Cosmic Alpha Released

I'm excited that they push Iced [1], a Rust-based cross-platform UI framework. Probably not the Rust framework which I would've betted on as the most promising one, but with the broad support and larger adoption I hope it will catapult it into the mainstream, we really need a good UI library that's not a web renderer. I was also quite excited about GPUI [2] but there seems to be very little activity in the repo for now (hard to judge though, I imagine they're just busy hacking on the editor).

I wanted to write a desktop app with Rust for a while and considered Tauri, Flutter (via rust-flutter-bridge) or a native framework like Iced, I think with the larger adoption it might make sense to go with Iced, though it's probably still much more experimental than frameworks like Flutter.

1: https://iced.rs/ 2: https://www.gpui.rs/

I tried it out about a week ago in a VM. I like what I'm seeing so far but the alpha state is very apparent. Simply trying to configure things is still quite buggy. Then, within 5 minutes, something happened that the whole desktop is broken, just get a mostly black screen. Even after rebooting, it was still broken with no obvious way to recover. I've tried dropping into rescue mode and updating all the packages but that still didn't fix things. I couldn't find any documentation about how to recover (not even a way to reset to default settings), and don't know what else to do other than wipe out the system and reinstall.

Besides that, there's still a lot of settings and functionality missing from the previous Gnome iteration. I believe they're slating for a release by the end of the year, which seems optimistic.

Pop!_OS has been my daily driver for three years and counting. I think its desktop enviroment is already fine, with a few annoyances (hiding the top bar requires GNOME Toolkit and doesn't work reliably).

I've been following the progress of Cosmic casually. To me it seems a slightly more [cohesive|streamlined|robust] version of the current desktop, which would be great.

Although it also seems like for non-early adopters like myself who just want to use something that works and gets out or their way is a long way off. Videos reviewing the alpha version say this fairly universally.

I've tried the Cosmic alpha and, while I like various things it does, I can't see myself using it as a daily driver yet:

- The clock doesn't show the weekday or the year and shows the month by name rather than by number,

- Can't make the stupendously oversized title bar smaller,

- Can't change the mouse cursor theme,

- I hate dynamic workspaces, I just want to open something on, say, workspace 3 and have it stay there.

However I do like some things it does:

- Independent workspaces per monitor, so if I switch workspaces on monitor 1 the workspace on monitor 2 stays the same. This is the big one which I miss in KDE, though I wonder if that means that Cosmic isn't EWMH compliant (as if it matters),

- (Mostly) sane keyboard shortcuts, where (almost) every DE-specific shortcut involves the Super (AKA Meta, AKA Mod4) key. I believe Apple's OSX also does something like this where all the desktop-level shortcuts involve the CMD key,

- If I move my cursor to a monitor with no open applications, hit the shortcut for the application launcher, and launch an application; then it opens that application on the monitor with the cursor. KDE (with Kwin) struggles with that, so I call that another win.

For reference I'm currently trying Cosmic on Tumbleweed, some of that stuff may differ between distros.

I'm looking around for a good Linux laptop. Any recommendations?

I didn't check anything out in person, but have looked at reviews of framework, system76, thinkpads and there hasn't been one where there haven't been serious complaints (e.g. bent parts in some framework 16s causing the whole thing to rattle.)

(Is an M1 Air with Asahi a good idea?)

Since they have DPMS in "to do", I'll pass on this.

It's not easy these days to find a compositor that doesn't screw your power management in a little subtle way. Either your displays keep waking up all the freaking time, or they won't wake up at all when you need them to, or they get blank but backlight continues to blare from them.

What I liked about good ol' X was that the buck stopped with the X server, and if it was fixed there, it was fixed everywhere. Now you are in a maze of twisty little compositors, all different, all squabbling between themselves about this or that, and in the meantime nothing ever works.

I bet the moment Wayland gets to a point of stability where there will be like .01% left to do to reach the complete desktop productivity and entertainment nirvana, even across all the compositors, some bored whippersnapper will declare that this .01% requires a paradigm shift and a complete rebuild from the ground up, at which point everyone will jump ship to some... Zayland, declaring Wayland obsolete effective immediately, and we'll have another decade until fonts are not shit and the clipboard works again.

I'm using the Cosmic alpha in Fedora and loving it. There are little bugs here and there, but nothing show stopping that I've seen. It's the first desktop that's been able to pry me away from KDE with tiling.

I spent a couple of days exploring linux distributions after deciding to drop Windows at home. It was an interesting experience, seeing how each distro approaches augmenting GNOME for desktop integration. I really like PopOS, but with the transition away from GNOME and GNOME extensions breaking between versions I went with Fedora.

Looking forward to trying COSMIC out again in stable, the alpha was actually very good. Let's see how they approach extensibility, as the GNOME extension fragmentation ended up a reason for my choosing Fedora.

Also if you were considering installing linux for a family member, I found ZorinOS was very good for this

The release page doesn't make it very clear what Cosmic is and does.

The product page is better:

https://system76.com/cosmic

[EDIT]: also useful :

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cosmic+desktop+...

I'm excited about Cosmic's potential to break open the Gnome / Plasma duopoly. Not sold on the visual design of the desktop yet, but maybe I'll come around once its out of Alpha.

I had a look at COSMIC on Fedora [1]. It is fast, stable and usable, but feels little unfinished (it is an early version after all). It is not my cup of tea (maybe I am too comfortable with KDE Plasma 6), but I am glad that there's a new solid option for a desktop environment. And unlike other with DEs, where interest and development quickly fizzles out, this will probably last as it has the System76 backing.

One issue that I had is fractional scaling for Electron (and older X11) apps on Wayland (same issue with Gnome and most DEs). Apps are blurry. It seems that only KDE Plasma figured it out. Plasma has an option "Apply scaling themselves", which just works.

[1] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ryanabx/cosmic-epoch...

OK cool, but when a Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu 24.04 rather than 22.04? Even Mint has caught up by now.

EDIT: Well, this is indeed doubles as a 24.04 LTS alpha, as noted further down in TFA.

I hope that cosmic manages to kill Gnome long term.

Installed it and on startup it immediately made a request to googleapis.com (142.251.36.106). We cannot be friends if you think this is in any way acceptable.

I’ve recently switched over to nixos and hyprland and couldn’t be happier. Linux UIs are stagnating all all seem to be coalescing around GNOMEs styling which I don’t particularly for. Hyprland with nix breaths new life into linux for me.

I wish the project best of luck, though I feel that it is going to take them years in order to reach parity with KDE, which combined with Qt took decades to bring to its current feature set.

Interesting Reddit discussion: When a user compliments the alpha release being lightweight and free of memory leaks, the discussion quickly moves to how the MVU design pattern in the GUI library (iced) might have helped.

https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/1f2suin/cosmic_alph...

I've been daily driving it on arch since the day it released and it's quite usable, with minimal bugs for my needs.

I just wish they add an applet that integrates Google Calendar stuff in their calendar, so I can know if I have a meeting or something coming up at a glance.

been giving it a try for the last couple of days (switched from mate + xmonad). so far it seems pretty promising, bunch of small annoyances or missing features that will hopefully be fixed over time, but it works more smoothly than regolith (the other DE with integrated tiling support) did.

primary annoyances are the lack of stable workspaces (i3 has that issue too) and the inability to remove window title bars. most apparent missing features so far are the lack of a load monitor applet and the workspace pager not showing thumbnails of what is running on each desktop. also I couldn't figure out how to put launcher buttons on the panel but not sure if that's a missing feature or something I'm missing.

I'm already using the PopOS window manager on NixOS, it works OK but I had to get a bit hacky to prevent hotkey collisions between it and Gnome. I bet that this will handle that for me, looking forward to trying it.

In general, it seems like a bad idea to "start over from a clean slate" in Open Source software. More wood behind fewer arrows seems like the way to go, to avoid fragmentation, bike shedding and re-inventing wheels. But of the best things to happen to Node in the past few years was Bun and Deno. Node's pace of improvement has improved dramatically once it got some real competition to be inspired by.

While I like the Gnome desktop project, they do sometimes feel a little slow in their rate of innovation & their openness to innovation. Merge requests that everyone's pretty much on board with can be open for years. Maybe Cosmic desktop's “fork” (technically re-build) and a little competition will speed them up like Node was sped up by Bun and Deno!

I know it's a little thing that's probably customizable, but I can't see anything in the screenshots except the inconsistent menu bar padding.

I hope the theming system will be improved. Right now the only thing you can do is change the colors, padding and border radius. That's it. Flat UI design needs to die.

rust is sexy, but i prefer system76 invest to become apple in hardware(failures of hardware, noise, cheap easy to break plastic), not software(may be little software around kernel and drivers updates).

my laptop died with well known display dash gpu issue, and once upgrade failed so i had to follow some esoteric command line things in recovery.

afaik framework they started rust ui thing is not that may be wins idiomatic rust ui(qt slash gnome of rust). so guess there will be rewrite.

and yeah, i sorrow bying system76 while being in europe, better go was local msi or even mac pro.

Related. Others?

You can kick the alpha tires on System76's Cosmic, a new Linux desktop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234849 - Aug 2024 (10 comments)

Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192303 - Aug 2024 (198 comments)

Cosmic Desktop Close to Alpha Release, Adds Compositor Multi-Threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948942 - July 2024 (4 comments)

Cosmic Desktop: Hammering Out New Cosmic Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40074383 - April 2024 (110 comments)

Cosmic Desktop Is Slated to Debut with Pop _OS 24.04 LTS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418855 - Feb 2024 (46 comments)

Cosmic Desktop: Closing in on a Cosmic Alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372762 - Feb 2024 (19 comments)

Cosmic: The Road to Alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984739 - Jan 2024 (17 comments)

System76's Cosmic Desktop Working Toward Its Alpha Release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959271 - Jan 2024 (10 comments)

Pop _OS Cosmic Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor and Multi-Window Support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656529 - Dec 2023 (43 comments)

Locked and Loaded with New Cosmic DE Updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970594 - Oct 2023 (28 comments)

COSMIC DE: Desktop environment created for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36725105 - July 2023 (148 comments)

Cosmic DE update: System76's new Linux desktop environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599094 - Jan 2023 (260 comments)

Pop_OS Cosmic Desktop to Make Use of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066593 - Oct 2022 (93 comments)

Cosmic: System76 take auto-tiling intuitive desktop environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683615 - June 2021 (1 comment)

System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26798080 - April 2021 (414 comments)

It looks exactly like Gnome. What's the point?

I don’t know System 76’s business numbers but after owning of their devices I would much prefer if they worked on their hardware versus creating a desktop manager. This seems like a giant distraction away from their real business. And their devices definitely could improve a lot vs other brands.