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The window and the applet popup open together The Cosmic Tail window, showing the device list and a device's details The Cosmic Tail panel applet popup

Cosmic Tail

A native COSMIC desktop app and applet for Tailscale.

Both the app and applet are written in Rust with libcosmic, so they follow the COSMIC theme and behave like the rest of the desktop.

Installation

1. Install Tailscale first

Cosmic Tail is a front end, not a Tailscale implementation. It talks to the Tailscale daemon (tailscaled) over its local socket, so tailscaled has to be installed and running on the machine before Cosmic Tail can do anything useful.

Follow the official instructions for your distribution: https://tailscale.com/docs/install/linux

Then bring the machine onto your tailnet, and grant your user account permission to change Tailscale settings:

sudo tailscale up
sudo tailscale set --operator=$USER

That last step matters. Without it the daemon answers status queries but rejects every write, so Cosmic Tail can show your tailnet but cannot connect, disconnect or change your exit node. Log out and back in after running it.

2. Build and install Cosmic Tail

Building needs a Rust toolchain and the just command runner, plus the usual libcosmic build dependencies (on Pop!_OS and Ubuntu: libxkbcommon-dev, libwayland-dev and pkg-config).

git clone https://github.com/frozenjava/CosmicTail.git
cd CosmicTail
just
sudo just install
  • just builds the application with the default just build-release recipe
  • just run builds and runs the window
  • just run-applet runs the applet outside the panel, for testing
  • just install installs both binaries, the desktop entries and the icons into the system (rootdir and prefix change where)
  • just uninstall removes them again
  • just vendor creates a vendored tarball
  • just build-vendored compiles with vendored dependencies from that tarball
  • just check runs clippy on the project to check for linter warnings
  • just check-json can be used by IDEs that support LSP

For a development install that needs no root, just dev-install symlinks debug builds into ~/.local — which is already on the PATH the panel passes to the applets it launches — and just dev-uninstall takes them back out.

3. Add the applet to your panel

The window shows up in the app grid as Cosmic Tail. The applet is added separately, under Settings → Desktop → Panel → Configure applets; the app's own settings page has a button for it too. Click its panel icon to open the popup.

Troubleshooting

What you see What it means
"tailscaled is not running, or its socket is unreachable" The daemon is not up. sudo systemctl status tailscaled
Everything is read-only; connecting fails Your user is not the Tailscale operator. Run sudo tailscale set --operator=$USER, then log out and back in
The applet is missing from the panel list The binary is not on the panel's PATH. just dev-install or just install first, then check the applet list again

The applet's stderr goes to the journal, prefixed with its app id, so journalctl --user -f shows it live. Set RUST_LOG=cosmic_tail=debug for more than warnings.

Cosmic Tail is a third-party application. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Tailscale Inc or System76.