I'm excited for Cosmic Desktop

I'm just afraid it's gonna be another 2 years before it's ready for everyday use

47

2 years is nothing to a Linux user lol

21
- It took me longer than that to figure out how to get out of Vim
  
  11
If it only 2 year I can wait XD

12
- That's my plan. I'm back on Gnome until feature parity.
  
  5
It could take that long. I was wondering if Ubuntu is 24.10 /25.04, 25.10, and 26.04 if pop will align their alpha2, beta, and official release with the Ubuntu release schedule.

I know they said something about a yearly release cadence for cosmic but I'm sure that's once it's officially in production.

That said, as far as an alpha goes, it's much more polished than a typical alpha. The path from here to beta might be faster than we think.

Pop devs never shied away from releasing with non LTS releases though and since one of their main pain points with releases was always gnome + cosmic plugins I'm not sure how their dependency on Ubuntu releases is affected.

I was super nervous for cosmic because I love pop. I didn't want them to bungle it and force me to distro hop. The alpha made me way less nervous and much more excited.

Whatever they do, whenever they release, I just hope they get it right! Small bugs are fine but major crashes would make me very sad.

7
2 years is not that much

5
- Not in the long view it wouldn't be that bad but we've seen other projects take so many years. Look how long it's taken Wayland.
  
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Yep. I stupidly thought I could use it on my work laptop. Big nope, I had to go back after 2 hours.

It has great potential, but it's still far from being ready.. 😔

4
- I agree
  
  1
I've been using it as my main for months. Even as an Alpha, it's very stable. That being said, it's missing quite a few features that a lot of people would consider a requirement. So "ready" will heavily depend on your requirements

3
- Exactly. I could use it as my daily if the settings panel was more complete.
  
  2
- Yeah I've been running it in one of my little VM specimen jars for a while now and I don't remember it crashing or doing anything weird so far. Pretty good for a first alpha!
  
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I'm using it every day now. I have one machine installed with the 24.04 ISO and it's working fine. There's some TODO items to come which I understand will be added by Alpha2. With a little command line knowledge COSMIC is perfectly usable now and is stable.

2
- I'm sure my command line game is weak. Do you have a solution for connecting to Bluetooth and for timing out to login screen and blanking it after a certain period?
  
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Great! Exactly on time for the next release of Debian :)

1
Hopefully they plan to stabilize what they see as core functionality, and then build out features. Some people won't consider it ready until this or that feature is added, but many of us who just want a WM+ can start using it once it's relatively stable.

1
- I couldn't even connect Bluetooth until I switched to Gnome again
  
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Well, since Cosmic isn't going to be ready for a couple years yet, let's try to fix your multimonitor issue. Are you running on Wayland and what's your GPU?

24

Wayland, Lenovo idepad 1 2018 (Ryzen 3) second monitor is Arzopa A1 GAMUT SLIM

11
- I'm guessing that's the onboard AMD graphics then?
  
  If you do an lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display' what does it return? Are you able to find anything in dmsg (journalctl -xb-1 for previous boot log) that would give an error message to investigate?
  
  13

I'm very curious how buggy it's going to be. (Obviously very during alpha, but I'm talking release.) They seem to be betting big on customisability, and a myriad of different setups is like a fly trap for bugs, in my experience.

But at the same time, a modern language like Rust provides lots of help to prevent a bunch of them, and they might be very talented programmers, so who knows!

13

Honestly, I haven't had a single bug aside from the default radio selection not being visible until you click the other option, but that is more of an ICED issue that is already being addressed. Really there are just a few power options like screen timeout and autosuspend that are missing and the UI needs a retouch, but I think its a solid base over all. It's being led by the same developer of Redox OS so he has a lot of experience developing a modular, well performant rust system.

7
- Great to hear! I've never used Redox either, so no idea how well that works too.
  
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I feel like I am the only person not super-jazzed about Cosmic.

If people are excited or want to use it, fine. But I don't know what it could possibly add to the mix besides offering mote DE choice, and Linux already has a lot of that.

12

It's new and different. It's also not really usable atm so there's plenty of hype and little disillusionment yet.
Give it a couple years and everyone will probably have forgotten about it.

9
If you already use pop with the cosmic plugin, it's going to be a better version of that. If you use something else then I'm not sure why youd care tbh.

8
- For me, I like the idea of a tiling window manager with batteries included. Been using tiling window mangers for ages now and cannot go back to floating window management. But all the tiling window managers are bare bones and configure everything you want from the ground up. Which I am not a huge fan of these days. I want something to work out the box with first party full tiling support (not just dragging windows to the side) but without needing 100s of lines of config to get a half decent setup.
  
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I'm not really invested in Cosmic, I'm happy with Hyprland and will continue to use it.

I do think they did a REALLY nice job with the tiling. I don't think you can find a more intuitive and user friendly tiling window manager. Something that's not absolute barebones out of box and can be configured entirely with a GUI. In that regard it does bring something to the mix and is very very welcome.

4
- I wish KDE had something like that! AFAIK I think most tiling things are still broken and haven't quite caught up to Plasma 6 yet.
  
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I like it as an alternative to GNOME that's not quite so GNOME-ish, if that makes sense. I do like GNOME but I find it a bit idiosyncratic sometimes, IE they seem very "my way or the highway" about some design things, and it often feels to me like you have to hunt down and keep updating endless plugins to do basic things that feel like they should be included.

If they can land in a spot where COSMIC looks as nice as GNOME but is also a bit less of a hassle to get set up the way you want it, I feel like they could occupy a nice middle-ground between GNOME and KDE possibly.

3

I can't wait to see what they can do, considering what System76 did with just GNOME.

I don't think anything's going to pry me from XFCE, though, except maybe if 4.20 hasn't made much progress on Wayland.

11

whats so good about XFCE

5
- It's very bread and butter, but also very customizable. It's also decently lightweight. Not the lightest, but a good compromise between both.
  
  Some distros don't have the best default config, though.
  
  10
If they support wayland I'm in

3
- It's new, so there's no point of supporting X11. It's Wayland only.
  
  2

From a quick view, it mostly looks like ElementaryOS's DE to me. What's the big deal with Cosmic? I really want to know, sell it to me!

8

For me it is the language it's written in: Rust. Now I can participate, fix bugs and implement new apps with the language I know the best.

Some people might also say less crashes, less vulnerabilities and all that, but for me the first part is the most important.

20
- Qt and gtk both have rust bindings though?
  
  6
It seems like pantheon only supports floating windows, whereas cosmic supports both floating and tiling.

6
Are you talking why for the user, or why it was developed? The main reason it exists is that System 76 like the Gnome desktop, but didn't like stuff Gnome was doing, so they decided to make their own version from scratch in Rust. For a user, I don't think there's any real compelling reason to use it, especially not right now, unless you love Rust, or have the same feelings about Gnome that S76 did.

6
For me I'm interested in it for four main reasons:

a) It's intuitive, even if you've never used Linux, while also being very customisable.

b) It's new. The DE world at the moment is almost entirely Gnome and KDE, with some XFCE and Cinnamon. COSMIC adds to it with their own coat of paint and a very clear, professional outloom on it and clear goals.

c) It's in Rust. I don't know Rust, but I know it's loved by the community and will bring in contributors as well as the bug-related stuff at compile time which is handy.

d) System76 needs to sell it. Normally I'm not a fan of companies being involved in my OS, but I like the way System76 does it: They make laptops that come pre-installed with Pop_OS! and then sell those, so while technically the hardware is their source of income they'll have to improve their software in actually meaningful ways for it to be appealing to customers. One of the best and also worst things about the open source community IMO is that there's a lot of very niche stuff- like how 7-zip supports selecting multiple items, compressing them, and then emailing the .zip all in one mouse click. Really cool for whoever wants to do that, but no one wants to do that.

2
elementary OS doesn't even have a functioning desktop, you can't even puts icons or folders on it let alone rearrange them its literally a glorified wallpaper with a dock. please tell me this isn't the case for Cosmic

0
- I actually really like not having icons on the desktop in gnome. It always ends up a collection of random garbage anyway after some time and Icd rather have that in my home directory. Now i can just press my keyboard shortcut to hide all windows and then I have a clean screen with nothing distracting me.
  
  8

I've been running it on my Asahi linux for a bit over a week, and while it comes off feeling a bit bare bones, I've had no stability issues despite it being an alpha, in fact all issues I've had are minor, in fact the biggest issues come from Asahi Linux, not Cosmic.

6

I’ve been playing around with asahi on a Mac mini with an M2. Enjoy it but so many limitations currently. I use MacOS about as much on that PC I just can’t stand the close butting being in the top left. Lmao

3

Hm.. just looked it up. It does look nice. Guess I'll have to read into it and see what benefits it provides.

5

What is the big difference between Cosmic and Gnome? I know System76 are developing it so I would imagine they have a problem with Gnome and their hardware business.

I used popOS! for a year and did get annoyed that Gnome required extensions that were not necessarily maintained in order to allow for what I considered to be basic customisation.

On OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE now, but interested to see what the philosophical difference is between Gnome and Cosmic.

5

There are basically two different versions of Cosmic. The current one which is basically just an extension for Gnome. This is what has shipped with PopOS and currently still done.

But system76 had a vision for what they wanted and they did not feel building that as an extension was sustainable long term. They had a bunch of stability issues (ie gnome breaking things in newer versions they were using). So they decided to write a new desktop environment from scratch in rust that they had full control over.

I believe that the new Cosmic sits somewhere in between KDE and Gnome in terms of customization - or at least what they are aiming for. No where near the level of settings as KDE but not trying to remove every option like Gnome.

And being a new project written from scratch it is forward focused - and only support wayland.

You can read more about their decisions in a recent blog post: https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-team-interview-byoux

12
- Great answer, thanks!
  
  1

I just want pop_os 24.04. I'm annoyed they're delaying the entire release so they can add cosmic to it.

5

Maybe I don't keep my finger on the pulse of this stuff the way I should, but what's the main benefit of 24.04? Pop updates the kernel and packages already. The main benefit we would get is newer gnome which... obviously isnt a development priority for them since it's going away.

What are we missing out on?

10
- Ha.. you pretty much asked the question. Visually nice, but have no idea what's so special about it.
  
  1

Tried it, my device crashes every 2 minutes in. Not worth the effort for now.

4

I've been using it on my Fedora laptop for the past week or so and it's really nice, even in alpha 1! Can't wait to see how it turns out fully finished!

3

I literally had a dream about switching to it last night. But it was different, as it had the things I'm currently missing, already implemented. But then again, in my dream, It was the summer of next year (2025), it's just that they went on a faster pace than expected and released Beta 1 instead of the Alpha 2, and that actually had Static workspaces (which is unfortunately, not a planned feature rn), as well as Sloppy Focus, which IS a planned feature and coming out with Alpha 2, the PR is even ready to merge! Ultimately, only time will tell.

3

And here I thought you were talking about Cosmic Encounter...

2

It sounds great. Cosmic is off to a great start and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

2

😎👍

2

I'm excited too and also use KDE. I'm not certain I will ever switch, but like other commenters. I am concerned with how long it may take before I consider it to be usable. Not to mention there are certain really cool features that KDE has that I would like to replicate over there before I even think of switching.

2

Something doesn't work so instead of fixing I am looking for alternatives...

-10

So my mom shouldn't use GNU/Linux because she can't fix bugs?

3
- exactly, otherwise she needs your help
  
  0
Yes that is what I did with Windblows, I'm tired of removing all the adwares they bundled every updates and for the final nail in the coffin they integrated copilot with it, I had enough with Windows so I just switched to Linux instead

1
- Your plasma desktop crashing with dual screens is something that's not normal. I use two monitors all the time and my desktop has never crashed.
  
  1
- Have fun with linux then.
  
  -3