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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
54 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 66.2 ms ] threadIt 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...
It's my main driver for software development, it was initially a dual boot system with windows, but I found that I could use Steam with very little configuration and could do all my gaming in linux(Cosmic DE/PopOS, I have a Nvidia GPU) as well. Works out of the box with Bigwig Studio and my Soundcard (Ultralite mk5)
I use a mix of the Cosmic store and nix for packages and programs.
I don't need to use windows ever again for anything and it makes me very happy.
I'm now leaning towards the Hyprland/Omarchy approach of starting with a curated blank slate that can be easily themed, customized and extended to suit where I wouldn't have to rely on big drop releases of a single organization for any missing/preferred functionality.
Even at its young age Omarchy has some how managed to attract 134/782 open/closed PRs [1] vs 6/90 for CosmicDE (since 2022) [2] which IMO speaks to the approachability and hackability of a scriptable DE and the community being built up around each.
Edit: as the Cosmic DE repo is made up of many submodules, they all have a lot more PRs/activity combined.
[1] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/pulls
[2] https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/pulls
I absolutely loved it. It is such a breath of fresh air. I previously used to run i3 and a bunch of other tooling around it I can't even remember. Setup always had some weird edge case or was weird to use. Gnome always felt very bloated and laggy.
I then tried sway because I wanted to see if Wayland was any better performance and was not very impressed, although it just might be a configuration issue, the out of the box experience was just not good. And I wasn't in the tinkering mood anymore.
I installed cosmic and everything just worked. It felt snappy, no weird lags, nice but not too slow animations, even a build in window manager that was close enough to i3 that I no longer need sway or i3.
Notification, Display Management, Login, Autolaunching apps, Window Management etc. everything finally feels like a full operating system the way I have never experienced linux before. Maybe Ubuntu or Mint came close, but those came with their own troubles.
Edit: I've now gotten 2 downvotes in 4 minutes. I do not understand what's so controversial about this comment. Why should we care about having a third DE? Does this matter to users at all? I've watched several videos show casing it, and there seems to be no point to it except organizational (Pop OS wants to break free from GNOME).
It provides nothing to the discussion except a bad attitude.
It's clear from the fact you're asking it you don't about the topic. Go investigate Cosmic desktop, if you don't know why we should care about it, and you can find out for yourself whether or not it's worth caring about.
If you find out that you don't think this is something that should be discussed, don't up vote the thread and move on, simple as that. If the thread gets many upvotes anyways, you can infer people care about it, even if you don't. Comments like this only pollute the discussion and make everything feel negative.
It's a big part of the reason the internet has become such a drag, that people always feel the need to comment every little thing, even if it only adds negative value.
As a broader picture — it matters since the creator is System76 which sells laptops and desktops and moves towards giving a full Linux on Desktop polished experience. You really can only go so far if you are not deeply involved in the DE yourself.
p.s.: your question is very legit imo, don’t get the downvotes
It's almost 2026. Yeesh