How hard would it be to make a scroll version of cosmic-ext-extra-sessions?

[amichaitea]

Cosmic is a DE in alpha by the folks who made PopOS. It's available on several distros; I used it with Fedora a while back and consider it to be usable as a daily driver. They do not have a native tiling-scrolling option but there is https://github.com/Drakulix/cosmic-ext-extra-sessions which provides a way to make other compositors integrate (not perfectly but pretty well) with Cosmic.

There is a sway version and I am wondering how hard it would be for someone who knows what they are doing, aka not me, to one for scroll? (The tiling scrolling option that is available is niri and for various reasons I greatly prefer scroll to niri!) If it isn't too hard, I am hoping someone here would be willing to give it a try.

I can go into why I would like this but I am pretty sure that is boring.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. If the answer is "no" for whatever reason, I totally understand.

[dawsers]

What are the advantages of being inside Cosmic? Would it be like being a GNOME extension in terms of desktop configuration etc.?

I need to understand a bit more before considering something like this.

But from what I see, there is already a sway session, and most of it is just a bash script, so I don't think that would be something too hard to do for someone motivated. scroll is compatible with sway, only the default configuration would need to change.

[amichaitea]

It's more like having both Cosmic and the other compositor installed and then when you log in with the session manager into the other compositor it already knows how to use Cosmic stuff like the keyring.

I know I can do this with, say, Gnome and Scroll and that's what I've got on my laptop right now but I haven't put in the work yet to get Secrets (the replacement for gnome keyring) working, partly because all the documentation I can find is for keyring and I'm not confident in my ability to figure out what I need to do. Cosmic extra sessions has all of that taken care of, to the extent that it uses shared libraries.

I'm interested having Scroll and the option of a more traditional DE for when I need to let kids in the class I teach use my laptop. I'm also thinking about if I want to switch on my desktop and laptop to Fedora from Arch because of the ddos attacks on Arch mirrors; if I do, Gnome or Cosmic are the DEs I'm most likely to pick for the installer, if I can get one of them working with Scroll as an additional session.

I hope this makes sense. Let me know if there's some other information I should provide.

[dawsers]

Thank you. Now I understand better what you are looking for.

I think it is a good idea to have scroll integrated like that as another option.

I use Arch, and have a very streamlined system trying to avoid installing full DEs I am not using. That is why something like this would be hard for me to maintain, because I would need to keep a separate system just to give support to this project. However, I am more than willing to help anyone who really wants to have this available with anything they may need about how this Cosmic feature could adapt to scroll, given it already supports sway. I could help with issues or even some code, but I wouldn't be able to test it, so that makes it very hard for me to make releases of that extension.

[amichaitea]

If you could modify the sway code so it should work with scroll, that would be fantastic -- and if it needs maintained later on down the line I'll burn that bridge when I come to it. I can't promise I'll be able to learn enough to do it myself, but I definitely wouldn't expect it of you.

[dawsers]

OK, I will fork https://github.com/Drakulix/cosmic-ext-extra-sessions, add scroll, and when you test it, maybe we can add a PR to the upstream repository.

I will post here when it's ready.

[dawsers]

OK, you can try it and see if it works. Let me know how it goes so I can make the needed changes.

https://github.com/dawsers/cosmic-ext-extra-sessions

[amichaitea]

There are some issues with the justfile but it's not your bugs -- I am encountering errors with the main repo when I try to install its sway variant. I will come back to this when I have time, I know that some of these popped up last time I was playing around with it and I got the issue resolved but I need to remember exactly what I did to fix it! In the meantime i can run scroll with arch on my laptop and the kiddos can deal with it.

I'll have time to work on this later this week; the start of the semester is a busy time for me. I appreciate that you put your own valuable time into this!

[dawsers]

If you are still on Arch, maybe try to change the install prefix from /usr/local to /usr for some of the files, because that is where wayland-sessions are. Maybe something along these lines:

install-scroll rootdir="" prefix="/usr/local": _build-scroll _install
  {{ just }} rootdir={{rootdir}} prefix={{prefix}} scroll/cosmic-ext-scroll-daemon/install
  install -Dm0644 scroll/config-cosmic {{rootdir}}/etc/scroll/config-cosmic
  install -Dm0644 scroll/cosmic-ext-scroll.desktop {{rootdir}}/usr/share/wayland-sessions/cosmic-ext-scroll.desktop
  install -Dm0644 scroll/start-cosmic-ext-scroll {{rootdir}}/usr/bin/start-cosmic-ext-scroll

And check where the daemon gets installed so you can modify config-cosmic at the end of the file to start it.