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
If it only 2 year I can wait XD
That’s my plan. I’m back on Gnome until feature parity.
That could be a longer wait because Gnome (hopefully) wont be standing still during that time.
But they have historically moved pretty damn slow
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!
Exactly. I could use it as my daily if the settings panel was more complete.
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.
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
systemctlandbluetoothctl.https://www.makeuseof.com/manage-bluetooth-linux-with-bluetoothctl/
In my experience I find just running
bluetoothctlto enter the interactive mode easiest. You can enter commands without prependingbluetoothctl. You can usehelpat any stage. So you want to usesystemctlto make sure Bluetooth is running, then enterbluetoothctl. Make sure the device is discoverable and pairing is set to on. Start your [headphones/whatever] in pairing mode and rundevices. When you see the device runpair. 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 suspendcommand. Or possibly the hybrid-sleep option could do what you want. Seesystemctl -hfor 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.
I couldn’t even connect Bluetooth until I switched to Gnome again
Great! Exactly on time for the next release of Debian :)
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.
If they support wayland I’m in
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.
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.
It seems like pantheon only supports floating windows, whereas cosmic supports both floating and tiling.
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.
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
Tried it, my device crashes every 2 minutes in. Not worth the effort for now.
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
Something doesn’t work so instead of fixing I am looking for alternatives…
So my mom shouldn’t use GNU/Linux because she can’t fix bugs?
exactly, otherwise she needs your help
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
Have fun with linux then.
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.
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
Great answer, thanks!
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 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’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.