Summary

cosmic-desktop: Missing hard dependency on libwayland-server causes panel/dock failure after dnf autoremove

Product/Component

• Product: Fedora
• Component: cosmic-session (or cosmic-comp)
• Version: 43

Description

Problem Statement

After running dnf autoremove, the libwayland-server package is removed as an "orphan" dependency. This causes cosmic-panel and cosmic-notifications to fail on next boot, resulting in no visible panel or dock in the COSMIC desktop environment.

Root Cause

The cosmic-desktop meta-package (or its components cosmic-session, cosmic-comp, cosmic-panel, cosmic-notifications) does not declare an explicit dependency on libwayland-server. Since no installed package explicitly requires it, DNF marks it as removable by autoremove.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Install Fedora 43 with COSMIC desktop (cosmic-desktop package)
2. Boot and verify panel/dock work correctly
3. Run dnf autoremove (this removes libwayland-server among other packages)
4. Reboot the system
5. Log in to COSMIC session

Actual Results

• Panel and dock do not appear
• journalctl --user shows repeated failures:
  cosmic-notifications: Failed to setup panel dbus server deadline has elapsed cosmic-panel: Failed to connect to the notifications daemon. cosmic-session: process 'cosmic-panel' failed with code 101

Expected Results

• Panel and dock should appear normally
• libwayland-server should not be removable by autoremove as it is required by COSMIC components

Solution

Add explicit Requires: libwayland-server to one of:
- cosmic-session
- cosmic-comp
- cosmic-panel
- cosmic-notifications

Or add it to the cosmic-desktop meta-package.

Additional Information

Package Versions

cosmic-session-1.0.0~beta.9-1.fc43.x86_64
cosmic-panel-1.0.0~beta.9-1.fc43.x86_64
cosmic-notifications-1.0.0~beta.9-1.fc43.x86_64
cosmic-comp-1.0.0~beta.9-1.fc43.x86_64

Transaction that caused the issue

Transaction ID : 13
Description    : dnf autoremove
Packages altered:
  Remove libwayland-server-0:1.24.0-1.fc43.x86_64
  [... other unrelated packages ...]

Workaround

Reinstall libwayland-server before rebooting the system:

sudo dnf install libwayland-server

Environment

• Fedora 43
• COSMIC Desktop beta.9
• Wayland session