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Cosmic Desktop

Installing COSMIC desktop on Fedora 42

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Installing COSMIC on Fedora 42

COSMIC is a desktop environment created in Rust from the ground up. Cosmic is written for the wayland protocol so there is no legacy code floating around like in gnome. Some of the features that caught my eye are the modular design, customization, tiling and floating windows combination. And to be honest, Rust is my current obsession so anything written in Rust is worth my while.

Install COSMIC

The installation in Fedora is pretty easy, I almost skip adding a header for this because it’s really only two group install commands, kudos to the Fedora COSMIC team because these groups have all the packages needed for a smooth installation.

~# dnf update -y
~# dnf group install -y cosmic-desktop
~# dnf group install -y cosmic-desktop-apps

Configure desktop

Most of the configuration is done with the cosmic settings “applet” but there are a bunch of directories with configuration files under ~/.config/cosmic. Most of the configuration options for the native COSMIC applications have an import button which suggests that you can share your configurations in plain files. I like this focus better than the GConf windowesque design.

Usage Experience

Pros

The look and feel of the whole desktop is very pleasing and it works with expected behaviours. I found the options that I wanted to change in a very intutive way. My native language is spanish and it was a very nice surprise to see that COSMIC recognized this setting and it got setup in spanis, also, most of the options of the native applications are in the correct language.

Cons

There are some stuff that still feels a little rough like: missing like image previews in file selectors, the screen capture application does not record video and some icons look a little pixelated in the Dock.

  • Can’t copy paste from vim (the mouse=a worked too well)
  • If I disable hibernate the sceen does not auto lock.
  • After unlocking the screen everything is unstable: missing workspaces the dock does no autohide
  • I had to kill -HUP cosmic-workspaces
  • terminal can’t move tabs, changed to ptyxis

Conclusion

The installation and basic configuration were very terse and the all around experience is very good. I will definetely use it as my main desktop for the next months.

References