I’ve been dabbling with this. I like what I see so far and am looking forward to the finished release.
For the record, I’ve installed Cosmic alongside Plasma on two computers.
I have an Intel NUC that I use for playing with new things and it doesn’t matter if anything gets nuked, Cosmic runs nicely and already seems well polished.
My main PC is an AMD Ryzen AM5 self-built system, and booting into Cosmic results in little more than a screen full of visual static. Not sure what’s going on there, maybe my graphics card is too old, or Cosmic doesn’t like my Displayport/ultrawide screen combo. But it doesn’t interfere with the running of Plasma at all, apart from taking over a few app defaults.
I installed Cosmic as per Joe’s instructions and it installed fine.
I just wish Archlinux ARM would include the Cosmic packages in their repos. It would be interesting to see if Cosmic would be snappier for ARM devices.
I read Joe 4 times. We make some terminal moves in our own distros…then shut down? And restart with the live USB?
And with the live USB we are not creating a partition? Unless Cosmic was just a package Gnome installed (see login picture at your link) then why did we need the live environment?
I’m obviously very confused :). I have always coveted Cosmic from afar. Is this such a beast that would pair (Alpha and warts and all) with Cinnamon?
The reason it is a little confusing is because there are multiple different instructions there, depending on how you want to handle the display manager. He has included a few different options. But the document doesn’t really come out and say that, so if you just read through it thinking it is a bunch of different things you have to do it is a little confusing.
All of the steps are done from the live environment. Those instructions are specifically for installing COSMIC alone (i.e. not on top of another DE), so no need to have an existing installation at all. You can nuke & pave on a spare machine, or set up a dual-boot in the Calamares installer…whatever you want. But all of the steps are from the live environment.
Before starting the installer, run this command to pull down the COSMIC package list:
This adds the extra packages to user_pkglist.txt, which is a special file specifically for adding custom packages to the installation routine.
You can use this file to add custom packages to any installation, by the way. If you are doing a fresh installation and want to have a few packages installed right off the bat, just toss them in this file. Read through this link if you want to learn more about that: https://discovery.endeavouros.com/installation/customizing-the-endeavouros-install-process/2022/03/. In this case, Joe is using user_pkglist.txt to add the base COSMIC packages to the regular installation routine.
The next step changes one of the Calamares modules by replacing services-systemd.conf with a custom version of the file.
The custom version is the same as the regular version, except cosmic-greeter.service has been added (so Calamares will look for this service, and enable it if it is found).
Note that you only need to enable cosmic-greeter.service if you want to use that greeter (basically a front end for Greetd, the display manager they are using). If you want to try COSMIC, I would say go all the way and test out the new greeter too, but if you would rather use SDDM (the display manger KDE uses) instead of Greetd, the next command is for doing the same setup with that instead.
Here is a picture (I will bill you for 1,000 words ):
Once you run the command(s) appropriate for your display manager choice, start the installer and choose “no desktop”. The installer runs like normal from there, and you can make all the choices you are familiar with. If you want to install alongside another distro or installation, just do it the way you normally would in Calamares.
That screenshot shows GDM in use, which was apparently tested but not documented in the notes like Greetd or SDDM are. If you want to use GDM, just do it the SDDM way but edit user_pkglist.txt and replace sddm with gdm before you start the installer.
I think it is fair to say that it shouldn’t be paired with another DE at this time. Probably it should just be installed on its own. Installing it on top of another DE may create issues that are difficult to troubleshoot or resolve.
Hopefully that clears it up a bit, and also hopefully I didn’t over-explain that or make it more confusing somehow.
I auditioned Big Ern (bill murray) from the Kingpin Movie. Didn’t like it. Went back to Random Color but it was beige instead of my old baby blue so I just used a solid wallpaper I liked.
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