I'm excited for Cosmic Desktop

ColdWater@lemmy.ca to Linux@lemmy.ml – 172 points –

From what I saw Cosmic has a lot of potential and looks pretty sleek too, right now I'm using KDE it's a great desktop, but now that I have a second monitor it randomly crashes on me, I think I'll switch to Cosmic when it reaches beta.

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

2 years is nothing to a Linux user lol

It took me longer than that to figure out how to get out of Vim

I feel like the official mascot of vim should be a mime trapped in an imaginary box lol

It could take that long. I was wondering if Ubuntu is 24.10 /25.04, 25.10, and 26.04 if pop will align their alpha2, beta, and official release with the Ubuntu release schedule.

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

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

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

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

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

2 years is not that much

Not in the long view it wouldn't be that bad but we've seen other projects take so many years. Look how long it's taken Wayland.

Yep. I stupidly thought I could use it on my work laptop. Big nope, I had to go back after 2 hours.

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

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

Yeah I've been running it in one of my little VM specimen jars for a while now and I don't remember it crashing or doing anything weird so far. Pretty good for a first alpha!

I'm using it every day now. I have one machine installed with the 24.04 ISO and it's working fine. There's some TODO items to come which I understand will be added by Alpha2. With a little command line knowledge COSMIC is perfectly usable now and is stable.

I'm sure my command line game is weak. Do you have a solution for connecting to Bluetooth and for timing out to login screen and blanking it after a certain period?

Bluetooth can be managed with systemctl and bluetoothctl.

https://www.makeuseof.com/manage-bluetooth-linux-with-bluetoothctl/

In my experience I find just running bluetoothctl to enter the interactive mode easiest. You can enter commands without prepending bluetoothctl. You can use help at any stage. So you want to use systemctl to make sure Bluetooth is running, then enter bluetoothctl. Make sure the device is discoverable and pairing is set to on. Start your [headphones/whatever] in pairing mode and run devices. When you see the device run pair . Only use the numbers. You may have to go into settings and select the device in the sound applet.

My situation doesn't require a logout timer, but if I'm walking away from the PC I just use the shortcut Super + ESC. Alternatively, there's many ways you can create a basic Bash script that when invoked times down to a systemctl suspend command. Or possibly the hybrid-sleep option could do what you want. See systemctl -h for possibilities.

Blanking the login screen is something that will be implemented shortly. Maybe I'll work on a script for that because it annoys me too. Fortunately I rarely use it. I'll repost if I do this.

I really don't think the two years people are saying in this thread is realistic. The hard work and core is written. What is there is stable. I think they will get this completed much sooner. They do have a hardware business to support after all.

Thanks for the useful info. Still, I don't think I want to fool with it until it's available via GUI. That's just me.

And I hope you are right about the rest being quicker.

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

Great! Exactly on time for the next release of Debian :)

Well, since Cosmic isn't going to be ready for a couple years yet, let's try to fix your multimonitor issue. Are you running on Wayland and what's your GPU?

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

I'm guessing that's the onboard AMD graphics then?

If you do an lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display' what does it return? Are you able to find anything in dmsg (journalctl -xb-1 for previous boot log) that would give an error message to investigate?

here is what I got 04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Mendocino (rev c2) Subsystem: Lenovo Device 380e Kernel driver in use: amdgpu Kernel modules: amdgpu I don't think I understand what I'm reading but here is all the error I could find: https://rentry.org/gni28ogy

Might have to get the full log, and it should be from immediately after one of those unexpected reboots. The flag b-1 indicates journalctl to export the logs from the previous boot (-1) instead of the current log. So if you do sudo journalctl -xb-1 > log.txt after one of these reboots and paste that file to look at, we might get something useful.

I'm fairly confident that's a problem that can be fixed with having an AMD graphics driver running. If it were nVidia, I'd be less confident.

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

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

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

Great to hear! I've never used Redox either, so no idea how well that works too.

I feel like I am the only person not super-jazzed about Cosmic.

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

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

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

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

I'm not really invested in Cosmic, I'm happy with Hyprland and will continue to use it.

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

I wish KDE had something like that! AFAIK I think most tiling things are still broken and haven't quite caught up to Plasma 6 yet.

KDE has """tiling""". They called it tiling but it's just god awful. If KDE had real automatic tiling, I would probably have sticked with it, to be honest.

I like it as an alternative to GNOME that's not quite so GNOME-ish, if that makes sense. I do like GNOME but I find it a bit idiosyncratic sometimes, IE they seem very "my way or the highway" about some design things, and it often feels to me like you have to hunt down and keep updating endless plugins to do basic things that feel like they should be included.

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

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

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

whats so good about XFCE

It's very bread and butter, but also very customizable. It's also decently lightweight. Not the lightest, but a good compromise between both.

Some distros don't have the best default config, though.

Yes, and the desktop is delightfully simple. Makes older hardware feel new but still looks good enough on modern hardware.

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

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

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

Qt and gtk both have rust bindings though?

Yep, but QT's object model and its being written in C++ makes it super cumbersome to use in Rust. GTK is better here due to it being written in C, but the direction it's taking in GTK4 is not really great, and having a safe Rust UI toolkit is a huge win for the community.

Cosmic being fully Rust means I can just take one project from them, and immediately start working on it with cargo and all the familiar tools. It's not as easy with C or C++ projects in Gnome and KDE.

I think it's great we have some competition in this space, everybody wins.

I think this rust only thing is gonna screw them on the long term. You really don't want that for app development, it might be a good choice for low level stuff and security sensitive things like browsers; but other than that you're severely hampering your contribution sources and increasing the development time. Color me skeptic but I see this going the same way unity did.

More than C or C++? I've been working on very effective and performing Rust teams professionally now about a decade and I tend to disagree.

The problems come when you don't support anything other than rust. Higher level languages are better suited for trivial applications. Rust isn't exactly a very popular language either so you're not going to attract contributions from random Joe #3. Cosmic's best hope is to attract the attention of the big players and get enterprise support, because random users just don't give a shit about the security upsides of Rust and will judge the DE solely based on its looks and features.

This is a weird take. Rust is very popular and is the current heir apparent to C for systems level stuff. It's a great choice to start a new DE/toolkit.

As for the rest, you're right the end user doesn't care about the language their graphical app is in, but the developers fielding their bug reports and making fixes/features sure do.

And developers who get familiar and easy tools such as cargo, rust-analyzer and all the popular libraries working in any Cosmic project in about five minutes. And the compiler will tell you if you managed to make memory errors or data races in a very clear way. Always the same way.

You learn Rust and its tools once, and you can just jump into any of these projects and be productive.

And yes, scripting language is needed for Cosmic at some point. There are a ton of them, from RHAI to different lisps to python to javascript. Plug and play, and the interop is easy and fast.

Rust is very hyped, but it's not very popular, the TIOBE index has it at 1.5% coming in #14. Which is paltry in comparison to Python, C and C++.

As for whether or not it will replace C in systems, time will tell.

TIOBE is weighted toward languages that have existed for a long time by virtue of counting lines written / skilled engineers etc. but the speed at which Rust is climbing that list is a better indicator. Also, a lot of the languages above it wouldn't be appropriate for anything like a DE.

But you're right, it's hyped, I just think the hype is real.

Yep, windows kernel has a ton of Rust code already, even some of its syscalls are made in Rust. Linux kernel is getting a new GPU driver for NVIDIA written in Rust, and GPU driver for removed M-series also written in Rust. removed is hiring Rust devs, so is Amazon, Meta, Google...

In the startup space it's been quite good with Rust for some time. I've been writing production code with it for almost a decade. It is not a fad anymore.

A productive, safe, fast and fun language to write with excellent tooling, and we are just getting started.

They use Rust for app dev already. Pretty sure they know what they are biting off.

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

It seems like pantheon only supports floating windows, whereas cosmic supports both floating and tiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

less functionality is bad. with a bit of gaslighting you can make anything seem like a design choice instead of admitting it's hard to make a good and sustainable implementation for said functionality. but at least gnome has extensions and is customisable, Pantheon DE is a brick in comparison.

Depends on what you want to do I guess. I'd rather have a clean desktop that cannot accumulate clutter like in windows where applications add shortcuts to the desktop automatically which you then have to remove manually.

linux doesn't have that problem and most of the times you're asked if you want to add a shortcut on the Desktop during the install even on Windows, i mean it's good we have options for all the use cases and workflows by having these different Desktop Environments but i think having options within the DE itself is better for the long-term adoption but it's harder to maintain which i understand. i like the UI getting used to me not the other way around

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

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

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

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

What are we missing out on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your plasma desktop crashing with dual screens is something that's not normal. I use two monitors all the time and my desktop has never crashed.

It's probably on me, I might've misconfigured something and I don't think I can fix it

misconfigured

Unless you did something really stupid and deleted system libraries or something like that, no configuration should cause crashes. Please make a bug report about it at bugs.kde.org. You might not be able to fix it yourself, but crashes are often relatively easy to diagnose and fix for a developer.