I have been following Cosmic and using it quite a bit. For alpha it was great. I have been daily driving it off and on and its mostly pretty good. I would say I prefer it over vanilla Gnome.
So its my plan to keep using it, I have no intention of going to Ubuntu again.
When I have had trouble (e.g. stuck updates, other apt woes, Bluetooth weirdness), System76's help pages have been great. If they don't cover it, I just search +Ubuntu and the advice I find almost always works.
I have no idea what WM or DE or anything I'm running, it's just here and it stays out of the way so there's no situation where I would be confronted by having to know its name. That's a bit annoying (I did finally find out that "Files" is actually "Nautilus", which helped when searching to understand some behaviors) in that it limits my ability to meaningfully search for, or change, these details, but I think if it was a big deal, I'd figure it out. It's just fine.
That I can run an OS for 5 years and not know my WM or DE, is pretty cool, IMHO.
I agree. It’s the second most irritating thing. I am glad that I have written my tiny `update` bash script, which takes care of installing all updates (apt, flatpack, brew, etc.) without touching "app store".
I believe the bundled Pop!_Shop originates from Elementary OS and suffers from issues with proper background job processing. I find all those “store” apps for GNOME to be poorly written, often displaying incorrect numbers of updates, and generally slow.
I really like it, everything mostly just works well without any hassles.
I'm keen to try out Cosmic, although I would have preferred that they had a Gnome based 24.04 release last year rather than making everything wait for it.
But I'm still a happy user. Just hope they stick to the 2 year LTS cadence in future.
Pop!_OS is probably the best Ubuntu/Debian derivative I've used. It's buttery smooth for everything I need it to be. I haven’t encountered any bugs or major problems that are strictly related to Pop!_OS. It feels like Ubuntu, without slow Snaps (Pop!_OS is Flatpak-centered), Canonical ads (Ubuntu Pro, MicroK8s...), and with a slightly modified GNOME desktop environment.
If I had to find the worst thing about Pop!_OS, it's a negligible issue stemming from muscle memory after using macOS. The Super+Left/Right Arrow keys on Pop!_OS are used to switch between applications, while on macOS they are meant to move the text cursor to the start or end of a word. I haven't found the option to disable it yet.
It is less bloated than ubuntu ( but still has heavily embedded stuff that is hard to remove like accessibility -- the amount of times kid pressed key combination to turn on voicing each key was super annoying ). Store is slow af. But all of those are smaller things.
edit: note about the store
"Weary" means "very tired". I think you mean "wary" -- nervous, hesitant, scared.
"I am wary of trying a new OS..."
On that 2014 MBP Retina, I have attached a 4K TV via HDMI. It works in dual-screen, even though I use it with the lid closed in single-screen mode (4k TV only), but only 30Hz are supported (I can run 1080@60). Limitation of the Intel onboard GPU I assume.
You probably have your reasons why you do not want macOS on that system anymore - for me the 2014 MBP fell long out of macOS support and while I had Sonoma with Opencore Legacy Patcher running on it, the OS was just unbearably slow, plus some audio issues (along the fact that with opencore legacy patcher your security is also at risk). So that was a no brainer, because macOS just wasn't an option anymore.
Another word of warning: I had the very same 2019 Intel MBP and it died just a couple of weeks after it fell out of Apple Care. Just turned of right while using, never came back. That series is notorious for having thermal issues, and a friend of mine had the same model dying the same way just a couple of weeks after. Maybe you want to sell it while it still has macOS support (higher prices on the 2nd hand market) and get a different laptop if you are after Linux.
Just note: anytime the kernel is updated, you need rerun these commands and rebuild the drivers for the new kernel.
Probably in non-free (debian/PopOS) or universe/restricted (ubuntu). The kernel module is "wl"
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMJpPasSN0M&list=PL0bXfFQsIC_M2RRCkWj11zTB2RKfTy66B&index=1
It still has some of that Gnome Shell feeling that I like but with many features I want that we'll never see in Gnome, like having the top bar on all screens. Right now if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is.
If they added independent workspaces per monitor I'll switch to it as soon as it gets out of beta.
Edit.
I just watched their workspace showcase video. We have independent workspaces per monitor [1]. Is this real life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rGXNNUoW8&list=PL0bXfFQsIC_M2RRCkWj11zTB2RKfTy66B&index=3
This drives me crazy. I'm in a flow, distraction free via the full screen and break it to see what date or time it is. Even on a multi monitor setup. Which usually ends up meaning I get pulled out of that flow because I see a new notification on some other app or because I grabbed my phone to check that info.
Do you never check your phone and realize you are now suddenly doing something completely unrelated?
Phones are focus breaking by design. It takes effort, silencing them.
Yes. Does that invalidate the fact?
> Do you never check your phone and realize you are now suddenly doing something completely unrelated?
How is this relevant? But, no, as it happens, I don’t.
> Phones are focus breaking by design. It takes effort, silencing them.
Maybe your phone. Those who get an addictive phone may get addicted, and it does take effort to break an addiction.
To me it's not about a couple seconds that takes me to look at my phone. It's the inability to have it on all my monitors just like all other DE. And it's not only the time. You can't access your notifications, your app indicator icons or anything you add to that top bar through extensions.
In niri you can have the bar on all monitors, and you can also configure a window to fill the available space and have it "think" it's full screen while the top bar is still visible (see the toggle-windowed-fullscreen setting).
For Quickshell I basically followed the website instructions but here are my notes from when I installed on Debian Trixie:
git clone https://git.outfoxxed.me/quickshell/quickshell
sudo apt install cmake qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-shadertools-dev spirv-tools pkg-config libcli11-dev qt6-wayland-private-dev qt6-svg-dev ninja-build qt6-svg-plugins libjemalloc-dev wayland-protocols libdrm-dev libqtqmlmodels-dev 'qt6-*-private-dev' libpam0g-dev
Do not install ddcutil: it prevents detection of the external monitor except if the monitor is turned off and on again.
cmake -GNinja -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCRASH_REPORTER=OFF
ignore warnings `The qml plugin 'xxx' is a dependency of 'quickshell'...`
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
I know in FOSS there's a ton of enthusiastic and just non professional work (nor there should be expectations of it), but still... I'd hope the user-facing interface for an OS (or any UI, really) should be designed by people with a background on design, which doesn't seem to be the case at all with this idea. It's another example of why most of us developers should not be even touching the world of laying stuff out visually :)
The problem isn’t lack of designers.
Having an entire CSS engine at their disposal certainly does help the designers design without needing to know programming.
There are conflicting design goals throughout the UI. All could be good/great with a cohesive system, but there is none.
To answer your question, the same people that wanted the system to be a Tier 1 mobile/tablet UI.
Now if you're talking about complete fullscreen, like when watching a video, I' don't understand the use case. Either you want fullscreen or you don't?
Thankfully, these days when I want to play a bit (with a computer, sigh) on my Sway setup, yeah, it doesn’t react to that button.
Saying all that, yeah, I never considered that — having your game being lost to buggy and slow Windows — a feature. I wouldn’t want that even today, having 125 times more RAM than 20 years ago.
There was some way of enabling always on top on non-GTK3/4 apps too, but I don't remember it off the top of my head.
I remember this goal to change the window management to be more like a tiling WM (similar to Niri) that seems to have faded away. I recently moved from GNOME to KDE, one reason being KDE adopting Wayland protocols quicker and constant performance issues with GNOME.
Are you talking about this article?
After Ubuntu Unity, XCFE became my desktop, for the remaining netbook lifetime.
And I used to deal with Gtkmm back in 2000's, when GNOME still had a good architecture.
It does seems to me that it would be better to invest one more release cycle in Gnome before switching all efforts to their Cosmic DE. But good luck for the team nonetheless.
I can build newer tools/libraries from source if needed, but upgrading and discovering half my workflow is broken on a newer OS is an absolute dealbreaker. I'll wait to adopt new OS for some time after they are released, let the early adopters flush out all the bugs.
It's my main driver for software development, it was initially a dual boot system with windows, but I found that I could use Steam with very little configuration and could do all my gaming in linux(Cosmic DE/PopOS, I have a Nvidia GPU) as well. Works out of the box with Bigwig Studio and my Soundcard (Ultralite mk5)
I use a mix of the Cosmic store and nix for packages and programs.
I don't need to use windows ever again for anything and it makes me very happy.
I'm now leaning towards the Hyprland/Omarchy approach of starting with a curated blank slate that can be easily themed, customized and extended to suit where I wouldn't have to rely on big drop releases of a single organization for any missing/preferred functionality.
Even at its young age Omarchy has some how managed to attract 134/782 open/closed PRs [1] vs 6/90 for CosmicDE (since 2022) [2] which IMO speaks to the approachability and hackability of a scriptable DE and the community being built up around each.
Edit: as the Cosmic DE repo is made up of many submodules, they all have a lot more PRs/activity combined.
You're linking to the PRs on one of many Cosmic repositories, the top-level wrapper repository. The total number of PRs on all Cosmic repositories it includes is far larger than Omarchy.
However, I have a Starlabs convertible tablet, which I have just not gotten comfortable with on Arch.
I've considered going the sxmo route, but the volume buttons aren't that good. So I'm thinking maybe KDE plasma? Maybe the hardware is just not good enough for me to be happy.
There really isn't a solid arch config, to my knowledge, on tablets. I'd love to have the scriptability of Omarchy on something that worked well with an OSK and touchscreen. It may be hard to do this, however, as elements like "Activate OSK when text box selected" might be reliant on DE properties. Im not sure
Which is how I look to most of these new desktops.
Not only that. Those frameworks are constantly changing. Old APIs are left behind while new, incompatible APIs are introduced swiftly. Fortunately, the Linux desktop is now perfectly usable despite all this, because most software runs in a terminal, the Electron engine, or in the web browser.
I am old enough that when I reached university, there were still green and ambar terminals to a DG/UX server used as timesharing system by all students.
Electron, the only application I tolerate on my private computers is VSCode, mostly because some plugins aren't available anywhere else.
Browser, I can have anywhere.
If it is to have the same experience as early 1990's UNIX, I can just as well ssh into a server box, VM or container.
Nowadays phones seem like a duopoly that cannot be challenged and tablets aren't very important anymore. Linux doesn't matter on the desktop because browsers are the UI and the apps run in the cloud. The whole GNOME/KDE/whatever effort is a bit moot.
The syntax may be verbose in some cases, but that ignores the hype surrounding Rust. I don’t think they will be hurting for contributors.
I'm still learning it but it doesn't really seem very joyous when trying to accomplish simple things. I'm feeling nostalgic for C actually. I don't end up doing a lot of concurrency and memory handling is a discipline that can be greatly aided by running valgrind on my unit tests.
I find Python joyous and I don't love Javascript but I'd much rather write UI code in that than any compiled language.
What made gnome extensions so successful (despite gnome breaking them every new release) is it's just JavaScript & CSS. You can learn & make a gnome shell extension in an afternoon. No need to learn C, GObject, etc.
For COSMIC, even the panel applets are full rust programs
The best design for extensions specifically is with a capable, well-defined, stable public API that can be hooked into by a scripting language. The extension APIs should be exposed with both official bindings for popular languages as well as plain C headers, so other language bindings can be easily written and extension authors can use Python or Lua or Ruby or whatever it is they like to write.
For many people that's fine, but you're comparing apples and oranges.
There's going to be room in Linux Desktops for multiple DE's, and everyone's going to have their own preference, mine's just leaning towards the Hyprland ecosystem.
I absolutely loved it. It is such a breath of fresh air. I previously used to run i3 and a bunch of other tooling around it I can't even remember. Setup always had some weird edge case or was weird to use. Gnome always felt very bloated and laggy.
I then tried sway because I wanted to see if Wayland was any better performance and was not very impressed, although it just might be a configuration issue, the out of the box experience was just not good. And I wasn't in the tinkering mood anymore.
I installed cosmic and everything just worked. It felt snappy, no weird lags, nice but not too slow animations, even a build in window manager that was close enough to i3 that I no longer need sway or i3.
Notification, Display Management, Login, Autolaunching apps, Window Management etc. everything finally feels like a full operating system the way I have never experienced linux before. Maybe Ubuntu or Mint came close, but those came with their own troubles.
Edit: I've now gotten 2 downvotes in 4 minutes. I do not understand what's so controversial about this comment. Why should we care about having a third DE? Does this matter to users at all? I've watched several videos show casing it, and there seems to be no point to it except organizational (Pop OS wants to break free from GNOME).
KDE is good but has its own flaws, and it's a different workflow
So, just use KDE.
UIs generally sick in Linux with the exception of the shell. And even that could be sexed up hugely.
The best thing about AI tools for me is that they make up for shortcomings in the UI and have become a very important go-between for me.
Downvotes
It provides nothing to the discussion except a bad attitude.
It's clear from the fact you're asking it you don't about the topic. Go investigate Cosmic desktop, if you don't know why we should care about it, and you can find out for yourself whether or not it's worth caring about.
If you find out that you don't think this is something that should be discussed, don't up vote the thread and move on, simple as that. If the thread gets many upvotes anyways, you can infer people care about it, even if you don't. Comments like this only pollute the discussion and make everything feel negative.
It's a big part of the reason the internet has become such a drag, that people always feel the need to comment every little thing, even if it only adds negative value.
As a broader picture — it matters since the creator is System76 which sells laptops and desktops and moves towards giving a full Linux on Desktop polished experience. You really can only go so far if you are not deeply involved in the DE yourself.
p.s.: your question is very legit imo, don’t get the downvotes
Unlike the previous Pop OS DE, Cosmic DE is not tied to a particular distro. For example, there's an official Fedora Spin [1].
Had been thinking of giving KDE another whirl, but now Cosmic seems roadworthy, and I could go back to hyprland with this Omarchy thing everyone seems so hyped about.
All these choices, such a great time to be a linux user.
Pop has kept kernel updates well ahead of Ubuntu though, I just switched sooner than they seem to have.
For example, the top-bar UI doesn't render certain app icons properly, which was driving me crazy. Maybe it's a settings/config thing. My opinion is if cosmic isn't a drop-in replacement for gnome with extra bells and whistles, im not going to use it.
For all I know, it could be a lot better than gnome at this point. But for a daily driver that I'm working in, I need the stability of gnome over the 'cool factor' of cosmic.
I really liked the direction it is heading and will be using it eventually. Worth installing and trying out!
It's almost 2026. Yeesh
Things that should work on that particular Ubuntu LTS should work in Pop_OS! And at least you don't have to cross reference things.
Thankfully they keep important things more up to date with newer kernels/hardware support than the version numbers would suggest, but I think that it's a common point of confusion.
I assume that this is a Wayland/X11 limitation.
How is Linux supposed to beat Windows if the desktop is so broken? Microsoft breaking their Windows 11 desktop more and more seems to be the only hope.
This is already standardized, there's already multiple implementations, and it works in all major desktop environments.
This is a brand new DE that just got out of alpha.
Its not gonna implement all protocols, because duh. Let's not be melodramatic.
This happens literally every time something new happens on Linux. "Oh it's so fucked and broken and Linux sucks!!"
Okay, it's new. There are mature options. Use a mature option. This is how things have always worked for all ecosystems.
https://blog.system76.com/post/closing-in-on-a-cosmic-alpha
> The official release of COSMIC DE will debut on Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS, which will be based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Running and testing on 24.04 gets us closer to a final, polished release.
It seems it’s because Cosmic development is being based on Ubuntu 24.04, so it’s more about that base than the date of the Pop_OS release.
Their desktop environment was nice, though I always run back to KDE, even now I'm on KDE on Endeavour, I gave Budgie a try again which is another one I really enjoyed for Ubuntu but KDE has enough bells and whistles that I always miss, especially its window management stuff. I did try OpenBox and company but too much manual setup required. I want OOTB experiences that just work without hassle.
I am interested that they've been working on a Text Editor, I saw it on their GitHub, and hopefully it will be nicely polished.
One thing I loved about ElementaryOS (Ubuntu based as well) was the built-in custom Text Editor they made, it was nice and fast, and did everything I wanted, and looked gorgeous. I'm hoping they do similar with their Text Editor.
I love stable things so I might still wait for this to get out of beta, but I love that it's making progress! Maybe in time for 2026.04 LTS?
Excited to desktop swap again!
I've got no idea on where Accessibility lands right now though... At least in terms of screen readers. As I've been having vision issues even beyond using very large monitors I've had to rely on zoom features in apps/browsers. It's generally been a better experience than some of the rougher edges of Windows at work. I need to figure out if/how to scale RDP sessions.
Congrats to the devs. It's a significant achievement.
What is the fundamental thing that makes a Windows version feel like a new Windows version? It's not a different control panel or basica taskbar animations (although it helps), it's mundane things like how the borders of the buttons look, animations, transitions, loading bars so on and so on...
It all boils down to Winforms/UWP/WinUI and others for Windows and GTK/QT for Linux...
To this day Winform in windows gives me a sense of peace, something about the way the UI looks just looks "solid"... even when a lot of it is outdated, UWP was terrible while WinUI 3 is sleek and modern, although it does feel less robust I just can't pinpoint the reason exactly.
For Linux I don't know exactly what it is but I am almost sure GTK/QT are responsible, I have yet to use a linux distro that manages to give me the "feel" of solidness that let's say the Windows 7 UI gave me, it's not really about how smooth your animations is, it's that when I open a file explorer or the control panel it just doesn't feel "there".
I how can it be that so many decades keep passing and Linux still feels like a pre alpha UI compared to Windows versions of the early 2000s? I just took a look at a youtube video of the beta and I keep seeing distros focus on the wrong things, also can we at LEAST bring back the chrome/aero/real button feel of the "start menu" buttons? the PopOS start menu button looks very unserious... I guess it's just me though.
I understand that there's a lack of funding but it wouldn't surprise me if a really good UI framework design came around Linux would suddenly start seeing much higher adoption.
I’ve used it pre installed at work/ home and installed on a work machine to get the nvidia card working after being unable with the original Ubuntu OS. Pop is basically Ubuntu so software that works on Ubuntu works on pop. It’s pretty bullet proof.
The “pop shop” (oddly named installer program where you don’t spend money) has a lot of the open source applications with one click install.
I think both Fedora and Popos can be run via usb stick if you want to try them out.
I’ve been stuck on 22.04 for almost the entire 24.04 cycle at this point, and I occasionally have weird display issues or other bugs that I know are not going to get fixed.
At this point my hope is that Cosmic may be stable enough to release as 26.04, since from what I’ve been hearing it sounds like the beta still has a lot of rough edges.
I think I would be a lot less salty if they’d just explicitly called a mulligan on 24.04 back in early or mid 2024. I could’ve made an informed decision to switch to an Ubuntu flavor with slightly rockier Nvidia drivers support while I waited until 26.04 to rejoin Pop OS. But instead they just kept drip feeding PR updates saying that it was “coming soon!”, even though it was probably clear to folks working on it that they were over a year away.
Edit: To explain why I think it was clear to folks working on the project: I recently went back to look at the Alpha announcements from late last year. I wasn’t going to run an Alpha, so I didn’t read them in depth, but in those announcements they announce that they are BEGINNING work on a media player, which was available in a WIP state in the Alpha. If they were BEGINNING work on the media player in late 2024, then they probably could’ve said in April 2024 (when they hadn’t even started on it) that this was going to take at least another year.