An in depth look at installing the #Cosmic #Desktop on #nixos and the distros that support Cosmic

Comparing the Cosmic desktop functionality with Gnome and dwl tiling window manager.

The Cosmic desktop has workspaces per displays, so when you switch workspaces on your laptop it doesnt change the workspace on your external monitor

Looking at the cosmic settings and applications and how to configure all the settings for the desktop

The application launcher that doesnt get in your way like Gnome and zoom out your display on all your monitors

Using the tiling mode and how to configure the alacritty terminal to work in tiling mode by change the window settings

At present there is no keyring for storing passwords like the Gnome passwords and keys application, but the cosmic terminal can save passwords like your ssh key or you can use ssh-add as a workaround

Remapping the keyboard layout using xkb is done using a configuration file and not using a gui at present

looking at rough edges like the display settings that set your external monitor to display 1 and your laptop screen to display 2

how to use the dock and unpin applications, configuring the panel and applets

The Cosmic desktop will be release on 11 December 2025, so ill be taking a look at the beta 7 version of Cosmic on nixos

In short Cosmic is the Gnome killer and frees you from Gnomes nanny knows best approach to the desktop that forces you to change your workflow

note: i had the wayland-display set to 0 in my home-manager config which may have caused issues with emacs and copy and paste, which i have now removed from my home.nix