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Artix and Cosmic DE?

Hi all!

Straight to the point: will Artix work well -or at all- with the new "Cosmic" DE by System76?

I'm curious about it since it was first announced and, as this new desktop environment has just been released (https://system76.com/cosmic), I wished to test it somehow.
However I've just landed on Artix Linux after a year of MX Linux, to kind of check if I could do without systemd in a debian way before switching to an Arch based distro, so I'm not too confident tweaking it yet. Hence my request for advice to the community: has anyone any experience with DEs having systemd dependencies? Or I should not be scared about the references to systemd folders in the related install documentation for Arch while installing the DE from the AUR?
Apologies if I may have some misconception of it all, I use to see at myself as an advanced noob, taking bits and pieces of knowledge about Linux for about only 5 years now...

Anyway -thanks to anyone willing to provide opinions and/or support about this! ;D
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As some say "Take your Art(ix) and store it apart(ix)"(?) :P

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #1 –
Cosmic yet has to prove itself in many ways. It's still in Alpha phase, so currently only suited for testing and bug reporting.
Several sources state Cosmic is Wayland only, and time will tell how well it integrates with non PopOS systems.

artist

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #2 –
LOL the 2 things I detest in Linux... systemd and wayland
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #3 –
Thank you for the clear reply Artist, I guess I will drop off the alpha-hype train for Cosmic then, at least for the moment ;)

That said, if anyone tries it out and would like to report here, I'll gladly read it!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
As some say "Take your Art(ix) and store it apart(ix)"(?) :P

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #4 –
Currently cosmic epoch has a "hard" dependency on systemd due to a bug https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-session/issues/55 I did patch it out locally to try this and it seemed to have some issues causing cosmic-panel to constantly crash and be restarted and the log is too verbose for me to manually go through, I only have a VM to use artix with, so it's hard for me to actually properly compile everything myself so I cheaped out and used chaotic aur compiled apps, which is what I actually believe the source of the issue to be.

I would say it's worth it if you don't mind wayland.

everything else I tested seems to work, as for services, cosmic-greeter is the only one that needs attentions, it has a dbus config service and a systemd service, the systemd service just starts greetd pointing to cosmic-greeter.toml

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #5 –
I've built all Cosmic and dependent packages from source, including some patches created by users. This to get a clear picture of what this desktop looks like and can do.

My observations:
- building some of these packages takes quite a lot of resources, including build times
- some packages need 8GB of memory or more or the build will crash
- the only alternative then is to link in serial mode
- there are many relations to systemd specific components, like journald, a systemd service and several commands in core programs
- there are quite a few patches offered by independent developers, to alleviate the need for systemd but their pull requests are not being merged
- even a question from a user on how start Cosmic on non-systemd systems falls on deaf ears: What is the correct flow to start COSMIC?

I realize this is alpha quality software, but there seem to be no sign of current or future support for non-systemd systems. There seems a big marketing and PR push behind this Cosmic desktop - the number of recently published articles about it is staggering - which raises high expectations with users who after reading about all its merits want to have a look and try for themselves. I'm afraid for non-systemd systems they will be mostly disappointed for the time being.

Now as to the test results; all that needs to be done is to start Cosmic is start it via sddm, gdm, greetd, etc, or manually via command start-cosmic. Both ways were tried on two different machines.
- In Wayland the only output was 'error=1', maybe caused by some missing specific requirement like apparently a fully specified LC. Setting that and multiple XDG ones and more did not result in anything graphical starting up.
- Under X (not sure if this is supposed to work at all) half a screen shows up with a black background and something that looks like a gnome dock, which hangs, restarts, repeat.

Some users seem to get better results - as in a partially working desktop - but it is far from clear how to reproduce that.

Imho, the users of non-systemd systems cannot yet take the Cosmic desktop for serious, as long and the reciprocity holds true.

artist

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #6 –
Cosmic is made in rust using https://github.com/Smithay/smithay that is for rust wayland compositors (and it is rust again).
So it's gonna take some time to compile (rust has long compiling time) and there is no X version.

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #7 –
I was able to get it fully working just fine with one caveate when using the pkgbuild scripts I have here https://github.com/Quackdoc/pkgbuild-scripts/tree/Master/cosmic-epoch by simply changing the source of cosmic-session and cosmic-notifications to the forks that unbreaks the journald stuff.

I have yet to add all the needed deps, but I think I got most of it last night. the one caveat I hit was for some reason the network applet they have uses 100% cpu usage, maybe I misconfigured networkmanager, it's the first time i've installed artix that hasn't been a dumb chroot. Pulse needs to be running too, or else the audio applet also bugs out with 100% cpu usage, if using pipewire, make sure to have both pipewire pulse working, as well as a session manager, because without a session manager installed and running, it too bugs out with 100% cpu usage.

You do need a couple things, cosmic-launcher does need a properly set locale (C.UTF-8 is no good, needs a proper lang locale). Cosmic-files now requires you to link it using the mold linker for some reason, lld bugs out when trying to link zstd since cosmic-files pulled in the "zip" dependency. Otherwise it's mostly a typical install for something you need to compile yourself.

It seems like artix has a sysusers implementation, so all you need to do is change the "command = " part of the greetd toml to just `cosmic-comp cosmic-greeter` and it will work fine, I didn't test the daemon since even on arch I found that really buggy, and iirc it only exists to get the background you have set for user 1000 and set it for the background for the greeter anyways, which is hardly essential.

Using some arch packages like "extra/cosmic-terminal" does work, but I found it to be a tad buggy, so I would reccomend setting up sccache, mold, and compiling. I have only tested for a few hours now, but locking, screen controls, suspend etc, all seem to work as expected.

xwayland isn't working for some reason though. Need to look into that still.

EDIT: should have checked my emails, patches for cosmic-session has been merged, just waiting on cosmic-notifications now.

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #8 –
@Quackdoc, I'm here :)

> building some of these packages takes quite a lot of resources, including build times
> some packages need 8GB of memory or more or the build will crash

Totally agree. That's rust in pure joy.

> if using pipewire, make sure to have both pipewire pulse working

I managed to make the sound work without pulse. Just using pipewire and wireplumber

> Cosmic-files now requires you to link it using the mold linker for some reason

I can link it without mold. Take a look: https://github.com/porteux/porteux/blob/1.7/003-cosmic/cosmic/cosmic-files/cosmic-files.SlackBuild

My issues so far using PorteuX distro:

1. can't force cosmic-greeter to show the login screen (https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-greeter/issues/95#issuecomment-2318635993)

2. network tray icon is there, but it doesn't work (https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-applets/issues/576)

3. .desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart are not initialized during boot (https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-session/issues/67) -- solving that will fix sound not working, including tray icon

4. cosmic-greeter lock screen only works via shortcut (super + escape). Click on it via panel doesn't do anything (apart from deselecting the hover highlight)

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #9 –
> I managed to make the sound work without pulse. Just using pipewire and wireplumber

Good to know, I had only tried it with pulse, but if it works without that's good to know

> I can link it without mold. Take a look:
Ill take a look at those build flags and see if I can dump it into my pkgbuilds

> 1. can't force cosmic-greeter to show the login screen

The login screen only shows when the greeter is launched using `cosmic-greeter` user, I suspect that might be the issue if you haven't set that  https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-greeter/blob/cd9fc48c6f26dd3a293353c4d233fbe09c37e24d/src/main.rs#L8

> 2. network tray icon is there, but it doesn't work

Haven't experienced that myself, if you run cosmic-comp via cli, and RUST_LOG=trace cosmic-panel you might be able to grab logs from it

> 3. .desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart are not initialized during boot

I havent used autostart in a long time so I can't comment, seems like something cosmic-session will need to support eventually.

> 4. cosmic-greeter lock screen only works via shortcut (super + escape). Click on it via panel doesn't do anything (apart from deselecting the hover highlight)

does "loginctl lock-screen work"? Another thing im wondering, lock suspend etc, in cosmic stuff uses dbus, so making sure the dbus stuff is working is fairly important.
 

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #10 –
So it can work, but what are the requirements for users to get it started and working correctly? These need to be documented:
- what packages need to be installed, not only for the DE itself
- what needs to be setup like eg. env vars, configs, etc
- what way(s) can it be started
- is anything else required

artist

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #11 –
Quote from: Artist – on
So it can work, but what are the requirements for users to get it started and working correctly? These need to be documented:
- what packages need to be installed, not only for the DE itself
- what needs to be setup like eg. env vars, configs, etc
- what way(s) can it be started
- is anything else required

artist

still working on figuring this out for artix. I plan on testing a clean install soon. but for now ill jot my thoughts, cosmic-notifications need patched just bumped the PR since maybe it too was forgotten about. cosmic-session needs to be installed which will pull all of the hard dependencies... hopefully, NetworkManager and pulse or pipewire is needed for the cosmic applets. power-profiles OR systemd-power is optional, cosmic-settings use systemd's timedate for setting timezone, that's the only thing left that has a hard requirement on systemd that artix doesn't provide. if it doesn't have it, it simply doesn't populate the timezones, everything else works. Cosmic only updates the time when the timezone is changed, so an NTP provider will be wanted, but not necessary.

Cosmic-greeter uses sysusers which works on artix, You can launch cosmic using start-cosmic which is what the wayland sessions desktop file does. This needs either a service pointing to the cosmic config, or editing the greetd service, or editing the greetd config.

cosmic-store needs flatpak installed to compile,

I didn't set anything special for env vars, and havent modified any other vars

EDIT: but yeah, it's rough in terms of compile resources, especially cosmic-applets which can cause an OOM even with 8gbs of ram.

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #12 –
You can make swap to avoid OOM (but it will be slower when it uses it instead of ram).

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #13 –
I totally forgot, we need a service, or really something, to start xdg-desktop-portal, cosmic-session does not handle that itself. Im not sure if it's supposed to, or if we just make our own service.

Re: Artix and Cosmic DE?

Reply #14 –
The Cosmic desktop is now in the https://wiki.artixlinux.org/Main/Repositories#Omniverse repository.

From https://omniverse.artixlinux.org/x86_64/cosmic-1st-read-me.txt :


Cosmic Desktop for Artix Linux


Do NOT USE on Production systems (alpha status software).


A basic install can be done via package 'cosmic-session' or group 'cosmic'.


To start the cosmic session use a display manager like eg. SDDM, or run command: start-cosmic


The cosmic packages group:

cosmic-icon-theme
just
cosmic-applets
cosmic-app-library
cosmic-bg
cosmic-comp
cosmic-files
cosmic-greeter
pop-icon-theme
fd
pop-launcher
cosmic-launcher
cosmic-notifications
cosmic-osd
cosmic-panel
cosmic-randr
xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic
cosmic-screenshot
cosmic-settings
cosmic-settings-daemon
cosmic-store (requires flatpack to install some packages)
cosmic-terminal
cosmic-text-editor
cosmic-wallpapers
cosmic-workspaces
cosmic-session


Additional cosmic packages:

clipboard-manager-git
minimon-applet-for-cosmic
quick-webapps
examine-git
cosmic-ext-forecast-git
cosmic-ext-calculator-git
cosmic-ext-tweaks-git
tasks-git
emoji-selector-applet-for-cosmic-git
cosmic-edit-git
apps-menu-applet-for-cosmic-git
cosmic-icons-git-git
places-status-indicator-applet-for-cosmic-git
cosmic-ext-applet-ollama-git
cosmic-ext-applet-external-monitor-brightness-git


artist