Install Cosmonic Desktop on Windows

This guide installs Cosmonic Desktop on Windows.

Install

Download links are provided with your invitation—download the Windows .exe installer and run it.

Release builds are Authenticode-signed, so a healthy download installs without SmartScreen warnings. If SmartScreen blocks the installer, treat the download as damaged and re-download it from your invitation links—don't override the protection.

The installer needs no admin rights: it installs per-user, starts the daemon and the native tray immediately, and registers both to start automatically at login.

What gets installed

• The Cosmonic Desktop app, which bundles the cosmonicd daemon and the native tray in its resources.
• The daemon runs in the background as a per-user login task (a Scheduled Task with restart-on-failure), started at install and restarted at each login, so your workloads run whether or not the app window is open.

The app talks to the daemon over a per-user named pipe—there's no network listener for the API. Workload specs and the image cache live in %APPDATA%\Cosmonic; to print the resolved pipe and state locations:

& "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\Cosmonic Desktop\resources\cosmonicd.exe" paths

Verify

Launch the app. The status bar should show the local host running with a live badge within a few seconds. If it reports disconnected instead, the app can't reach the daemon—see Troubleshooting.

Next steps

Run your first workload in the Quickstart.