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
That could be a longer wait because Gnome (hopefully) wont be standing still during that time.
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.
Yep. I stupidly thought I could use it on my work laptop. Big nope, I had to go back after 2 hours.
It has great potential, but it’s still far from being ready… 😔
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
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 systemctl and bluetoothctl.
https://www.makeuseof.com/manage-bluetooth-linux-with-bluetoothctl/
In my experience I find just running bluetoothctl to enter the interactive mode easiest. You can enter commands without prepending bluetoothctl. You can use help at any stage. So you want to use systemctl to make sure Bluetooth is running, then enter bluetoothctl. Make sure the device is discoverable and pairing is set to on. Start your [headphones/whatever] in pairing mode and run devices. When you see the device run pair <numbers/address>. 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 suspend command. Or possibly the hybrid-sleep option could do what you want. See systemctl -h for 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.
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.
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-1 for 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.
I don’t think I understand what I’m reading but here is all the error I could find: https://rentry.org/gni28ogy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
