I think even if the company goes away we will see this continue. It modern it rust and some if its fundamentals are already used by other projects. Of course not same way, but its not just going away.
I was introduced to UNIX in 1993, Linux in 1995's Summmer, and have lost count how many X Windows desktops or windows managers have come and gone in 32 years.
Have you tried the new-ish KDE window tiling? (Super-T by default) I had a similar desire to you, and am quite happy with what KDE provided. It'd be interesting to read a comparison between the two.
Although I'm happy enough with what KDE gives me that COSMIC would have to be substantially better before I'd endure the switching costs.
I like tiling a lot more than I like floating windows. Cosmic is my daily driver and is awesome. I just wish it had a bit more customization options, I don't want to spend days rummaging through wikis like with hyprland but having a bit more control over it would be nice, not a deal breaker though
I hard bounced off COSMIC with the complete lack of theming. I can't even set my clock to a reasonable format in it. The only thing it has going for it is sane multi-monitor support, which neither KDE nor GNOME have gotten right so far (though at KDE there is some activity around it, dunno 'bout GNOME).
I tried a bunch of shells when I got my Legion Go, including COSMIC. It had the worst touchscreen support of any of them.
Now that SteamOS is officially released, I just use KDE. Maybe COSMIC will be better at touch eventually, but since it's a traditional laptop company, I'm not sure.
I really hate that at some point in the past, KDE developers decided that they hated how deeply intuitive virtual desktops are and deprecated them in favor of something deeply unintuitive (Activities). Any issue or complaint mentioning it is shot down with "you're holding it wrong."
Please just give virtual desktops first class support and lets forget about the Activities experiment. Most users hate it.
The attitude regarding it is about as bad as Gnome forcing Overview on everyone, refusing to provide a first party dock or lightweight launcher. Despite almost every distro and 95% of Gnome users immediately installing Dash to Dock.
I skimmed the linked story and I still don’t really know what POP!_OS is. They are using the Linux kernel and wrote their own desktop environment, but what’s in between that? Does it include all the GNU system tools? Is there a lot of software that takes advantage of the COSMIC desktop environment? Do they have an App Store? Is it closer to something like Ubuntu or is it more like Android?
It's ubuntu with their own desktop and app store (kinda like mint) its also known for being the best linux experience for nvidia users. It's designed for power users and gamers
I've been using 22.04 for about six months (AI development and some Steam games) - I really enjoy it. The 24.04 upgrade was flawless.
It may sound a little odd but I'd describe my time with Pop!_OS as "quiet". It feels good to be total control again. I don't have to constantly disable things and there isn't a Copilot icon on my dock that comes back from the dead every few days.
Obsidian, 1Password, VS Code, Warp, etc. all work without issue.
I have been using is since early Alpha and overall its pretty good. Certainty bug early on but now that I'm thinking on it I don't remember hitting any real issues in a few months now.
I still think the name Pop!_OS is dumb, they should just call it CosmicOS, as this new desktop is their defining feature and its a great name.
What is really amazing is that thanks to Cosmic now becoming an important part of Wayland, along with others, the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it.
My with for Pop!_OS next major feature would be to embrace ZFS and build around it.
I'm also looking forward to seeing full Cosmic on ReduxOS.
> the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it.
Can you expand on what you mean here? I only somewhat follow Wayland/X11 migration/development, but from what I understand gnome is on Wayland, enough so that they apparently dropped x11 support from their upcoming release in march.
There are 10+ years of endless discussion about how wayland is being developed and being standardized.
The youtuber Brodie Robertson does regularly updated on all the discussion and proposals and why are the moving forward or not moving forward. And what the issue with the processes are:
If that's not good enough, you can find all the issues with the discussion, but be ready for the same issues to be discussed endlessly in a cycle for years and years.
Gnome is not the only issue but they are on of the biggest. The refuse to implement certain things even when pretty much every other system on the planet both linux and non linux support it. And those are things that many applications relay on. And because of the way the standardization process works it was for years really hard to get many things into the standard leading to basic things missing and applications having inconstant support or apps that are just broken.
Having more voting members and more members with some real money and development power and more composites has already changed the dynamics.
Gnome is wayland, but they are very stubborn about the extensions they will/won't implement. For example, mixed dpi scaling, server side decorations, accessibility protocols all work differently on gnome or not at all.
This makes it very difficult for Wayland to evolve in a way that people want, as Gnome is the biggest player by user count.
I use Cosmic on a DGX Spark, as my daily driver, and it works pretty well.
They don’t have a pop os iso for arm64, but they do have arm64 Debian repo. So I just took DGX os (what Nvidia ships on the device), added the pos os “releases” repo, and installed cosmic-session.
It works like a charm and provides a super useful tiling experience out of the box.
This is replacing my M3 Pro as my daily driver and I’ve been pretty happy with it.
I recently upgraded to an ultrawide monitor and find the Cosmic UX to be hands down better than what I get in the Mac with it.
If you want a Linux desktop with the productivity boost of a tiling window manager with a low learning curve, it’s pretty good.
PopOS 20/22 was the first "as good as mac" desktop linux experience IMO. Didn't really need to improve on it from my POV since Chrome and Steam and Proton apps worked in it just great. I'm doing the upgrade now, I hope I don't regret it.
Been running Cosmic releases since the later alphas and through the beta cycle without issue... will update in the next few days to full release. Looking forward to it.
There are a couple less than ideal edges IMO, but it's gotten to be a very solid experience. I've been really happy with Pop+Cosmic myself. I appreciate that they keep the kernel more current than upstream Ubuntu as well.
For what it's worth.. it's based on Ubuntu 24.04, which is where their version starts... they're much more up to date on the kernel, a lot of the packages are newer than upstream as well. It's a more current LTS than what Ubuntu offers, but they keep the version number.
Also, they didn't do a release while COSMIC desktop was under development, and the release cycle was alpha/beta on a full baseline to match the COSMIC development... unless you think you can develop a full DE in Rust faster than that.
Same though from me. Like WTF, we're about 4,5 months away from 26.04 LTS and they're just launching 24.04 NOW?!
How is this supposed to convince people who are already happy with the KDE or Gnome or other variants of Ubuntu and which ship without such monumental delays, thay they should switch to Popos variant of Ubuntu?
It wasn't that long of a delay. Just a couple months. Also, keep in mind that this was the first release of COSMIC. Even if it had hypothetically taken an extra six months, that does not set the basis for a release cadence. There will be regular releases from this point.
They were pretty aggressive about pushing kernel version on 22.04, it really doesn't matter what its based on. I think they should just not use this version numbering, its more confusing then anything else.
I use Pop!_OS for my gaming PC and I generally enjoy it. It could do with less punctuation in the name because it makes it harder to search the internet for distro specific information.
Readit News
I wanted a Sway-like experience but with a desktop experience, and so tried it.
It's surprisingly good: a DE with powerful enough window tiling.
It's now my daily driver.
Since they're backed by a sole company, I'm still not convinced on their longevity, but remain hopeful!
I'm not familiar with Pop OS, which I now realise is what the post is.
Although I'm happy enough with what KDE gives me that COSMIC would have to be substantially better before I'd endure the switching costs.
Now that SteamOS is officially released, I just use KDE. Maybe COSMIC will be better at touch eventually, but since it's a traditional laptop company, I'm not sure.
Please just give virtual desktops first class support and lets forget about the Activities experiment. Most users hate it.
The attitude regarding it is about as bad as Gnome forcing Overview on everyone, refusing to provide a first party dock or lightweight launcher. Despite almost every distro and 95% of Gnome users immediately installing Dash to Dock.
I thought this was pretty obvious.
It may sound a little odd but I'd describe my time with Pop!_OS as "quiet". It feels good to be total control again. I don't have to constantly disable things and there isn't a Copilot icon on my dock that comes back from the dead every few days.
Obsidian, 1Password, VS Code, Warp, etc. all work without issue.
I still think the name Pop!_OS is dumb, they should just call it CosmicOS, as this new desktop is their defining feature and its a great name.
What is really amazing is that thanks to Cosmic now becoming an important part of Wayland, along with others, the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it.
My with for Pop!_OS next major feature would be to embrace ZFS and build around it.
I'm also looking forward to seeing full Cosmic on ReduxOS.
Can you expand on what you mean here? I only somewhat follow Wayland/X11 migration/development, but from what I understand gnome is on Wayland, enough so that they apparently dropped x11 support from their upcoming release in march.
The youtuber Brodie Robertson does regularly updated on all the discussion and proposals and why are the moving forward or not moving forward. And what the issue with the processes are:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjzjpJ02WDOsPPtwUqqE...
If that's not good enough, you can find all the issues with the discussion, but be ready for the same issues to be discussed endlessly in a cycle for years and years.
Gnome is not the only issue but they are on of the biggest. The refuse to implement certain things even when pretty much every other system on the planet both linux and non linux support it. And those are things that many applications relay on. And because of the way the standardization process works it was for years really hard to get many things into the standard leading to basic things missing and applications having inconstant support or apps that are just broken.
Having more voting members and more members with some real money and development power and more composites has already changed the dynamics.
This makes it very difficult for Wayland to evolve in a way that people want, as Gnome is the biggest player by user count.
Also we need to take into account that many open source projects eventually run out of steam, which is what I see as most likely.
They don’t have a pop os iso for arm64, but they do have arm64 Debian repo. So I just took DGX os (what Nvidia ships on the device), added the pos os “releases” repo, and installed cosmic-session.
It works like a charm and provides a super useful tiling experience out of the box.
This is replacing my M3 Pro as my daily driver and I’ve been pretty happy with it.
I recently upgraded to an ultrawide monitor and find the Cosmic UX to be hands down better than what I get in the Mac with it.
If you want a Linux desktop with the productivity boost of a tiling window manager with a low learning curve, it’s pretty good.
There are a couple less than ideal edges IMO, but it's gotten to be a very solid experience. I've been really happy with Pop+Cosmic myself. I appreciate that they keep the kernel more current than upstream Ubuntu as well.
Note that if you're that far behind on a project, the rational choice is to significantly cut its scope, and push the rest to the following releases.
Also, they didn't do a release while COSMIC desktop was under development, and the release cycle was alpha/beta on a full baseline to match the COSMIC development... unless you think you can develop a full DE in Rust faster than that.
How is this supposed to convince people who are already happy with the KDE or Gnome or other variants of Ubuntu and which ship without such monumental delays, thay they should switch to Popos variant of Ubuntu?
Such a long delay isn't reassuring at all.
The punctuation hasn't bothered me once in that time.
I've enjoyed a much more stable Linux desktop experience than I had on other distros in the past when I tried though.