COSMIC

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COSMIC is a desktop environment built by System76 in Rust.

Installation

Overlay

The fsvm88's cosmic-overlay provides all necessary packages.

It can be added with the following command:

root #eselect repository add cosmic-overlay git https://github.com/fsvm88/cosmic-overlay

Unmasking unstable ebuilds

For the latest tagged release, unmask the packages in /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/cosmic-de (or whatever file is preferred):

FILE /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/cosmic-deUnmasking unstable ebuilds

cosmic-de/*

Unmasking live ebuilds

To try out the latest commits from master branch, unmask the packages in /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/cosmic-de (or whatever file is preferred):

FILE /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/cosmic-deUnmasking unstable ebuilds

# live ebuilds are masked via "missing" keywords
cosmic-de/* **

Emerging

After unmasking the ebuilds, COSMIC can be installed by emerging the following packages.

root #emerge cosmic-meta pop-theme-meta

Configuration

Configuration process is a bit different on systems with and without systemd.

systemd

OpenRC

greetd

The most convenient way of login management while using COSMIC is using greetd.

First of all, display-manager-init, greetd and elogind need to be installed:

root #emerge gui-libs/display-manager-init gui-libs/greetd sys-auth/elogind

greetd needs to be configured as a display manager. That can be achieved with the following configuration:

FILE /etc/conf.d/display-managergreetd with cosmic-greeter

CHECKVT=7
DISPLAYMANAGER="greetd"

Make sure that the following services are enabled:

root #rc-update add elogind boot

root #rc-update add dbus default

root #rc-update add display-manager default

At the end, greetd needs to be configured to run cosmic-greeter as a frontend. It's very important to run it as cosmic-greeter user.

FILE /etc/greetd/config.tomlgreetd with cosmic-greeter

[terminal]
vt = 7

[default_session]
command = "/usr/bin/cosmic-comp /usr/bin/cosmic-greeter"
user = "cosmic-greeter"

After that, reboot the machine. If everything went well, a password prompt will appear and then COSMIC can be started.