What is Cosmic DE?
The Cosmic DE is a new desktop environment being developed by the team behind Pop!_OS, a popular Linux distribution. Unlike their previous efforts, which built upon GNOME, the Cosmic DE is a ground-up development using Rust and a custom compositor built on Smithay, aiming for a lightweight, responsive, and customizable user interface.
Its most notable feature is, tiling window management with stacking, and a more integrated experience with the Pop!_OS ecosystem, enhancing performance and user control. It aims to offer a modern alternative to existing desktop environments, designed specifically for Linux users’ needs.
Installing Cosmic on Arch
When it comes to installing Cosmic DE, it has now become as easy as ever thanks to the ArchInstall script included on every Arch ISO starting v2.8.5. Yes, even though it’s still in Alpha stages, for whatever reason, it has now made its way to the Extra repo on Arch.
Now I will not be going through how to use the ArchInstall script here, just watch the included video which covers it all. If you chose this Distro, then you should know how to use it by now lol.
As you can see from the video above, all you have to do it grab the latest Arch ISO, boot into it and launch the ArchInstall then go through the motions as usual. I would change up the command a bit like so, making sure we are always running the latest version of the script :
pacman -Syy archinstall && archinstall --advanced
As mentioned in the video the --advanced flag is required to unlock the Cosmic DE desktop profile. The reason it’s hidden should be clear enough, in case it’s not, well it’s because it’s in Alpha and no one sane enough who requires any kind of stability should install it.
Also, note the issue with the Cosmic Greeter, it could be that the maintainer of the packages on Arch forgot to include it or something else. If you are trying it way after this was written, maybe it’s been fixed, if not then do as shown below to fix it.
Once all packages are installed, Before you exit chroot n reboot use this command :
pacman -Syy cosmic-greeter
systemctl enable cosmic-greeter.service
Now that this is fixed, I would like to take this oportunity to mention that there’s 2 more missing packages that ArchInstall failed to include, those are xdg-user-dirs which is resonsible for creating you user folders, like Dicuments, Pictures, Videos..., and finally the power-profiles-daemon tool that allows you to switch power profiles, so to fix those do this…
pacman -Syy xdg-user-dirs power-profiles-daemon
xdg-user-dirs-update && systemctl enable power-profiles-daemon.service
Done ! All missing essential features fixed. Keep in mind that it’s only natural for them to exist, project is still in Alpha stages, a lot of things need to be addressed. Give it time to mature before judging it, and more importantly report all the bugs related to it or any feature requests you might have upstream, to the Cosmic Bug Tracker
Customization
As we know, Cosmic DE will be highly customizable out of the box. It comes between Gnome and KDE Plasma. Meaning we can modify it more than the former but less than the latter. Still in my opinion that’s awesome.
There are some caveats however, those being that Qt apps are still not fully supported eg. Kvantum, especially if you are used to the tried and true Global Menu which will not be officially supported as it’s way too complex according to the devs. Also the Blur effect not there yet. Maybe in the future someone will port it over ? I dunno about LibAdwaita though, from what I have heard, support coming not yet there.
So if you are looking for consistency, it will be a long while before we can achieve it. Still, this did not stop some theme developers from porting their themes over to it. So if you would like to try them out, just head on over to the » Cosmic-Themes “store” and grab the one(s) you like. Importing the .ron files is easy just open Settings > Desktop > Desktop & Panel > Import, then select file n see it apply immediately.
Wrapping up
As mentioned, I would highly recommend you install Cosmic DE on a spare non-essential device since it’s still Alpha 1 software. And you will need modern enough hardware that has full support for Wayland since it doesn’t nor will it ever have X11 support.
However, if you are an Arch power user and prefer to do it the manual way, you can. Just head on over to the wonderful ArchWiki and follow the instructions there. I would recommend it over ArchInstall as you can do more and have more flexibility.
Finally if you don’t want to use it on Arch, you can grab their Official Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS alpha ISO from » Cosmic Downloads. They also have instructions for other Distros like Fedora, NixOS and more…
If you want to know what I think of this DE, and read how my experience with it went, check this post on » DarkXero’s Bytes
I hope this post has proven to be useful.
Cheers !