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?
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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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
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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.
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.
If you already use pop with the cosmic plugin, it's going to be a better version of that. If you use something else then I'm not sure why youd care tbh.
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.
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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.
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I just want pop_os 24.04. I'm annoyed they're delaying the entire release so they can add cosmic to it.
Maybe I don't keep my finger on the pulse of this stuff the way I should, but what's the main benefit of 24.04? Pop updates the kernel and packages already. The main benefit we would get is newer gnome which... obviously isnt a development priority for them since it's going away.
What are we missing out on?
Tried it, my device crashes every 2 minutes in. Not worth the effort for now.
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.
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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!
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.
It seems like pantheon only supports floating windows, whereas cosmic supports both floating and tiling.
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.
Depends on what you want to do I guess. I'd rather have a clean desktop that cannot accumulate clutter like in windows where applications add shortcuts to the desktop automatically which you then have to remove manually.
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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.
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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.
I'm just afraid it's gonna be another 2 years before it's ready for everyday use
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.
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.
If it only 2 year I can wait XD
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