dev libseat-dev libxkbcommon-dev libinput-dev libgtk-4-1 udev dbus -y

and the optional ones with:

sudo apt install libsystemd-dev libpulse-dev pop-launcher libexpat1-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype-dev lld -y

They can be installed all at once with:

sudo apt install just rustc libglvnd-dev libwayland-dev libseat-dev libxkbcommon-dev libinput-dev libgtk-4-1 udev dbus libsystemd-dev libpulse-dev pop-launcher libexpat1-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype-dev lld -y

Testing

The easiest way to test COSMIC DE currently is by building a systemd system extension (see man systemd-sysext).

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch
cd cosmic-epoch
just sysext

This will create a system-extension called cosmic-sysext, that you can move (without renaming!) into e.g. /var/lib/extensions. After starting systemd-sysext.service (sudo systemctl enable --now systemd-sysext) and refreshing (sudo systemd-sysext refresh) or rebooting, COSMIC will be an available option in your favorite display manager.

Note: An extension created this way will be linked against specific libraries on your system and will not work on other distributions. It also requires the previously mentioned libraries/dependencies at runtime to be installed in your system (the system extension does not carry these libraries).

It is thus no proper method for long term deployment.

Packaging

COSMIC DE is packaged for Pop!_OS. For reference look at the debian folders in the projects repositories. These and the justfile inside this repository may be used as references on how to package COSMIC DE, though no backwards-compatibility guarantees are provided at this stage.

Versioning

COSMIC DE is very much still work-in-progress and thus does not follow a versioning scheme so far. We do our best to keep the referenced submodule commits in this repository building and working together, as a consequence they might not contain the latest updates and features from these repositories (yet).

Notes on versioning and packaging all these components together properly will be added at a later stage once COSMIC DE gets its first release.