Introduction

I installed Sway at first, but after some recommendations from my community, I decided to install Cosmic.

First steps:

When I removed sway, I did it without disabling autostart in my bash_profile. This caused me to not be able to log in to my user; which, is not fine since I want to build packages!

To fix this, I went to my Home folder in my Root user, entered my user’s home folder, and commented out the sway startup script, rebooted, and now I have a blank TTY screen.

[!NOTE] Check battery levels

cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity

I am on a laptop, and realized that I can’t see any information on the battery, so I learned you can simply find out the current level with the above command.

Uninstall Sway:

Remove Sway and all its dependencies along with config files:

sudo pacman -Rns sway

Installing Yay

[!WARNING] Skipping yay for now, I got error: [Makefile:144]: yay error 1 saying Golang connection error.

Apparently you can fix this by skipping compiling with yay-bin, but I just didn’t proceed with yay since cosmic is available as an official package. Why add possible insecure packages, when you can just install it securely.

[!NOTE] If you want to proceed with yay:

sudo pacman -S --needed git base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git # pre-compiled version of yay
cd yay-bin
makepkg -si

COSMIC

Apparently cosmic-session is an official package..so I am installing it using pacman:

pacman -Syu cosmic-session
# S: Synchronizes packages
# y: Refreshes the database for packages
# u: Upgrade all installed packages to their newest version

Then it prompts with the 7 providers for vulkan-driver which I just chose the default.

Enable cosmic-greeter

systemctl enable cosmic-greeter.servce

I rebooted and was welcomed with the cosmic-greeter.

I think this is fitting for a future Kubestronaut

System76 Driver

To have the battery be read by Cosmic, I had to install System76 Driver:

Following https://support.System76.com/articles/system76-driver/ - Last edited 2/27/2025

I installed the driver with Arch - Manual install steps:

Install build dependencies for the System76 Firmware Daemon, System76 Driver, and the Firmware Manager:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git linux-headers

Firmware Daemon

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/system76-firmware.git # 
cd system76-firmware
makepkg -srcif
sudo systemctl enable --now system76-firmware-daemon
sudo gpasswd -a $USER adm

Firmware Manager

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/firmware-manager.git
cd firmware-manager
makepkg -srcif

Driver

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/system76-driver.git
cd system76-driver
makepkg -srcif
sudo systemctl enable --now system76

Now reboot the system so that the user is added to the adm group.

Check if $USER is added to group:

groups [you-username]

System76 Power

Next we follow the guidelines to install System76 Power: https://support.system76.com/articles/system76-software/

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/system76-power.git
cd system76-power
makepkg -srcif
sudo systemctl enable --now com.system76.PowerDaemon.service
sudo gpasswd -a $USER adm

After installing system76-power I had to install the GNOME Shell Extention.

I was hesitant to do so, since Cosmis is not GNOME, but it’s necessary to see the battery %.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/gnome-shell-extension-system76-power-git.git
cd gnome-shell-extension-system76-power
makepkg -srcif

After rebooting, I was able to see my battery %! Yay!

Next install bluetooth…yay.

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