cosmic-ext-alternative-startup

This provides an alternative entry point for cosmic-sessions compositor ipc interface usually provided by cosmic-comp.

Why does this IPC API exist?

1. cosmic-session needs to know when the compositor has setup the necessary sockets to race-free launch dependent shell-components. This job could be done by other service managers, such as systemd, but is currently provided in an agnostic way by cosmic-session.
2. cosmic-session and cosmic-comp work together to give special privileged connections to it's shell clients. While certainly not flawless, it enables the compositor to only trust the process that has been starting itself with certain functionality.

What does cosmic-ext-alternative-startup do?

For sessions without cosmic-comp is poses a problem. They usually have their own ways of starting apps after startup or notify a service manager like systemd.

cosmic-ext-alternative-startup can be used by these to fire up a small daemon that will notify cosmic-session of successful startup on execution.

It will also handle requests for "privileged" wayland connections by simply forwarding these connections to the normal wayland socket, for other compositors don't have a matching api and just expose privileged protocols to all non-sandboxed clients.

So how do I use it?

Depends on the compositor you want to use with COSMIC! In general please take a look at cosmic-ext-extra-sessions instead.

But e.g. in sway you could add exec cosmic-ext-alternative-startup to the end of your configuration file to be able to launch a sway cosmic session using cosmic-session sway.