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# COSMIC

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- Desktop environment
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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-gitAUR, beware the cosmic-applets-gitAUR 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.

## See also

- System76 Blog
- Pop!_OS Welcome Page

Category:

- Desktop environments

COSMIC
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