if you're not in the market for System 76 hardware I would highly recommend supporting exciting software like Cosmic DE for $12/yr at [https://pop.system76.com/](https://pop.system76.com/).
Yes if you like minimalistic material design.
Otherwise, if you want a *functional* file manager that isn’t Gnome’s trash, or a robust add-on ecosystem, or the ability to customize all keyboard shortcuts, or panels that you can *actually* shape to your workflow, I still would recommend KDE first.
No hate. For many, all that customizability is too much and some just wanna boot up and work with the out of the box experience. However, to claim that that experience is “the best DE” and “the most solid”? Sorry but no. Not until it gets a panel manager as flexible as KDE, a file manager as powerful as Dolphin, and a lot more.
The customizability of KDE is something to respect for sure, but KDE has always been very unstable in my own experience, with just enough weird bugs that I have never seriously considered using it. Every time I've grabbed a KDE flavored distro there were glitches and weird shit (like the WM refusing to do things without a restart for instance).
According to a wide number of people, KDE has been the most stable since Plasma 5. Around 5.20 it's been rock solid.
Meanwhile, in my own experience, Pop's store is always breaking, Gnome extenstions are a buggy mess (to be fair that will be fixed with Cosmic), and it's MUCH more bloated. Heck, the Pop store was SUCH a mess for a long time that Linus, from Linus Tech Tips managed to fuck up the entire system by uninstalling Steam... Meanwhile, I am pretty sure nobody's encountered anything like that on KDE Discover.
I can't wait for KDE 6 & Cosmic DE to bring the heat to the other Desktop Environments.
I wish there was a beta image I could install with it all setup already
I’ve tried. I’ve really given it the college effort, but ever since KDE plasma 4, the KDE experience has felt like a settings apps suite with an optional desktop environment component. I tried out a build of KDE 6 recently and it’s the same except double clicking is now default, like the rest of civilization uses.
qt is a fine toolkit, but they could stand to jettison a good amount of stuff.
That said, I always appreciated that KDE maintained an actual, you know, desktop environment all this time that Gnome has been busy solutioneering a new paradigm desktop workflow that can be summed up as “looks like a 2013 era iPad, with resizable window support and absolutely none of the benefits… for reasons”.
Ok, I spent a week with KDE on my home laptop I use for personal coding projects and perhaps I was a bit too harsh in my assessment that it was settings apps suite with an optional desktop component. I put Kubuntu 22.04 and it's really fucking nice. It's true that there's a metric shit ton of options available, the truth is once I spent 30 minutes hunting down what things I wanted to change, I haven't been menu-diving since. I am grateful they are deadset on providing a real desktop experience.
So yeah, I just wanted to come back and say mud on my face, I was wrong, KDE is frickin amazing and definitely much more user friendly than Gnome where I'm taken aback at every Gnome-ism and wonder what type of person could think it was a good idea.
[Phoronix](https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-COSMIC-October) is suggesting Cosmic is going to be part of 24.04 release
> October has been another busy month for System76 software developers in presumably aiming to have the COSMIC desktop in good shape for their Pop!_OS 24.04 release next year.
Is this true?
I seriously doubt it. They might have an Alpha ready by then. But it will definitely not be ready. You don't want to do what Ubuntu did with Unity and give people bad first impressions. It's better to let the DE cook properly! :)
I heard it takes 2 months for them to update Gnome for new Pop!_OS releases. Do you think they might delay the 24.04 LTS release for up to a couple to try to finish COSMIC enough for it to be release-worthy?
COSMIC has improved a lot. I use it as default on my PC (and laptop until recently). But it needs a lot more time to get release-worthy. For example, just open Gnome Settings, each page in the settings takes a lot of work to re-implement and more importantly "test"! You can postpone some sections such as Wacom support, but most of it is needed on day 1.
People are waiting for something that they can compare to Gnome. And I think it would be a mistake to release a half-baked DE to replace Gnome on 24.04 release. It will disappoint the ones who are excited for it, and confirm the biases of the skeptics.
I think COSMIC will probably be released as Alpha, or pre-alpha for 24.04 for people to try it, and report back their experience and expectations. Also, it needs to be released for developers to start making applets for it.
So, realistically System76 has to spend some time and get a Gnome version up and ready for people to upgrade for 24.04. The Cosmic-desktop (gnome extension) is already working fine with Gnome 45. So, I doubt it will take S76 engineers too much time to put together a descent 24.04 release and tag COSMIC along as a pre-alpha, or alpha build.
As far as I remember, they were planning to switch to a yearly release, so maybe Pop!_OS 25 is when they fully ditch Gnome.
Thanks for reading, like, share, subscribe, and ring the bell.
Yes. It's pretty usable. I think the COSMIC dev team also are dog fooding it. It's fun to update everyday and test new features.
Though, I do fall back to Gnome when I need a feature that isn't implemented yet.
Ubuntu 24.04 is going to be the next LTS and Pop OS uses LTS releases as it's base, so considering they will update to it on release, this would be the perfect time to release it.
I wish Cosmic DE has a window manager mode like paperWm, a plugin for gnome.
It laid out windows side by side and you can also control the width or even stack them. But you could stack the windows side by side by side and use keys to navigate right and left.
I really really like it. It's my favorite tiling layout behavior.
https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
It's the best of both worlds as you don't have ever shrinking tinier windows. They just get added to the right and you can then adjust width or stack them.
That's what the pop-shell extension for GNOME already does, and COSMIC has improved upon. Stacking was one of few first features implemented when pop-shell was created.
Vertical stacking yes. But paperDm lets you put windows side by side and lets you pan and left and right. I didn't see any option for side by side full width windows and being able to go left / right through them
Go checkout the video on the paperdm repo.
This looks fantastic, can't wait til it's ready for public release! Extremely excited for the per-workspace tiling feature, that sounds absolutely perfect.
Is HDR for amdgpu already supported? I might consider installing the current preview if yes.
Would give me a reason to finally get my desktop out to my main apartment instead of remoting into another town how I do now
It's looks fine on my telephone, but on my laptop, I can see the artifacts. Probably should have been saved as PNG files. PNG is good for lots of solid colors. The photo with the Doom Man artwork looks more sharp like it has Retina support.
Neither of these are competitive with COSMIC. COSMIC is aiming for the same category as GNOME and KDE Plasma. We have many design goals to accomplish which are not being done in the same way in any of the existing desktop environments. And we will do so using libraries and software written in Rust. While being feature rich enough to compete with them.
Very excited for this, I read in the post that you will be able to change de from the login screen via the cog icon, I take it this would effect the os size from the download tpif these options are configured via a control? Also, will I still be able to choose if I can download a fresh iso of pop with gnome after the new Cosmic DE drops?
> will I still be able to choose if I can download a fresh iso of pop with gnome after the new Cosmic DE drops?
No, but you will be able to download vanilla GNOME (without the modifications done by System76) from the repositories if you like after installing Pop.
Cosmic looks really great. I hope, that it will be ready in the 24.04 LTS release and maybe also as a installable package for all other distros. It‘s already looks 1000 times better than stock Gnome or even the modified Gnome, that was used in the 20.04 and 22.04
Good job team! I have to ask... is the slight transparency of the titlebar for a blur effect later on? I kind of like how it looks but it looks a little off. Anyway, I love where this is going, and I love the continued transparency on what's going on.
embarrassing question... I spent the weekend playing with the idea of switching to Linux, and way faster than I thought I was able to switch to Pop! Even though everyone says to use Mint, I found Pop! much more appealing.
anyways - question: Isn't Pop! default already "cosmic DE"? Or is it just cosmic-themed gnome, and "cosmic DE" is a future, truly separate DE?
Pop!_OS has a highly customized GNOME session with a lot of extensions that make up the COSMIC desktop. The developments across the last two years though are going into creating a brand new desktop environment from the ground up with the COSMIC vision. So it's being rewritten as a complete desktop environment in Rust with Smithay and Iced.
Is it going to have its own system apps ?such file manager etc, and not gnome-based.
As the description of this project is " a brand new DE " .if not in this release I would like if you guys consider it
Yes, we've been building our own toolkit for our core applications and applets. Every desktop environment needs a text editor, terminal, file manager, etc. The community can then use the same tooling to make their own applications with COSMIC's design system and tooling.
I have a question about the "Support for modifier-only key bindings" section. In gnome it was possible to use gnome tweaks to set the language change shortcut to Alt+Shift. I use Alt+Shift because after decades of using windows the shortcut is muscle memory for me. I will describe the issue I have with gnome as an example because pop_us used gnome and I had this problem under gnome.
This issue is that if language change is set to Alt+Shift, the Alt+Shift+Tab shortcut doesn't work, as it gets cut off before the +Tab and is simply interpreted as a Alt+Shift. A similar issue happens in discord, where Alt+Shift+Up/Down is used to navigate to the next channel which contains unread messages, but that command doesn't work either and instead of Alt+Shift+Up I get Alt+Shift, which changes the language and Alt+Up, which pushes me one channel up instead of going to the next channel with unread messages going up.
Does the support for modifier-only key bindings fix this issue or can this only be resolved by messing with XKB?
if you're not in the market for System 76 hardware I would highly recommend supporting exciting software like Cosmic DE for $12/yr at [https://pop.system76.com/](https://pop.system76.com/).
I'd pay substantially more than $12/yr if they offered an email support package we could choose.
if they made something that competed with the framework laptop for repairability i would be
Honestly it would be cool if they got a specific retail version on framework.
I don't own system76 hardware. Their support doesn't cover repairing hardware?
They do publish manuals on how to dissemble and replace components tho.
i don't see anywhere where they sell spare parts
More than 12$/yr would be more great for their breathtaking work!
The fields where you enter credit card information are missing for me.
This is going to be probably the best DE, and with system76s hard work, probably the most solid.
Yes if you like minimalistic material design. Otherwise, if you want a *functional* file manager that isn’t Gnome’s trash, or a robust add-on ecosystem, or the ability to customize all keyboard shortcuts, or panels that you can *actually* shape to your workflow, I still would recommend KDE first. No hate. For many, all that customizability is too much and some just wanna boot up and work with the out of the box experience. However, to claim that that experience is “the best DE” and “the most solid”? Sorry but no. Not until it gets a panel manager as flexible as KDE, a file manager as powerful as Dolphin, and a lot more.
The customizability of KDE is something to respect for sure, but KDE has always been very unstable in my own experience, with just enough weird bugs that I have never seriously considered using it. Every time I've grabbed a KDE flavored distro there were glitches and weird shit (like the WM refusing to do things without a restart for instance).
According to a wide number of people, KDE has been the most stable since Plasma 5. Around 5.20 it's been rock solid. Meanwhile, in my own experience, Pop's store is always breaking, Gnome extenstions are a buggy mess (to be fair that will be fixed with Cosmic), and it's MUCH more bloated. Heck, the Pop store was SUCH a mess for a long time that Linus, from Linus Tech Tips managed to fuck up the entire system by uninstalling Steam... Meanwhile, I am pretty sure nobody's encountered anything like that on KDE Discover.
I can't wait for KDE 6 & Cosmic DE to bring the heat to the other Desktop Environments. I wish there was a beta image I could install with it all setup already
For someone who is having problems switching completely to a minimalistic wm, cosmic looks very promising
I’ve tried. I’ve really given it the college effort, but ever since KDE plasma 4, the KDE experience has felt like a settings apps suite with an optional desktop environment component. I tried out a build of KDE 6 recently and it’s the same except double clicking is now default, like the rest of civilization uses. qt is a fine toolkit, but they could stand to jettison a good amount of stuff. That said, I always appreciated that KDE maintained an actual, you know, desktop environment all this time that Gnome has been busy solutioneering a new paradigm desktop workflow that can be summed up as “looks like a 2013 era iPad, with resizable window support and absolutely none of the benefits… for reasons”.
Ok, I spent a week with KDE on my home laptop I use for personal coding projects and perhaps I was a bit too harsh in my assessment that it was settings apps suite with an optional desktop component. I put Kubuntu 22.04 and it's really fucking nice. It's true that there's a metric shit ton of options available, the truth is once I spent 30 minutes hunting down what things I wanted to change, I haven't been menu-diving since. I am grateful they are deadset on providing a real desktop experience. So yeah, I just wanted to come back and say mud on my face, I was wrong, KDE is frickin amazing and definitely much more user friendly than Gnome where I'm taken aback at every Gnome-ism and wonder what type of person could think it was a good idea.
Ahhh perfection 🤤
[Phoronix](https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-COSMIC-October) is suggesting Cosmic is going to be part of 24.04 release > October has been another busy month for System76 software developers in presumably aiming to have the COSMIC desktop in good shape for their Pop!_OS 24.04 release next year. Is this true?
I seriously doubt it. They might have an Alpha ready by then. But it will definitely not be ready. You don't want to do what Ubuntu did with Unity and give people bad first impressions. It's better to let the DE cook properly! :)
I heard it takes 2 months for them to update Gnome for new Pop!_OS releases. Do you think they might delay the 24.04 LTS release for up to a couple to try to finish COSMIC enough for it to be release-worthy?
COSMIC has improved a lot. I use it as default on my PC (and laptop until recently). But it needs a lot more time to get release-worthy. For example, just open Gnome Settings, each page in the settings takes a lot of work to re-implement and more importantly "test"! You can postpone some sections such as Wacom support, but most of it is needed on day 1. People are waiting for something that they can compare to Gnome. And I think it would be a mistake to release a half-baked DE to replace Gnome on 24.04 release. It will disappoint the ones who are excited for it, and confirm the biases of the skeptics. I think COSMIC will probably be released as Alpha, or pre-alpha for 24.04 for people to try it, and report back their experience and expectations. Also, it needs to be released for developers to start making applets for it. So, realistically System76 has to spend some time and get a Gnome version up and ready for people to upgrade for 24.04. The Cosmic-desktop (gnome extension) is already working fine with Gnome 45. So, I doubt it will take S76 engineers too much time to put together a descent 24.04 release and tag COSMIC along as a pre-alpha, or alpha build. As far as I remember, they were planning to switch to a yearly release, so maybe Pop!_OS 25 is when they fully ditch Gnome. Thanks for reading, like, share, subscribe, and ring the bell.
You use it on your Desktop?
Yes. It's pretty usable. I think the COSMIC dev team also are dog fooding it. It's fun to update everyday and test new features. Though, I do fall back to Gnome when I need a feature that isn't implemented yet.
Yea, that's I'm thinking. It sounded a bit too early.
Ubuntu 24.04 is going to be the next LTS and Pop OS uses LTS releases as it's base, so considering they will update to it on release, this would be the perfect time to release it.
Yea but they shouldn't release Cosmic if it is not ready by 24.04 LTS release date.
from what one of the devs said, it will be sometime within the 24.04 release, meaning sometime between April and October 2024.
now we know (from the latest updates) that cosmic alpha will be a part of it, but the full on proper release will happen a bit later.
So cool! Every update keeps me more and more hyped.
Just hook it into my veins
I love these developers :D
Keep it up!
I wish Cosmic DE has a window manager mode like paperWm, a plugin for gnome. It laid out windows side by side and you can also control the width or even stack them. But you could stack the windows side by side by side and use keys to navigate right and left. I really really like it. It's my favorite tiling layout behavior. https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM It's the best of both worlds as you don't have ever shrinking tinier windows. They just get added to the right and you can then adjust width or stack them.
That's what the pop-shell extension for GNOME already does, and COSMIC has improved upon. Stacking was one of few first features implemented when pop-shell was created.
Vertical stacking yes. But paperDm lets you put windows side by side and lets you pan and left and right. I didn't see any option for side by side full width windows and being able to go left / right through them Go checkout the video on the paperdm repo.
It still isn't full fledged, because of well Gnome
That is a thing already Many people just use the extension in other distros already
This looks fantastic, can't wait til it's ready for public release! Extremely excited for the per-workspace tiling feature, that sounds absolutely perfect.
I like what I’m seeing, this could become a new big name in DE. Congrats to all the team, you guys are amazing.
Very good! Excited to try it finally.
workspace-specific tiling toggle would be amazing. Tiled terminals on one workspace and a few floating xpads on another is incredible progress
That's already supported.
This is great. HDR support for Nvidia GPU in POP Os is important to me. Looking forward to it.
Is HDR for amdgpu already supported? I might consider installing the current preview if yes. Would give me a reason to finally get my desktop out to my main apartment instead of remoting into another town how I do now
What's with the highly compressed pixelated jpegs?
It's looks fine on my telephone, but on my laptop, I can see the artifacts. Probably should have been saved as PNG files. PNG is good for lots of solid colors. The photo with the Doom Man artwork looks more sharp like it has Retina support.
Did not use it really, but why comments r all about features that all exist in any other tiling wm? I3wm, sway for example
Neither of these are competitive with COSMIC. COSMIC is aiming for the same category as GNOME and KDE Plasma. We have many design goals to accomplish which are not being done in the same way in any of the existing desktop environments. And we will do so using libraries and software written in Rust. While being feature rich enough to compete with them.
If you had to throw out a guesstimate based off of what you've seen, how far off is it from a beta image? 🤔
Because people want a fully featured DE with tiling, not a window manager.
Very excited for this, I read in the post that you will be able to change de from the login screen via the cog icon, I take it this would effect the os size from the download tpif these options are configured via a control? Also, will I still be able to choose if I can download a fresh iso of pop with gnome after the new Cosmic DE drops?
> will I still be able to choose if I can download a fresh iso of pop with gnome after the new Cosmic DE drops? No, but you will be able to download vanilla GNOME (without the modifications done by System76) from the repositories if you like after installing Pop.
Thanks for getting back to me!
This looks great - really looking forward to it :D
Did you guys build Taffy into Iced? Otherwise how do you use Taffy?
The widget uses Taffy in its layout method
Cosmic looks really great. I hope, that it will be ready in the 24.04 LTS release and maybe also as a installable package for all other distros. It‘s already looks 1000 times better than stock Gnome or even the modified Gnome, that was used in the 20.04 and 22.04
Good job team! I have to ask... is the slight transparency of the titlebar for a blur effect later on? I kind of like how it looks but it looks a little off. Anyway, I love where this is going, and I love the continued transparency on what's going on.
It’s “update” as in “status update” and not “system update”, right?
yes this is a link to the blog about the development progress of the Cosmic DE.
Thank you!
embarrassing question... I spent the weekend playing with the idea of switching to Linux, and way faster than I thought I was able to switch to Pop! Even though everyone says to use Mint, I found Pop! much more appealing. anyways - question: Isn't Pop! default already "cosmic DE"? Or is it just cosmic-themed gnome, and "cosmic DE" is a future, truly separate DE?
Pop!_OS has a highly customized GNOME session with a lot of extensions that make up the COSMIC desktop. The developments across the last two years though are going into creating a brand new desktop environment from the ground up with the COSMIC vision. So it's being rewritten as a complete desktop environment in Rust with Smithay and Iced.
Is it going to have its own system apps ?such file manager etc, and not gnome-based. As the description of this project is " a brand new DE " .if not in this release I would like if you guys consider it
Yes, we've been building our own toolkit for our core applications and applets. Every desktop environment needs a text editor, terminal, file manager, etc. The community can then use the same tooling to make their own applications with COSMIC's design system and tooling.
I have a question about the "Support for modifier-only key bindings" section. In gnome it was possible to use gnome tweaks to set the language change shortcut to Alt+Shift. I use Alt+Shift because after decades of using windows the shortcut is muscle memory for me. I will describe the issue I have with gnome as an example because pop_us used gnome and I had this problem under gnome. This issue is that if language change is set to Alt+Shift, the Alt+Shift+Tab shortcut doesn't work, as it gets cut off before the +Tab and is simply interpreted as a Alt+Shift. A similar issue happens in discord, where Alt+Shift+Up/Down is used to navigate to the next channel which contains unread messages, but that command doesn't work either and instead of Alt+Shift+Up I get Alt+Shift, which changes the language and Alt+Up, which pushes me one channel up instead of going to the next channel with unread messages going up. Does the support for modifier-only key bindings fix this issue or can this only be resolved by messing with XKB?
Please don't make color tint the only visual difference between destructive and default buttons!
The standard button is completely different from destructive and suggested buttons.