notes from setting up and using cosmic DE 2 hours

[thor314]

I tried out cosmic for the last two hours and i'm going to stick with it for now. I wanted to share my notes in case they were helpful to developers.

As of 2024-10-10, CDE has some rough edges, particularly around custom keybinds, GNOME-like alt-tab and alt-~ behavior is not yet implemented, and tdrop/guake-like behavior is on the epoch 2 feature list. Not all settings panel options are implemented yet.

Wayland is fast (much faster than Xorg), the DE has nice tiling and animations (I would like them to be a little faster), is at least good enough to daily drive.

My issues generally appear to have already been noted and are at least on a development cycle to do list.

I would ilke better documentation for diving in, but I'm going to daily drive CDE for now at least.

first pass issues

• tdrop is designed to run on X11, and does not work on wayland (or by extension, cosmic). This might require n>2hrs development, and seems like a candidate for an open source contributor. Some issues have been made, and it looks like it's on cosmic epoch 2 for development.
• I would like to have my alt-tab and alt-~ behavior back. issue. On epoch 1 dev cycle.
• keybinds reset with a config file - can't just press the keybind in settings modal; have to type it out - my file doesn't seem to actually get loaded, even after a logout login, so I'm not getting my custom keybinds loaded.
• first log out resulted in blackscreen, ctrl+alt+f2 fixed this.

setup log

• Trying cosmic greeter instead of gdm. Unsure how I will unset this if needed.
• initial observations
  • initially, obsidian is overscaled, but we can fix that in displays.
  • keybindings and caps ctrl are unbound as expected. welcome to wayland and cosmic.
  • I see less, or rather, no lag in the system picker, or in Obsidian as compared to Gnome/Xorg.
  • blue outline on active window is a little annoying, can change its color to be less intrusive. I might turn it off altogether if I can find that, or make it lighter - got it, and smaller gaps
  • they've implemented nice tiling
  • some animations are implemented
  • clipboard may issues? - seemingly not
  • alt tab behaves differently, huh
  • curious if they've got notifications figured out yet
  • need asap: caps lock to ctrl - modified .config/cosmic/com.system76.CosmicComp/v1/xkb_config
• settings panel
  • no observable way to turn off dock - just kidding, under desktop.
  • no option to set caps lock to ctrl in settings yet
  • some panels, like users, not implemented yet
  • option to hide top bar, nice
  • move windows looks great
  • hope they implement a way to export all settings, esp keybinds

[mmstick]

To export all settings, copy ~/.config/cosmic/