Pop!_OS Team Sets September 25 for COSMIC Beta Release
Pop!_OS Team Sets September 25 for COSMIC Beta Release
linuxiac.com
Pop!_OS Team Sets September 25 for COSMIC Beta Release
10 comments
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the other night a friend of mine wanted to switch to Linux and was dead set on using Pop!_OS after reading about COSMIC and seeing some images of it on unixporn. He even asked an LLM about the best distros for his rig and what he liked to do and the answer was Pop!_OS. So he asked me to help him install it. I suggested other distros but no, dead set on using pop.
Live boot USB and the entire time during the install it's complaining about not being able to connect to the internet while being connected to the internet. After the install, it locks up immediately on logging into the OS. try again, ok not locking up now. start doing some apt installs/updates - it crashes. Finally get it to a stable state and try installing steam and a game to test out the nvidia stuff that the LLM claimed Pop was fantastic for. Game crashes. system locks up again.
I eventually say "dude, I got cachyos on this usb too...wanna try that instead?" fine, install CachyOS (which gives you the option to install COSMIC during the install) everything just works. no more crashes, everything is smooth, his games work flawlessly. COSMIC crashes. just the DE. switch him to KDE and that was that. no more issues.
I'm honestly a bit worried about System76. They put all their focus on COSMIC and it feels like with each alpha release it progressively gets worse. I mean during the early Alphas I was seriously considering daily driving it but with each alpha release it just "felt off" and a bit slower/worse with more features added (and there aren't many). the OS has noticeably gotten worse because it hasn't been worked on. Even the distrowatch reviews for it have gotten worse.
But hey if you want GNOME with a tiling toggle then have at it. It's just weird that its taken them this long for something that doesn't have much to it and it's not very good.
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Disclaimer: I haven't tried it in a while so I can't speak to the current quality of COSMIC and Pop!_OS 24.04
But no, I am not surprised it's taken them this long. They started almost from scratch, made an entire Desktop Environment basically from scratch, using only the basic Iced for rendering and building their own equivalent of GTK/Qt. Libcosmic is massive undertaking and I have been worried about them.
But it has enormous potential: they know how to do tiling and styling very well, and Rust makes it hard not to write secure performant code.
I admire their bravery and perseverance and have faith that COSMIC will eventually be amazing.
And I'll buy my next laptop from them to support them.
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I'm not impressed with how they're approaching the development. They've been rushing cosmic development without taking time to do some things properly. They forked iced and have a huge amount of changes. Instead of keeping the history clean they squashed their changes into a 50,000 line commit. Their compositor has no automated testing last I looked at it. Hundreds of warnings during compilation.
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I tried PopOS and I experienced the issues:
TF2 not loading.
Password decryption putting in random characters when typing.
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really looking forward to this.
have been comfortably using gnome with a set of extensions; still have some hangups around their design decisions.
10 comments
As someone who owns a System76 desktop, which I really love, I would have preferred that they spend more time on getting Pop!_OS 24.04 first, and then finish COSMIC.
Yeah, I'm on custom PC and Ubuntu 22 start to feel really old. All software are outdated which bring instabilities when using some binaries from the net or flatpaks. I think I'll either jump in the beta, or distro-hop soon