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.
😎👍
I’m just afraid it’s gonna be another 2 years before it’s ready for everyday use
That could be a longer wait because Gnome (hopefully) wont be standing still during that time.
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.
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.
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 <numbers/address>. 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
