[bug] notification center applet doesn't appear most of the time

[blind-confused]

I already mentioned this in one of the COSMIC chats, but I decided to do a proper issue here, so it doesn't get lost I guess.

most of the times I log into COSMIC, the notification center applet is just missing. It's fixed by logging out and logging back in. if the applet is missing, notifications appear for a few seconds, and then disappear completely (since there's no center to store them in). Considering that notifications in COSMIC have no sound effects (at least not right now), anyone daily driving COSMIC might look away at the right moment and miss important notifications, so I thought it was worth writing about this here.

sometimes this same issue also happened with cosmic-greeter, but I'm not sure whether it still happens or not (I haven't daily driven COSMIC for a while). Whenever cosmic-greeter wasn't there, waking up from sleep mode would exit into the desktop instead of the lock screen.

for info, if this helps, I was using COSMIC from COPR on Fedora Workstation 41, on a laptop with AMD GPU and CPU.

[snaggen]

Just wanted to mention that I also see the same issue on Alpha 6 from Fedora 41 packages. Did a killall -9 cosmic-notifications and got it back.

[snaggen]

After a fresh reboot, I see this in the journald logs

mar 07 07:38:37 locke cosmic-session[2452]: starting process ' DISPLAY=:0 WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland DAEMON_NOTIFICATIONS_FD=23 WAYLAND_SOCKET=25 cosmic-notifications '
mar 07 07:38:37 locke /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[2452]: 2025-03-07T06:38:37.536917Z  INFO launch_pad: starting process ' DISPLAY=:0 WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland DAEMON_NOTIFICATIONS_FD=23 WAYLAND_SOCKET=25 cosmic-notifications '
mar 07 07:38:39 locke cosmic-notifications[2544]: Failed to setup panel dbus server I/O error: Broken pipe (os error 32)
mar 07 07:38:39 locke /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[2452]: 2025-03-07T06:38:39.132830Z  INFO cosmic-notifications: cosmic_session::notifications: 2025-03-07T06:38:39.132755Z ERROR cosmic_notifications::subscriptions::notifications: Failed to setup panel dbus server I/O error: Broken pipe (os error 32)

And after I do a killall cosmic-notifications it starts as expected.

[snaggen]

I assume this might be some kind of race condition, but it is very consistent, so I guess that for some users they, like me, never see the notifications. So, this should be seen as a fairly high priority issue.

[snaggen]

I also realize that the actual bug might be within https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-notifications

[snaggen]

No, the cosmic-notifications errors seems to be a red herring. I added some basic retry logic to cosmic-notifications, but that didn't change anything. Now, in my logs I do not see any cosmic-notifications errors, still the cosmic-applet-notification is not running. Killing cosmic-notifications however, seems to trigger a restart of the panel, and this time I can see that cosmic-applet-notification is running. So, the issue seems to be with the applet.