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 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.
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.
Yes, and the desktop is delightfully simple. Makes older hardware feel new but still looks good enough on modern hardware.
If they support wayland I’m in
It’s new, so there’s no point of supporting X11. It’s Wayland only.
I meant I’m waiting for XFCE to support Wayland haha
Oh I see, fair enough
I feel like I am the only person not super-jazzed about Cosmic.
If people are excited or want to use it, fine. But I don’t know what it could possibly add to the mix besides offering mote DE choice, and Linux already has a lot of that.
I’m not really invested in Cosmic, I’m happy with Hyprland and will continue to use it.
I do think they did a REALLY nice job with the tiling. I don’t think you can find a more intuitive and user friendly tiling window manager. Something that’s not absolute barebones out of box and can be configured entirely with a GUI. In that regard it does bring something to the mix and is very very welcome.
I wish KDE had something like that! AFAIK I think most tiling things are still broken and haven’t quite caught up to Plasma 6 yet.
KDE has “”“tiling”“”. They called it tiling but it’s just god awful. If KDE had real automatic tiling, I would probably have sticked with it, to be honest.
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For me, I like the idea of a tiling window manager with batteries included. Been using tiling window mangers for ages now and cannot go back to floating window management. But all the tiling window managers are bare bones and configure everything you want from the ground up. Which I am not a huge fan of these days. I want something to work out the box with first party full tiling support (not just dragging windows to the side) but without needing 100s of lines of config to get a half decent setup.
It’s new and different. It’s also not really usable atm so there’s plenty of hype and little disillusionment yet.
Give it a couple years and everyone will probably have forgotten about it.I like it as an alternative to GNOME that’s not quite so GNOME-ish, if that makes sense. I do like GNOME but I find it a bit idiosyncratic sometimes, IE they seem very “my way or the highway” about some design things, and it often feels to me like you have to hunt down and keep updating endless plugins to do basic things that feel like they should be included.
If they can land in a spot where COSMIC looks as nice as GNOME but is also a bit less of a hassle to get set up the way you want it, I feel like they could occupy a nice middle-ground between GNOME and KDE possibly.
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.
Tried it, my device crashes every 2 minutes in. Not worth the effort for now.
It sounds great. Cosmic is off to a great start and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
And here I thought you were talking about Cosmic Encounter…
😎👍
I just want pop_os 24.04. I’m annoyed they’re delaying the entire release so they can add cosmic to it.
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Ha… you pretty much asked the question. Visually nice, but have no idea what’s so special about it.
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!
Well, since Cosmic isn’t going to be ready for a couple years yet, let’s try to fix your multimonitor issue. Are you running on Wayland and what’s your GPU?
Wayland, Lenovo idepad 1 2018 (Ryzen 3) second monitor is Arzopa A1 GAMUT SLIM
I’m guessing that’s the onboard AMD graphics then?
If you do an
lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'what does it return? Are you able to find anything in dmsg (journalctl -xb-1for previous boot log) that would give an error message to investigate?here is what I got
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Mendocino (rev c2) Subsystem: Lenovo Device 380e Kernel driver in use: amdgpu Kernel modules: amdgpuI don’t think I understand what I’m reading but here is all the error I could find: https://rentry.org/gni28ogyMight have to get the full log, and it should be from immediately after one of those unexpected reboots. The flag
b-1indicates journalctl to export the logs from the previous boot (-1) instead of the current log. So if you dosudo journalctl -xb-1 > log.txtafter one of these reboots and paste that file to look at, we might get something useful.I’m fairly confident that’s a problem that can be fixed with having an AMD graphics driver running. If it were nVidia, I’d be less confident.
Hm… just looked it up. It does look nice. Guess I’ll have to read into it and see what benefits it provides.
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.
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
