New package: cosmic-1.5.0

[benjcal]

Testing the changes

• I tested the changes in this PR: YES

New package

• This new package conforms to the package requirements: YES

Local build testing

• I built this PR locally for my native architecture, (x86_64)

[IzumiSenaSora]

Man i just wanted to check if cosmic is available in void linux!
Even though it's not available but this pull request!
It seems cosmic can run without systemd!
Unlike gnome 49+

[benjcal]

Man i just wanted to check if cosmic is available in void linux! Even though it's not available but this pull request! It seems cosmic can run without systemd! Unlike gnome 49+

Have you played with void-packages? You can pull this PR and build it and start playing with it! I'm running it with no systemd and it seems ok... There seems to be something with the sound but idk if that just my system. So testers are welcome!

[vodkanull]

Thanks for working on this!
I just wanted to show some support. A few days ago I asked in r/voidlinux why COSMIC wasn't in the official repositories yet (I really like it and have been using MtFBella109 repo). Seeing an actual PR appear so soon after that discussion is great.
I’m going to try building and testing this PR on my system. If I find any issues I’ll report them here.
Thanks again for taking the time to package it.

[EllisK-L]

Thanks for getting this PR up! I've been looking forward to it. I built and tested the full cosmic desktop. The issues I've encountered so far are being unable to launch cosmic-launcher, and my mouse doesn't update when hovering over links/buttons/window edges. It just stays as the default arrow.

Anyone able to replicate those issues, or is it just my system?

[benjcal]

@EllisK-L what kind of issue are you seeing with cosmic-launcher? I'm not super familiar with cosmic but I think that is the launcher on the screenshot, right? when I look at ps aux | grep cosmic-launcher I see it running in the background too...

A bit of context about my setup, I'm using sddm to start the cosmic session and I have dbus enabled.

An issue I saw was that my sound was not recognized, but running pipewire on a terminal got it working, so it seems to be related in how I have pipewire configured to autostart and not related to cosmic...

I'm looking forward to hear more opinions and see how the thing is working in other people's machines... I'm still daily-driving plasma out of habit but I think I'm gonna throw some more hours at cosmic to see how stable it feels and what other sharp edges might be found.

[EllisK-L]

I also launched cosmic with sddm, I don't think I tested audio, I can when I'm back at that system.

Here's an example of cosmic-launcher the default shortcut is the super key, but can also open it by just running it as a command. Here's an example on my PopOS 24 system:

[benjcal]

@EllisK-L you are right! Just fixed it, the issue was that cosmic-launcher required the package pop-launcher, so I just added that and now it is working fine!

[benjcal]

Alright, just pushed a few more changes, mostly dealing with adapting COSMIC to Void Linux!

• The big thing: I added elogind as a dependency to cosmic-session, along with the --features autostart configure arg, so it now autostarts things on session start! The audio issues I had are gone since this cleanly autostarts pipewire now.
• Added a no-systemd.patch to cosmic-session to replace systemctl calls with loginctl equivalents (took it from Artix's patch).
• Added a new package, blocaled from linux from scratch book, which cosmic-initial-setup requires to display languages correctly. From the readme: Blocaled provides a stand-alone implementation of the localed D-Bus service.
• Added cosmic-session and greetd as runtime dependencies to cosmic-greeter. (Haven't tested cosmic-session with it yet... I've been using sddm to start the cosmic session.)

Now looking into why the CI is failing blocaled :-)

[IzumiSenaSora]

Update it to COSMIC 1.5.0?

[benjcal]

Update it to COSMIC 1.5.0?

bro... 😄

[glauconeto]

Thank you for making this branch available, I will plan myself to test it in VM and on my test hardware machine.

[benjcal]

To the people here... COSMIC 1.5.0 just dropped... do we polish this version (1.4.0) and get it into void or do we jump straight to 1.5.0?

[EllisK-L]

hmmm, Cosmic gets updates about every week, it's very possible this PR will take another week+ before it's merged. Since we're still pretty early in the testing phase of this PR updating to 1.5 probably wont hurt. But making sure it's polished in Void should be the focus. Up to you though as the PR authour :)

[benjcal]

Alright, COSMIC 1.5.0!

Not much changed in terms of the packaging... just bumped the version on all cosmic templates and regenerated checksums. We also dropped the no-systemd patch for cosmic-session since upstream now wraps systemctl calls in run_optional_command(), so it degrades gracefully on Void without systemd. No new packages or dependency changes needed.

[glauconeto]

Tested in a fresh Void Linux VM using the packages built from this PR.

Installation completed successfully, but I was unable to start a graphical login through greetd.

During testing I found a few integration issues:

• cosmic-greeter installs /usr/lib/sysusers.d/cosmic-greeter.conf and /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/cosmic-greeter.conf, but the cosmic-greeter system user was not created automatically after installation. I had to create it manually, along with its home/runtime directories.

• The package does not provide a greetd configuration (e.g. a cosmic-greeter.toml or equivalent). The default /etc/greetd/config.toml still launches agreety, so manual configuration is required.

• After changing greetd to:

  [default_session]
  command = "cosmic-greeter-start"
  user = "cosmic-greeter"
  

  greetd switched to VT7 but no greeter appeared. The VT became unusable (no login prompt or graphical greeter), requiring switching to another TTY to recover.

• cosmic-greeter-start redirects both stdout and stderr to /dev/null, making it difficult to determine why startup fails.

• I also couldn't find any useful greetd logs by default.

This was tested in a virtual machine, so I can't rule out a VM-specific issue. However, from a packaging/integration perspective, it looks like the current PR is still missing some pieces required for an out-of-the-box greetd setup, or at least some documentation describing the necessary post-installation steps.

[EllisK-L]

I found the issue with the cursor.

Cosmic expects a default cursor to be in the icon theme at /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme

In PopOS 24 the file that exists there contains:

[Icon Theme]
Inherits=Adwaita

When I add that file the cursor reacts how I'd expect. This would require adding a dependency for the adwaita-icon-theme.

[benjcal]

@glauconeto Thank you so much for testing this and reporting back!

I tried before trying to start cosmic via greetd or cosmic-greeter-start but without success... as packaging reference I've been using the PKGBUILD of artix linux, a Arch Linux without systemd, but still with no success.

You are right about the missing cosmic-greeter.toml, I'll add that and give cosmic-greeter another try.

Regarding logging I ended up running the commands in cosmic-greeter-start by hand since it is just a plain script

Also, when I have runit scripts I was able to get logs after setting up socklog... but I'll try to repoduce what you did and see if there's something I can adapt, and then I'll report back :-)

[benjcal]

@EllisK-L I think you are right! I went down the dependencies of cosmic-icon-theme (ours is cosmic-icons matching the upstream repo name) and that depends on pop-os/icon-theme? (this looks like an old dependency not referenced in cosmic-epoch repo)... at any rate, that depends on adwaita-icon-theme...

All of this is to say... I'll add adwaita-icon-theme dependency to cosmic-icons :-)

Also, should cosmic-icons be called cosmic-icon-theme? I see both patterns in our packages... i.e. adwaita-icon-theme and also breeze-icons 🤷

[EllisK-L]

If I recall correctly, void packages are to follow upstream names, including capitalisation. Like how adwaita-icon-theme and breeze-icons are the upstream names.

Then even with that dependency it looks like it needs the file /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme. If I have time I might check how/if Artix solved this.

[benjcal]

@glauconeto ok so, the way to start cosmic from the terminal is not with cosmic-greeter-start but with start-cosmic. cosmic-greeter has quite a few dependencies with systemd that I haven't been able to untangle and I don't think it is realistic to try for this initial release. We can start cosmic either with start-cosmic or with a desktop manager like sddm.

You are more than welcome to try, the debian systemd configs are here.

As for this branch, I think it is ready to merge as soon as all test pass and the admins deem it so :-)

[mendescotta]

Hi, just wanted to share that I've been working on cosmic desktop for void since version 1.3 and have almost everything working including cosmic-greeter. Regarding cosmic launcher, it depends on pop-launcher.
I fixed all issues I came across so far except for a pesky logout racing issue I'm still chasing. My repo is https://codeberg.org/mendescotta/void-packages. I will try bringing it to github to contribute to this PR but I'm still learning about how to contribute and use github properly.

[benjcal]

@mendescotta oh that's awesome! any particular reason to have it as a separate repo? would you mind if I use your templates as reference to get this build working? Thanks a ton for sharing, more than happy to collaborate!

[mendescotta]

Hi @benjcal, only reason was because the groundwork was already done by @MtFBella109 at https://codeberg.org/Bella109/void-packages, I picked up from there. I have brought all my work to github just now https://github.com/mendescotta/void-packages/tree/cosmic-1.5.0-testing, this branch includes a few commits released after 1.5 and ongoing fixes

[glauconeto]

Before know this PR, a while ago, I tested the repository of Bella109. It got very well, except the sound interface, but I got that it was with some conflict with the previous Gnome config. I think I test @mendescotta, I could try some similar experience. I'll test more effectively on the following days, with a fresh installation in my VM.

[benjcal]

@mendescotta thanks a ton for sharing your repo! We got cosmic-greeter working!

I was was looking around I think we've done some very similar work... there's some difference in that I try to avoid patches as much as possible, and actually moving from 1.4.0 to 1.5.0 allowed me to get rid of a few since upstream had changed hard systemd to soft warnings.

So pretty much, this packages are as vanilla as possible.

For getting cosmic-greeter working I made and INSTALL and REMOVE scripts to create the required user group for it, also added the PAM configuration needed, /etc/greetd/cosmic-greeter.toml and runit services for cosmic-greeter-daemon and cosmic-greeter, which, the latter is pretty much a wrapper for greetd with the proper configuration.

I also noticed that you have your packages enabled for i686 but no matter what I tried I wasn't able to get them working. There were a lot of compile errors concerning 64 bit integers not being supported in i686.

But truly, thanks a ton! I've been stuck on cosmic-greeter for a few days now! At least now we got most of everything working.

@glauconeto when you get to test these hopefully you should be able to try everything! There's something about audio/sound in this thread and that now being fixed, assuming pipewire, I haven't tested with other configurations...

[mendescotta]

Glad to hear! @benjcal the i686 was just an oversight. Cosmic only targets 64bits. Indeed I had a few outdated patches that carried on from the way buggier 1.3. Funny enough it seems Cosmic devs gave us a week off to get this done as no 1.6 dropped Wednesday as it's been for a while 😆
Testing your branch now to contribute directly. Would love some advice on how to properly become a maintainer or contributor (aside from rtfm which I am doing 🤓)!