For a very long time now, I’ve been hearing about how System76 is developing the next revision of COSMIC, COSMIC Epoch. COSMIC Epoch is a full-featured desktop environment version of the original COSMIC, a GNOME extension which was originally built for Pop!_OS.

Sadly, due to my main laptop being bricked, I decided to try it out on a distrobox on my server, babymega. I created a distrobox, then I installed the cosmic-desktop and cosmic-desktop-apps group from Fedora, and after awhile of leaving it unattended, I finally went back to it, and found out that it had finished installing. The first thing I went to do was try to actually start it by using start-cosmic as our lord and saviour Arch Wiki recommends, but it asked me to change my password (????), which I did, and proceeded to start COSMIC, which failed. Then, I tried to start it using cosmic-session, which also failed, and had the same output as start-cosmic. I installed GDM, but remembered that it was complete shit at being ran without systemd. It kept referencing something called cosmic-comp, so I ran it, but to no avail. It complained about a file being non-existant, which kind of shows a packaging flaw in COSMIC Epoch. I never bothered to find out what this file was, since I was losing interest.

Honestly, I was very dissapointed with the results of this test, and I was even thinking of switching to COSMIC Epoch as my main DE, but I may have to stick with jumping between GNOME and Niri for now.