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?
Most things can be solved with Gnome Shell extensions, but I have to admit that having to install 5-6 extensions for basic DE features, like managing where notifications show up, makes it easier to switch to something else.
Even then, Gnome updates regularly require massive updates to those extensions... Pop used to just do that in the box, but felt just having an entirely separate DE they control would be a better long run experience.
I don't understand, on Gnome when you maximize a window (drag to top) you can still see the time.
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?
I agree GP was talking about the multi monitor scenario, but I also run into trouble with just one monitor. If I'm playing a full screen game and want to know what time it is, there's no way to focus the task bar without closing the game entirely. On Windows, hitting the start button while in a fullscreen app will give focus to the taskbar so you can glance at the time and immediately return to the game.
Yeah, I lost so many Warcraft III games on Battle.net, when I accidentally pressed that pesky button, while having a pretty decent computer with 256 MB RAM. I ended up facing a separate keyboard without the key (and some others too).
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.
This is now solved because games don’t default to exclusive fullscreen anymore, so the windows compositor still runs on top of the game, so popping up the start menu is instant without any weird resolution/hdr changes
Just because someone wants a single app to have a full screen (video, game, an IDE, etc), doesn’t mean they aren’t using their other screens/desktops for work.
Well, that only works for GTK 3 or 4 apps. Thanks to CSDs and GNOME's refusal to implement SSDs, every app that's not either running in XWayland or a GTK3/4 app has its own decorations without the context menu with the always on top option.
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.
You can use the alt+space shortcut to access the window context menu on any window, even if they are not a gtk/gnome app. At least on my system qt and kde apps still get some kind of ssd decoration that behaves somewhat like the gnome apps, plus access to the window context menu, though I agree things should be better than this and work more universally...
I'll probably be switching over too, from sway, once Cosmic is out of beta. I love tiling, and the only thing I miss while using sway is the lack of a single integrated settings application. It's possible to couple together individual apps to manage Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Monitors and everything else, but a single settings app is much better than babysitting a dozen separate ones.
I use Regolith Desktop packages to run Sway with Gnome.
It's basically i3/Sway + Gnome settings, and works really well.
I get the benefit of a sane DE (Sway) and somewhat easier settings and defaults
"Right now if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is."
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.
FWIW on KDE this is easily doable. I have my taskbars set up with per monitor taskbars as well.I can do pretty much anything while playing a game, watching a movie, etc.
I don't get the problem with hitting [meta] checking the time real quick, then hitting [meta] and being put back into your work. I do it with full screen games all the time with almost no issues.
I appreciate your dedication. Never once in my career have I been at "I'm so locked in, I can't spare a single second of time to look at another monitor" level of concentration :D
The point is, there's no clock in any other monitor because the top bar is only on the main one.
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.
Sure - I get the point, but also have never found the top bar on another monitor to be super prohibitive to my production. It's rare that I don't have a spare moment to move the mouse to check notifications (in fact, if they were close to my full-screen work environment, I might be tempted to check them MORE frequently).
I accidentally upgraded to the alpha (identical laptops, picked the wrong one and jumped into it) and it's been very rough and not just around the edges. Can't wait to go to beta, hopefully this addresses most of the issues. At least even the alpha was rock solid in terms of stability, so definitely fine for daily use but I didn't enjoy the user experience.
It used to be really bad this spring, but now it's somewhat buggy but fundamentally fine. Somewhere around March games would just randomly lose focus, start stuttering, or you couldn't use fullscreen while having a secondary monitor connected, that sort of thing. Now it's mostly fine. Steam Remote Play still has issues, but this is really a niche use case.
I've been running the 6.16 kernel via mainline for a couple months and that has taken care of most of my issues with games, running ta current gen AMD gpu. Can't speak for how much of the stability increase has been the kernel vs the DE though, just been getting more solid along the way. I just switched about 5-6 months ago though.
> [in Gnome] if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is.
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 :)
That surprises me. What kind of decision process ends up choosing to hide the primary clock in a desktop OS. It's funny imagine the meeting, people voting "yes" to this. Not even in the tiny screens (by comparison) of phones this has been done (probably proposed somewhere sometime, but thankfully denied).
I'm using niri with quickshell now and it has a similar feel, as quickshell implements many features in a unified way as in Gnome Shell.
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).
I tried niri this spring and had several issues trying to get copy-pasting between Wayland and X (Xwayland) working. Think I had some other problems as well that were a dealbreaker that I can't recall at the moment. Anyway, have you had an issues like this? I assume Gnome does a lot of work to make it seamless, maybe Quickshell does something similar?
As far as I remember I just had to install wl-clipboard and xwayland-satellite. It was working fine then even before I moved from Waybar to Quickshell.
For niri I followed closely the build and "manual installation" and "example systemd setup" instructions on the website. If you do that don't forget to edit niri.service to set the correct path for the executable.
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
For the Quickshell config I used Noctalia. This means installing some dependencies like fonts-roboto, then cloning the noctalia repository as a directory in ~/.config/quickshell/, and finally editing the quickshell systemd service to start it with the noctalia config (command "qs -c noctalia-shell").
Checkout DankMaterialShell[0], it's still in somewhat early stages of development but it supports both Niri and Hyprland. I just switched over to it from waybar in my Omarchy setup and have been loving it.
I've been using the cosmic-de on arch for a few months now. Started with the alpha and then switched to their git main branch.
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.
I agree, I just have phases. Sometimes I really love tinkering. But I when I got a new computer, I already had to setup so many things, I just wasn't into fiddling with i3 at that time.
I’ve been using Pop OS for several years and really like it. However while I think it’s cool that they’re doing some innovative DE stuff, the fact that it has come at such a huge cost to the stability of the OS is extremely frustrating.
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.
Pop was my last Distro before I went to Endeavour (Arch), it wasn't anything against Pop, I just ran into a weird issue where I needed a more up to date GBLIC for some software I was trying to run (to add insult to injury, it was a Ubuntu package too). I am really excited by the work they do, if I'm ever shopping for a Non-Mac Laptop in the near future I'm strongly leaning towards buying a System76 laptop since I love what they do.
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 recently installed Pop OS stable on my ancient 2014 MacbookPro. It was a mostly flawless experience - I needed to manually install the closed-source wl WiFi driver after installing while on USB-Ethernet, but after that everything worked. Trackpad (with 2finger scroll enabled by default), Display (with HiDPI), SD Card reader etc. I like the gnome based UI, I am not sure about the new Cosmic thingy though. Hope the GNOME-based UI will still be available in the new release.
As of just a couple years ago, I was able to run the latest Pop on even a late 2011 MBP. It's the only distribution I found that cleanly handled the wifi stack, display, and power management, although it took some tweaking for power management in particular to work right.
PopOS (just as Ubuntu) comes with a live-linux for its install media -i.e. you can try with the very same installer usb-stick if the system works for you. In generall I'd say the older a system, the better the likelihood of linux compat (if it is not WAY to old).
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.
I just tried to put omarchy/arch on my 16” mbp. Everything worked (eventually… speakers and keyboard backlight needed special stuff) except for suspend or hibernate. After about a week, I gave up and put Monterey on it.
I've been using Alpha(as my main driver!) for a year now, there's been a few hiccups here and there but its been very good. I prefer this to Gnome.
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.
They took too long so I moved off of PopOS 22.04 over to Ubuntu 25.04. I had tons of audio stability issues among many other things that I wanted fixed as well. I also have a lot of Gnome extensions I depend on right now, so I'm not ready to run a completely new DE without a healthy extension ecosystem to fix the quirks. I love the idea of a Rust DE and all that, but I can't really risk it for my daily driver machine.
Same - I got tired of waiting and moved to KDE on Fedora. Zero complaints and regrets. People said that Fedora is too bleeding edge and things break but fingers crossed, it has been an awesome experience.
Exact same story; Fedora has been so much more wonderful than I expected. Made me realise just how far the Linux desktop has really come these past years while Pop OS languished. I've tried the alpha, and while bugs were few, Cosmic doesn't look or feel like home to me. The slightly off positioning of items on the taskbar, the high contrast borders... It's speedy, but it's not for me.
I might try Fedora now that kde-neon is going the immutable route via kde linux. That said one of my most stable times with KDE was installing it over Pop!_OS. It was rock solid.
I've been running Fedora for years on my XPS 13 and am very pleased. Had zero issues except the integrated webcam doesn't work, but honestly that's a feature to me.
I am well aware of the risks. But I much more highly value getting bug fixes earlier rather than waiting a whole two years with partially broken software. As evidenced by the fact that everything I need to work does work now, and all the problems I had before have suddenly disappeared. LTS is overrated IMO.
On the one hand, I appreciate the modern stack; on the other hand, the proportions and margins are completely off, making everything look genuinely bizarre. The switches, for instance, are humongous, and the radius on the rounded corners is excessive just take a look at the dock. Everything is touching corners or has double the amount of whitespace it needs. I hope they start polishining with a designer now.
Maybe it's just media bias, but I have seen interest and work for GNOME really drop off the last couple of years. You could see something cool being worked on every couple weeks (at least reported on).
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.
> 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.
Long time Pop user -- I've been eagerly following Cosmic's development for over a year. I resisted the temptation of the alphas, and know how I'll be spending my evening.
Congrats to the devs. It's a significant achievement.
Would love to hear people's experiences with PopOS. I remember when it was new and Cosmic looked really neat, but I'm weary to try a new OS that has fewer users, purely because bugs will be reported and fixed less, so I've been an Ubuntu (and probably a Debian, soon) user.
I've been on Pop for about 5 years, through several major upgrade cycles, and it's nearly flawless. The bundled Pop!Shop app store is the notable turd in the pool, but it's optional. It has a system restore partition (that I've never had to use), boot-the-previous-kernel (that I've used once), full-disk encryption by default, so many little things that I appreciate. Everything Just Works, on both my old Thinkpad and my new Framework.
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.
> The bundled Pop!Shop app store is the notable turd in the pool, but it's optional.
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 switched from Ubuntu shortly after they started using snap everywhere (so around 20.04?).
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.
I have been using PopOS for a long time. Its kind of like Ubuntu with some of the dumb Ubuntu stuff removed. Their PopShell for Gnome was just far, better then normal Gnome.
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.
I have been using Pop!_OS on my old Intel-based Dell laptop for over 5 years. Now, I'm alternating between my M1-powered Mac and Pop!_OS as my daily driver. Before, I used Ubuntu for over 10 years and tested various distributions.
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 was, for me, one of the best experiences for linux desktop. In a very practical way, it was popos that got me off of windows at home. There are some issues, but they seem to mostly revolve about me getting opinionated over what something 'should' look like ( so I occasionally try other distros ).
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.
They’ve got a decent live USB version that runs their installer if you want to try it out short-term, though obviously that doesn’t really give you a real sense of the day-to-day. One thing that really impressed me about the live distro was that it worked out of the box with the propriety nvidia drivers.
Can't speak for GP, but in the 5-6 months or so I've been using it, most of my issues have been with keyboard navigation breaking or not working in some of the apps. It's gotten better with regular updates though and has been pretty solid. Other stability issues seem to have been deeper as since switching to a mainline kernel install (6.16.x) I haven't noticed any deep issues.
Pop has kept kernel updates well ahead of Ubuntu though, I just switched sooner than they seem to have.
it doesn't seem to handle multiple monitors very gracefully yet, at least when I used it & on my setup. Felt a little bit slower than gnome and less stable across the board.
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!
Was looking forward to this for a long time as I think Linux could do with a clean break from the Legacy built around Gnome/KDE/X11. But it's taking so long to get to release my main concern is now that a small company doesn't have the dev resources to take on maintaining a DE by themselves and haven't been successful in attracting a dev community to help pick up the slack.
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.
The number of PRs for Cosmic you shared is very misleading. The parent repo is full of submodules, so if you want to present the number of PRs to Cosmic as a whole, you need to count the PRs for each repo. For example, the software library app alone has more than double (3/182) the number you presented (6/90).
ok that makes more sense, was looking for their main/largest repo with the most stars, but yeah given it's made up of multiple sub modules its PRs are highly under represented.
> Omarchy has some how managed to attract 134/782 open/closed PRs [1] vs 6/90 for CosmicDE (since 2022) [2]
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.
This is fine, but Hyprland/Omarchy is a different paradigm than you average Gnome/KDE distro... As much as I would love to love Omarchy, it is just not my cup of tea, I just like to operate on windows floating everywhere, and get pissed that I can't find what I'm after and Super+Tab two full rounds before landing where I want to be, I just like that, I thrive in this chaos... I settled for Bluefin which is by far the best developer experience I have ever had in my life, it is just the perfect distro for coming from either Windows or macOS...
The reality is that hyprland is not a desktop environment and, even with a few dozen extra packages installed, it doesn't cover even a quarter of the use cases something like KDE does.
For many people that's fine, but you're comparing apples and oranges.
The fact they are different is the point, and my preference is leaning towards the Hyprland/Omarchy approach of starting from an empty base that you script and stitch different features together (from a wider community of authors) to build my preferred DE instead of relying on a big release drops from a single vendor to provide most of a DE's features.
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.
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
A UNIX graphical system without a proper developer stack, with frameworks for all layers, means everyone does their little thing, the people that can't be bothered just ship Electron or something just as bad, and for all user purposes to manage windows, and a couple of xterms, one could just be using FVWM from 1994.
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.
Which is basically why nowadays, my devices don't run GNU/Linux.
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.
Isn't this what Gnome/Libadwaita is trying to solve? They've been putting quite a bit of effort into it, and gnome builder, flatpak & related tech to have a proper developer stack for making GUI apps, and a community (gnome circle) to show them off.
At one time Gnome ejected a portion of its user base in order to become something that would work on tablets and phones as well as desktops - at least that seemed like the rationale. At that time it looked like there might be a market for linux devices with a UI and I don't know for sure but I think some money was spent to achieve this which is why objections by users were of so little importance.
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.
Yes, both GNOME and KDE, but unfortunately never took off as many of us expected in the 2000's, and nowadays apparently tiling managers without such frameworks is what is cool.
On approachability, I think with COSMIC the use of Rust is going to negatively impact it in that area. I don’t think a scripting language needs to be used, but something more C-like in syntax is a must. Rust is intimidating looking to those who don’t know it which is likely to bottleneck contributions.
Or at the very least, an easier way to extend the desktop with extensions.
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
Unfortunately Gnome extensions suffer from breaking frequently due to how they work.
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.
One tends to love things that make life easy. If you spend all your time debugging memory errors or concurrency problems then rust might seem wonderful for saving you from those problems.
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.
I think that writing UIs in a compiled language can be a pleasant experience, but it requires that the language in question be designed to put an explicit heavy emphasis on ergonomics and devs landing on the happy path by default. Rust doesn't really fit that profile and prioritizes safety above all.
Rust certainly has an enthusiastic following, and I’m sure there will be contributors from within that circle, but that hype has little impact beyond that crowd. The chances that your random user who gets an itch to contribute has adequate Rust skills is not high.
I think this is amazing work and I'm looking forward to trying it out and maybe adopting long term, but I can't help but think they're selling themselves short with the default theme. Personally find the electric blue pretty grating. Would be nice to see more examples of "calm" theming with more neutral tones, or even a preset alternative default for that.
I've been running the alpha for about 6 months at this point... it's been relatively solid, but there's been a few rough edges (mostly around keyboard navigation in the apps). Most of what I expect to work is now working without issue. I've also been running a mainline 6.16 kernel, for better gpu support (RX 9070XT).
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.
I can’t say much about fedora But pop os is not bleeding edge or glitzy. It’s kind of a workhorse distribution. I like Pop!os, despite its strange name.
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.
> Dragging and Dropping files from Wayland apps to X11 apps is not currently supported.
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.
Which implies that it's one of those things that DEs need to provide. So to answer OP's question, the answer is: With lots of custom, non-standard code. And who knows, if the world continues in this X11/Wayland duopoly, maybe one interop API will become standardized.
It's a thing that the Wayland API handles with portals. Some compositors implement more features than others, and kwin_wayland in my opinion, is one of the better implementations. Your interpretation is off.
The fragmentation is a huge reason the desktop experience is broken. The only UI that's actually consistent across all distros and works pretty damn well is the TUI.
Its not fragmentation, you (and others) just do not grasp the very basics of Linux.
Its open source.
We will never, and I mean never, have one desktop to rule them all. That's impossible. Not improbable, impossible. You just can't make that happen on Linux.
What you want is a closed-down ecosystem in which one actor controls it with an iron fist. Which is fine - more power.
But we already have that. That's windows and mac os. If Linux tried that, it would destroy it.
I think they bit off more than they could chew with this project, but happy they are making progress. I actually prefer Gnome, so I didn't care much for this project anyway. I've switched back to regular Debian 13 and am super happy with it.
Yes, I didn't even know they didn't had a version based on the last LTS (that was release more than 1 year ago). Especially considering that they have a strong focus for developers, and developers in general wants the new-ish libraries otherwise things starts to break or just in general compatibility issue with newer programs or libraries that you may depend for work.
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.
One of the big differences between PopOs and Ubuntu is that they tend to keep more up to date versions of the kernel and drivers which significantly mitigates the impact of this. PopOS 24.04 is currently on kernel 6.16.
I don't know about that - quite a few of us developers value stability over all else.
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.
But in this case it is not like you're in the bleeding edge (you aren't anyway since Pop OS is based on Ubuntu LTS that is already a more conservative distribution even when a new version is released), you're in a stable distribution from almost 3 years ago.
This is the point where things start breaking because it is too old, not because it is too new. Case in point I know at least one or two projects that drops anything from their CI that is not the newest LTS release, and there are probably more.
Reading through this thread, I've never been happier with macOS as my daily driver. I don't think or worry about my OS at all, other than being reminded on HN how terrible it is.
Nice. I'm sat on Gnome like a basic again, as I got tired of fucking around with dotfiles and deciding what sort of login manager defines me as a person.
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.
I was running i3 on Arch before. Then, I moved to Gnome Shell and have been daily driving COSMIC for a couple months. I think you will like it. At least on Alpha there were a couple rough edges here and there, but no deal breakers for me.
I was using Manjaro i3 X11 for 3 years. A few months back I switched to Arch Hyprland Wayland and so far I am very happy with it. I use it for programming, video editing and gaming. No major inconveniences.
I'm not a UI/UX designer but I feel like in general, Linux community need to put a LOT more focus into the GUI frameworks.
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 really identify with this. I think the worst offender was KDE when I could [meta]+drag and move taskbar applets all around the screen like a regular window. Like you said it's understandable since there is a vast funding difference between windows/MacOS and the linux DEs but it is unfortunate.
From a marketing perspective perhaps, but it's still a supported LTS release of Ubuntu at heart and having two different version numbers would create ambiguity.
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.
Why should we care about the COSMIC Desktop Environment?
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).
Your comment could have been posted under almost ANY story on HN. "Why should we care about .... ?" In other words, it's a very low value comment as far as discussion goes. If you don't care about it move on, nobody said you had to care.
Because there are a number of existing frustrations with GNOME that can not be fixed in GNOME, because GNOME Foundation has their own specific vision, which not a lot of people like.
KDE is good but has its own flaws, and it's a different workflow
Not being able to question large investments is not a healthy perspective. And as this is the first public release with Cosmic, I think it's completely fair for people to question it.
Who is "we". But to answer your question, it was created because System76 didn't find an existing DE that met their needs even after extensive changes to them.
As someone else mentioned, it's because it's a very low value comment.
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.
Perfectly valid question. I remember Ubuntu getting lost down a rabbit hole of their touch screen desktop wm that had soo many warts. I guess if you don't have the power to steer a project you fork or try something else. Then realise you neither have the UI chops or technical finesse to pull something off. Windows has been atrocious UI wise since Win 8, failed to pull anything off cohesively and just left a mess. Much like Ubuntu, but with what you would expect a well funded dedicated UI team.
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.
I personally care because it’s Rust based and that means I’m likely to participate in development and feel comfortable with the tooling.
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
I'm actually excited to try Cosmic DE.
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...
Most things can be solved with Gnome Shell extensions, but I have to admit that having to install 5-6 extensions for basic DE features, like managing where notifications show up, makes it easier to switch to something else.
Problem is exacerbated when your GNOME Shell gets updated and takes out all your extensions.
Or your extensions take out GNOME
Even then, Gnome updates regularly require massive updates to those extensions... Pop used to just do that in the box, but felt just having an entirely separate DE they control would be a better long run experience.
Most things, yes. The things I mentioned, no.
I don't understand, on Gnome when you maximize a window (drag to top) you can still see the time.
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?
Baffled me too but I get it now, they want fullscreen on the first monitor and a clock on the second.
I agree GP was talking about the multi monitor scenario, but I also run into trouble with just one monitor. If I'm playing a full screen game and want to know what time it is, there's no way to focus the task bar without closing the game entirely. On Windows, hitting the start button while in a fullscreen app will give focus to the taskbar so you can glance at the time and immediately return to the game.
Yeah, I lost so many Warcraft III games on Battle.net, when I accidentally pressed that pesky button, while having a pretty decent computer with 256 MB RAM. I ended up facing a separate keyboard without the key (and some others too).
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.
This is now solved because games don’t default to exclusive fullscreen anymore, so the windows compositor still runs on top of the game, so popping up the start menu is instant without any weird resolution/hdr changes
Ha, "instant". It will appear 30 seconds later, out of context, like a kraken from the depths.
My trinket drawer still contains five assorted Windows keys that I prised out of various keyboards for this reason. Vague plans to make a necklace.
Ah thanks, I was so confused
Just because someone wants a single app to have a full screen (video, game, an IDE, etc), doesn’t mean they aren’t using their other screens/desktops for work.
Even with a single screen I sometimes want a video in full screen, while keeping an app window (email, excel, whatever) in a window in front of it.
right click -> "always on top". That's available by default
Well, that only works for GTK 3 or 4 apps. Thanks to CSDs and GNOME's refusal to implement SSDs, every app that's not either running in XWayland or a GTK3/4 app has its own decorations without the context menu with the always on top option.
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.
You can use the alt+space shortcut to access the window context menu on any window, even if they are not a gtk/gnome app. At least on my system qt and kde apps still get some kind of ssd decoration that behaves somewhat like the gnome apps, plus access to the window context menu, though I agree things should be better than this and work more universally...
I'll probably be switching over too, from sway, once Cosmic is out of beta. I love tiling, and the only thing I miss while using sway is the lack of a single integrated settings application. It's possible to couple together individual apps to manage Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Monitors and everything else, but a single settings app is much better than babysitting a dozen separate ones.
I use Regolith Desktop packages to run Sway with Gnome. It's basically i3/Sway + Gnome settings, and works really well. I get the benefit of a sane DE (Sway) and somewhat easier settings and defaults
https://regolith-desktop.com/
I highly recommend regolith as well, even though the Sway session has never worked without issues for me yet. X11 is very stable.
Very cool. I'm on Fedora and not likely to switch, but it looks like there's a lot of improvements I could crib from regolith.
FWIW you can run i3 as WM inside, say, XFCE, if you're not married to wayland. i3 and sway are almost identical otherwise.
"Right now if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is."
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.
FWIW on KDE this is easily doable. I have my taskbars set up with per monitor taskbars as well.I can do pretty much anything while playing a game, watching a movie, etc.
Plus, you can add window rules in a nice to use GUI to automagically do it for you!
Getting a desk clock was a weirdly useful change for me, maybe try that?
Which has the added bonus of working even in fullscreen games.
I don't get the problem with hitting [meta] checking the time real quick, then hitting [meta] and being put back into your work. I do it with full screen games all the time with almost no issues.
Addiction issue.
But very widespread.
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.
I live by timers/alarms on my phone... if I don't set an alarm/timer, I'll never break focus for meetings etc.
> But very widespread.
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.
Even if you don't get pulled into something else, having to stop what you're doing to check the time sounds like a bad UI.
That's not on you to say, and pretty fucking tone deaf to boot.
If someone cannot look at their phone to find out the time without becoming distracted and losing their focus, that’s not a phone problem.
Maybe, but why should you have to pull out a separate device to check the time?
I appreciate your dedication. Never once in my career have I been at "I'm so locked in, I can't spare a single second of time to look at another monitor" level of concentration :D
The point is, there's no clock in any other monitor because the top bar is only on the main one.
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.
Sure - I get the point, but also have never found the top bar on another monitor to be super prohibitive to my production. It's rare that I don't have a spare moment to move the mouse to check notifications (in fact, if they were close to my full-screen work environment, I might be tempted to check them MORE frequently).
you can literally press Meta/Win key and have Gnome's overview... want something better move to XFCE :P
It is not about the time spent looking at the time, it is about being unable to ignore shiny stuff when you get out of fullscreen.
I accidentally upgraded to the alpha (identical laptops, picked the wrong one and jumped into it) and it's been very rough and not just around the edges. Can't wait to go to beta, hopefully this addresses most of the issues. At least even the alpha was rock solid in terms of stability, so definitely fine for daily use but I didn't enjoy the user experience.
It used to be really bad this spring, but now it's somewhat buggy but fundamentally fine. Somewhere around March games would just randomly lose focus, start stuttering, or you couldn't use fullscreen while having a secondary monitor connected, that sort of thing. Now it's mostly fine. Steam Remote Play still has issues, but this is really a niche use case.
I've been running the 6.16 kernel via mainline for a couple months and that has taken care of most of my issues with games, running ta current gen AMD gpu. Can't speak for how much of the stability increase has been the kernel vs the DE though, just been getting more solid along the way. I just switched about 5-6 months ago though.
> [in Gnome] if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is.
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 truth is that the GNOME community probably has the most designers and UX-focused members in its community.
The problem isn’t lack of designers.
You mean the designers who did something like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/1nrcvok/i_dont_see_t...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45391654
For all the hate it receives, Libadwaita is one of the nicest designed toolkits currently in-use that has more than a dozen applications using it.
Having an entire CSS engine at their disposal certainly does help the designers design without needing to know programming.
That surprises me. What kind of decision process ends up choosing to hide the primary clock in a desktop OS. It's funny imagine the meeting, people voting "yes" to this. Not even in the tiny screens (by comparison) of phones this has been done (probably proposed somewhere sometime, but thankfully denied).
The problem isn’t enough designers, it’s too many.
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.
I'm using niri with quickshell now and it has a similar feel, as quickshell implements many features in a unified way as in Gnome Shell.
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).
I tried niri this spring and had several issues trying to get copy-pasting between Wayland and X (Xwayland) working. Think I had some other problems as well that were a dealbreaker that I can't recall at the moment. Anyway, have you had an issues like this? I assume Gnome does a lot of work to make it seamless, maybe Quickshell does something similar?
As far as I remember I just had to install wl-clipboard and xwayland-satellite. It was working fine then even before I moved from Waybar to Quickshell.
Did you follow or do you have a guide or instructions for how you configured your setup?
For niri I followed closely the build and "manual installation" and "example systemd setup" instructions on the website. If you do that don't forget to edit niri.service to set the correct path for the executable.
For Quickshell I basically followed the website instructions but here are my notes from when I installed on Debian Trixie:
For the Quickshell config I used Noctalia. This means installing some dependencies like fonts-roboto, then cloning the noctalia repository as a directory in ~/.config/quickshell/, and finally editing the quickshell systemd service to start it with the noctalia config (command "qs -c noctalia-shell").Checkout DankMaterialShell[0], it's still in somewhat early stages of development but it supports both Niri and Hyprland. I just switched over to it from waybar in my Omarchy setup and have been loving it.
[0]: https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell
You mean like GNOME used to be usable, before the big rewrite.
I've been using the cosmic-de on arch for a few months now. Started with the alpha and then switched to their git main branch.
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.
If you don't like tinkering, the likes of i3 and sway are not for you.
I agree, I just have phases. Sometimes I really love tinkering. But I when I got a new computer, I already had to setup so many things, I just wasn't into fiddling with i3 at that time.
Why haven’t you just transferred your config? I’ve got a new laptop, rsynced my entire system, updated some things here and there, and that was it.
Resolution changed, GPU changed and I was running X11 on the old system, it was time for Wayland
I’ve been using Pop OS for several years and really like it. However while I think it’s cool that they’re doing some innovative DE stuff, the fact that it has come at such a huge cost to the stability of the OS is extremely frustrating.
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.
Pop was my last Distro before I went to Endeavour (Arch), it wasn't anything against Pop, I just ran into a weird issue where I needed a more up to date GBLIC for some software I was trying to run (to add insult to injury, it was a Ubuntu package too). I am really excited by the work they do, if I'm ever shopping for a Non-Mac Laptop in the near future I'm strongly leaning towards buying a System76 laptop since I love what they do.
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 recently installed Pop OS stable on my ancient 2014 MacbookPro. It was a mostly flawless experience - I needed to manually install the closed-source wl WiFi driver after installing while on USB-Ethernet, but after that everything worked. Trackpad (with 2finger scroll enabled by default), Display (with HiDPI), SD Card reader etc. I like the gnome based UI, I am not sure about the new Cosmic thingy though. Hope the GNOME-based UI will still be available in the new release.
As of just a couple years ago, I was able to run the latest Pop on even a late 2011 MBP. It's the only distribution I found that cleanly handled the wifi stack, display, and power management, although it took some tweaking for power management in particular to work right.
Hello! I have a mid-2014 Macbook Pro and I couldn't get my wifi working with PopOS. Do you have a webpage, or set of commands you could share?
> sudo apt update && sudo apt install broadcom-sta-dkms
Probably in non-free (debian/PopOS) or universe/restricted (ubuntu). The kernel module is "wl"
It's usually something like this. But I guess for Ubuntu?
https://wiki.debian.org/wl
Just note: anytime the kernel is updated, you need rerun these commands and rebuild the drivers for the new kernel.
I guess the gnome version will be available until cosmic moves out of beta. That might still take some time.
I have an old 2019 MBP, now I am tempted to try Pop on it. Does the external displays work?
PopOS (just as Ubuntu) comes with a live-linux for its install media -i.e. you can try with the very same installer usb-stick if the system works for you. In generall I'd say the older a system, the better the likelihood of linux compat (if it is not WAY to old).
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.
You can try using DP adapter/cable: https://web.archive.org/web/20160708162656/https://support.a...
I just tried to put omarchy/arch on my 16” mbp. Everything worked (eventually… speakers and keyboard backlight needed special stuff) except for suspend or hibernate. After about a week, I gave up and put Monterey on it.
I've been using Alpha(as my main driver!) for a year now, there's been a few hiccups here and there but its been very good. I prefer this to Gnome.
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.
They took too long so I moved off of PopOS 22.04 over to Ubuntu 25.04. I had tons of audio stability issues among many other things that I wanted fixed as well. I also have a lot of Gnome extensions I depend on right now, so I'm not ready to run a completely new DE without a healthy extension ecosystem to fix the quirks. I love the idea of a Rust DE and all that, but I can't really risk it for my daily driver machine.
Same - I got tired of waiting and moved to KDE on Fedora. Zero complaints and regrets. People said that Fedora is too bleeding edge and things break but fingers crossed, it has been an awesome experience.
Exact same story; Fedora has been so much more wonderful than I expected. Made me realise just how far the Linux desktop has really come these past years while Pop OS languished. I've tried the alpha, and while bugs were few, Cosmic doesn't look or feel like home to me. The slightly off positioning of items on the taskbar, the high contrast borders... It's speedy, but it's not for me.
I might try Fedora now that kde-neon is going the immutable route via kde linux. That said one of my most stable times with KDE was installing it over Pop!_OS. It was rock solid.
That's exactly how I caught up to speed with KDE. I installed it on Pop and liked it so much that it is my default DE again after many years.
There is a Fedora Cosmic spin available as well for anyone who likes Fedora but still wants a nice Cosmic experience out of the box
I've been running Fedora for years on my XPS 13 and am very pleased. Had zero issues except the integrated webcam doesn't work, but honestly that's a feature to me.
I had to blacklist newer kernel series that broke AMD graphics. But overall quite like it.
Weird. I'm also running Fedora on an xps 13 and my camera is fine. In case it makes a difference, is yours the Ubuntu-specific version?
Yup! I bought the Ubuntu specific version and flashed Fedora on it day 1. From everything I've read this was fairly common behavior.
Wow. I use the camera all the time and I'd be pretty annoyed if it didn't work. I wonder how/if my setup is different.
Moving from an LTS to a non LTS is not a great thing if you're after stability.
I am well aware of the risks. But I much more highly value getting bug fixes earlier rather than waiting a whole two years with partially broken software. As evidenced by the fact that everything I need to work does work now, and all the problems I had before have suddenly disappeared. LTS is overrated IMO.
On the one hand, I appreciate the modern stack; on the other hand, the proportions and margins are completely off, making everything look genuinely bizarre. The switches, for instance, are humongous, and the radius on the rounded corners is excessive just take a look at the dock. Everything is touching corners or has double the amount of whitespace it needs. I hope they start polishining with a designer now.
I feel you. It’s not the worst I’ve seen by a long shot but it’s still not “right” and as a result would find it irritating to use.
Some of the whitespace can be configured in the settings. I am not sure if the problems you mention can be adjusted there though.
I like the function but it does all feel just a bit off and half backed. Im relatively hopeful it'll get there.
There has been a UI/UX designer since day one.
:/
Really impressive work from the Pop!_OS team. They broke away from GNOME and decided to build their own DE, now it’s finally here
Maybe it's just media bias, but I have seen interest and work for GNOME really drop off the last couple of years. You could see something cool being worked on every couple weeks (at least reported on).
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.
Back when I was still into using Linux as desktop OS, I lost interest when GNOME 3.0 came to be.
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.
> 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.
Are you talking about this article?
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/tag/tiling/
Yes it was shown off at their GUADEC.
It's Sep 2025. Why is the 24.04 LTS still at Beta?
I think it’s related to what is mentioned in this blog post.
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.
Do you think that they'll rebase for the soon coming 26.04?
probably.
Long time Pop user -- I've been eagerly following Cosmic's development for over a year. I resisted the temptation of the alphas, and know how I'll be spending my evening.
Congrats to the devs. It's a significant achievement.
Would love to hear people's experiences with PopOS. I remember when it was new and Cosmic looked really neat, but I'm weary to try a new OS that has fewer users, purely because bugs will be reported and fixed less, so I've been an Ubuntu (and probably a Debian, soon) user.
I've been on Pop for about 5 years, through several major upgrade cycles, and it's nearly flawless. The bundled Pop!Shop app store is the notable turd in the pool, but it's optional. It has a system restore partition (that I've never had to use), boot-the-previous-kernel (that I've used once), full-disk encryption by default, so many little things that I appreciate. Everything Just Works, on both my old Thinkpad and my new Framework.
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.
FWIW, I have been running regular Pop using the Cosmic Store for a while now. It's nice and snappy.
Seconded, the Cosmic Store is a massive improvement... I do wish they'd make flathub vs packages slightly more obvious of a selector though.
> The bundled Pop!Shop app store is the notable turd in the pool, but it's optional.
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 switched from Ubuntu shortly after they started using snap everywhere (so around 20.04?).
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.
I have been using PopOS for a long time. Its kind of like Ubuntu with some of the dumb Ubuntu stuff removed. Their PopShell for Gnome was just far, better then normal Gnome.
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.
I have been using Pop!_OS on my old Intel-based Dell laptop for over 5 years. Now, I'm alternating between my M1-powered Mac and Pop!_OS as my daily driver. Before, I used Ubuntu for over 10 years and tested various distributions.
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.
> I'm weary to try a new OS that has fewer users
"Weary" means "very tired". I think you mean "wary" -- nervous, hesitant, scared.
"I am wary of trying a new OS..."
It was, for me, one of the best experiences for linux desktop. In a very practical way, it was popos that got me off of windows at home. There are some issues, but they seem to mostly revolve about me getting opinionated over what something 'should' look like ( so I occasionally try other distros ).
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
They’ve got a decent live USB version that runs their installer if you want to try it out short-term, though obviously that doesn’t really give you a real sense of the day-to-day. One thing that really impressed me about the live distro was that it worked out of the box with the propriety nvidia drivers.
Haven't tried the latest stuff yet but I've been on PopOS for a few years now and it's pretty seamless.
I had to check, so for the record: Pop OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distro.
Just to be clear, the news here is that Pop OS now uses the Cosmic DE (which just reached beta).
Unlike the previous Pop OS DE, Cosmic DE is not tied to a particular distro. For example, there's an official Fedora Spin [1].
[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/cosmic
No snaps by default. So it fixes Canonical's folly.
The killer feature of Pop for me is nvidia drivers baked into the live ISO. Live boot to nvidia-smi without touching the disk is really handy.
Universal Blue has this too
Pop is great & i love what system76 is doing, but the bugs in cosmic have had me holding off. I will certainly try again soon.
Which bugs in particular? I was thinking of installing it on another drive.
Can't speak for GP, but in the 5-6 months or so I've been using it, most of my issues have been with keyboard navigation breaking or not working in some of the apps. It's gotten better with regular updates though and has been pretty solid. Other stability issues seem to have been deeper as since switching to a mainline kernel install (6.16.x) I haven't noticed any deep issues.
Pop has kept kernel updates well ahead of Ubuntu though, I just switched sooner than they seem to have.
it doesn't seem to handle multiple monitors very gracefully yet, at least when I used it & on my setup. Felt a little bit slower than gnome and less stable across the board.
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!
Was looking forward to this for a long time as I think Linux could do with a clean break from the Legacy built around Gnome/KDE/X11. But it's taking so long to get to release my main concern is now that a small company doesn't have the dev resources to take on maintaining a DE by themselves and haven't been successful in attracting a dev community to help pick up the slack.
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.
[1] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/pulls
[2] https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/pulls
The number of PRs for Cosmic you shared is very misleading. The parent repo is full of submodules, so if you want to present the number of PRs to Cosmic as a whole, you need to count the PRs for each repo. For example, the software library app alone has more than double (3/182) the number you presented (6/90).
ok that makes more sense, was looking for their main/largest repo with the most stars, but yeah given it's made up of multiple sub modules its PRs are highly under represented.
> Omarchy has some how managed to attract 134/782 open/closed PRs [1] vs 6/90 for CosmicDE (since 2022) [2]
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.
This is fine, but Hyprland/Omarchy is a different paradigm than you average Gnome/KDE distro... As much as I would love to love Omarchy, it is just not my cup of tea, I just like to operate on windows floating everywhere, and get pissed that I can't find what I'm after and Super+Tab two full rounds before landing where I want to be, I just like that, I thrive in this chaos... I settled for Bluefin which is by far the best developer experience I have ever had in my life, it is just the perfect distro for coming from either Windows or macOS...
The reality is that hyprland is not a desktop environment and, even with a few dozen extra packages installed, it doesn't cover even a quarter of the use cases something like KDE does.
For many people that's fine, but you're comparing apples and oranges.
The fact they are different is the point, and my preference is leaning towards the Hyprland/Omarchy approach of starting from an empty base that you script and stitch different features together (from a wider community of authors) to build my preferred DE instead of relying on a big release drops from a single vendor to provide most of a DE's features.
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 agree with this.
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
A UNIX graphical system without a proper developer stack, with frameworks for all layers, means everyone does their little thing, the people that can't be bothered just ship Electron or something just as bad, and for all user purposes to manage windows, and a couple of xterms, one could just be using FVWM from 1994.
Which is how I look to most of these new desktops.
> with frameworks for all layers
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.
Which is basically why nowadays, my devices don't run GNU/Linux.
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.
Isn't this what Gnome/Libadwaita is trying to solve? They've been putting quite a bit of effort into it, and gnome builder, flatpak & related tech to have a proper developer stack for making GUI apps, and a community (gnome circle) to show them off.
At one time Gnome ejected a portion of its user base in order to become something that would work on tablets and phones as well as desktops - at least that seemed like the rationale. At that time it looked like there might be a market for linux devices with a UI and I don't know for sure but I think some money was spent to achieve this which is why objections by users were of so little importance.
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.
Yes, both GNOME and KDE, but unfortunately never took off as many of us expected in the 2000's, and nowadays apparently tiling managers without such frameworks is what is cool.
Omarchy is mainly composed of configuration files which makes it a lot easier to interact with.
Exactly, much more hackable/approachable/sharable to be able to easily cobble features together.
"configuration as convention"?
> curated blank slate
On approachability, I think with COSMIC the use of Rust is going to negatively impact it in that area. I don’t think a scripting language needs to be used, but something more C-like in syntax is a must. Rust is intimidating looking to those who don’t know it which is likely to bottleneck contributions.
Or at the very least, an easier way to extend the desktop with extensions.
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
Unfortunately Gnome extensions suffer from breaking frequently due to how they work.
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.
Rust is the “most loved” language for almost a decade now.
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.
One tends to love things that make life easy. If you spend all your time debugging memory errors or concurrency problems then rust might seem wonderful for saving you from those problems.
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.
I think that writing UIs in a compiled language can be a pleasant experience, but it requires that the language in question be designed to put an explicit heavy emphasis on ergonomics and devs landing on the happy path by default. Rust doesn't really fit that profile and prioritizes safety above all.
Rust certainly has an enthusiastic following, and I’m sure there will be contributors from within that circle, but that hype has little impact beyond that crowd. The chances that your random user who gets an itch to contribute has adequate Rust skills is not high.
I think this is amazing work and I'm looking forward to trying it out and maybe adopting long term, but I can't help but think they're selling themselves short with the default theme. Personally find the electric blue pretty grating. Would be nice to see more examples of "calm" theming with more neutral tones, or even a preset alternative default for that.
My next laptop will be a system76 no matter what... But pleeeeeease come out with a high-perf ARM model!!
I've been running the alpha for about 6 months at this point... it's been relatively solid, but there's been a few rough edges (mostly around keyboard navigation in the apps). Most of what I expect to work is now working without issue. I've also been running a mainline 6.16 kernel, for better gpu support (RX 9070XT).
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.
First time Linux explorer here; does anyone know how Fedora Atomic Cosmic fares against Pop OS?
I can’t say much about fedora But pop os is not bleeding edge or glitzy. It’s kind of a workhorse distribution. I like Pop!os, despite its strange name.
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.
> Dragging and Dropping files from Wayland apps to X11 apps is not currently supported.
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.
Works in KDE just fine
Which implies that it's one of those things that DEs need to provide. So to answer OP's question, the answer is: With lots of custom, non-standard code. And who knows, if the world continues in this X11/Wayland duopoly, maybe one interop API will become standardized.
It's a thing that the Wayland API handles with portals. Some compositors implement more features than others, and kwin_wayland in my opinion, is one of the better implementations. Your interpretation is off.
The desktop is literally not broken at all.
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.
The fragmentation is a huge reason the desktop experience is broken. The only UI that's actually consistent across all distros and works pretty damn well is the TUI.
Its not fragmentation, you (and others) just do not grasp the very basics of Linux.
Its open source.
We will never, and I mean never, have one desktop to rule them all. That's impossible. Not improbable, impossible. You just can't make that happen on Linux.
What you want is a closed-down ecosystem in which one actor controls it with an iron fist. Which is fine - more power.
But we already have that. That's windows and mac os. If Linux tried that, it would destroy it.
I've been daily driving Gnome on Fedora for years and literally nothing about it is broken. We're having very different experiences.
In GNOME, can you drag and drop from the archive manager into your file manager yet?
This is solved by using X11.
I've had issues with Nvidia drivers on a fresh install. Couldn't get my PC to boot, similar to what is described here - https://youtu.be/ICXjcnhW5qc
I think they bit off more than they could chew with this project, but happy they are making progress. I actually prefer Gnome, so I didn't care much for this project anyway. I've switched back to regular Debian 13 and am super happy with it.
Yes, I didn't even know they didn't had a version based on the last LTS (that was release more than 1 year ago). Especially considering that they have a strong focus for developers, and developers in general wants the new-ish libraries otherwise things starts to break or just in general compatibility issue with newer programs or libraries that you may depend for work.
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.
One of the big differences between PopOs and Ubuntu is that they tend to keep more up to date versions of the kernel and drivers which significantly mitigates the impact of this. PopOS 24.04 is currently on kernel 6.16.
I don't know about that - quite a few of us developers value stability over all else.
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.
But in this case it is not like you're in the bleeding edge (you aren't anyway since Pop OS is based on Ubuntu LTS that is already a more conservative distribution even when a new version is released), you're in a stable distribution from almost 3 years ago.
This is the point where things start breaking because it is too old, not because it is too new. Case in point I know at least one or two projects that drops anything from their CI that is not the newest LTS release, and there are probably more.
I've moved over to hyprland but Cosmic is a pretty good upgrade from Gnome already in my opinion. Great to see so many viable desktop environments!
So excited for this! I'm on 22.04 but I've been watching this closely.
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!
Linux is always so much further ahead of Apple on window management.
Reading through this thread, I've never been happier with macOS as my daily driver. I don't think or worry about my OS at all, other than being reminded on HN how terrible it is.
I have zero interest in switching to Linux, I did that, and life is too short dealing with all that maintenance. I just use MacOS.
Cosmic is coming along so well, worked with their PM team when it was pre-alpha on validations and the project still excites me.
Wow, reordering workspaces with the mouse! This is a small thing that has been driving me insane on GNOME coming from macOS.
Tiling support is such a killer feature.
Don't both gnome and kde also have tiling support?
Gnome via extensions, but not natively. I've never really clicked with any of them. Not sure about KDE.
Plasma has at least basic tiling support for different workspaces and reasonable default hotkeys to arrange your windows.
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/
Nice. I'm sat on Gnome like a basic again, as I got tired of fucking around with dotfiles and deciding what sort of login manager defines me as a person.
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.
Not really
I'm glad to see some innovation in the Linux desktop space but pop os just looks kind of cheesy
I hope it will make the space more interesting. Also with other projects using cosmic as a base to build on top.
This might be what finally gets me to ditch my i3+xfce setup. Anyone done a similar transition?
I was running i3 on Arch before. Then, I moved to Gnome Shell and have been daily driving COSMIC for a couple months. I think you will like it. At least on Alpha there were a couple rough edges here and there, but no deal breakers for me.
I was using Manjaro i3 X11 for 3 years. A few months back I switched to Arch Hyprland Wayland and so far I am very happy with it. I use it for programming, video editing and gaming. No major inconveniences.
Funny to see the demo resemble my decade-old DWM setup.
No secure boot support? Still?
I'm not a UI/UX designer but I feel like in general, Linux community need to put a LOT more focus into the GUI frameworks.
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 really identify with this. I think the worst offender was KDE when I could [meta]+drag and move taskbar applets all around the screen like a regular window. Like you said it's understandable since there is a vast funding difference between windows/MacOS and the linux DEs but it is unfortunate.
This was long awaited thing, very good!
if you're on the alpha, does it update to the beta when you apt update?
Yes it does. We could argue if it’s update or upgrade, but I think it’s clear what you mean.
you're right, i meant apt upgrade
Shame there is no ARM64 ISO.
> 24.04 LTS Beta
It's almost 2026. Yeesh
Yeah the version numbering is a mistake. They should version based on their release, not the underlying base.
From a marketing perspective perhaps, but it's still a supported LTS release of Ubuntu at heart and having two different version numbers would create ambiguity.
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.
Anyone have this (or another linux distro) working with an nvidia rtx 5060?
[dead]
Why should we care about the COSMIC Desktop Environment?
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).
Your comment could have been posted under almost ANY story on HN. "Why should we care about .... ?" In other words, it's a very low value comment as far as discussion goes. If you don't care about it move on, nobody said you had to care.
Because there are a number of existing frustrations with GNOME that can not be fixed in GNOME, because GNOME Foundation has their own specific vision, which not a lot of people like.
KDE is good but has its own flaws, and it's a different workflow
IMO KDE is not a different workflow. You can easily recreate all of gnome in KDE.
So, just use KDE.
you really can't. I have tried and I am trying every couple of years. I hope it gets there one day though
it's also usually more buggy for me, so there's that.
Can KDE do dynamic workspaces now? That was one of the nicer things about GNOME last time I used it
Tried KDE. I very much prefer Gnome with extensions
Pro-tip: These are inside thoughts, no need to comment, just have the thought and move along.
Not being able to question large investments is not a healthy perspective. And as this is the first public release with Cosmic, I think it's completely fair for people to question it.
Sure but there was not much in that question.
Sorry, I don't see it that way.
Which is why you were downvoted.
Who is "we". But to answer your question, it was created because System76 didn't find an existing DE that met their needs even after extensive changes to them.
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.
Perfectly valid question. I remember Ubuntu getting lost down a rabbit hole of their touch screen desktop wm that had soo many warts. I guess if you don't have the power to steer a project you fork or try something else. Then realise you neither have the UI chops or technical finesse to pull something off. Windows has been atrocious UI wise since Win 8, failed to pull anything off cohesively and just left a mess. Much like Ubuntu, but with what you would expect a well funded dedicated UI team.
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.
I personally care because it’s Rust based and that means I’m likely to participate in development and feel comfortable with the tooling.
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
Old news? The version number is 24.04, seems like a year old? Page doesn’t have a date, news should always have a date…
Should be new. They released some showcase videos a few hours ago [1]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMJpPasSN0M&list=PL0bXfFQsIC...
The version number is 24.04 because it's based on the latest Ubuntu LTS.
They have delayed 24.04 to wait for Cosmic to be ready. They push new kernels to the older release as well.
Interesting that a normal, justified question receives this many downvotes...