System76, creator of Pop!_OS and prominent Linux OEM, has just announced the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS – normally not something I particularly care about, but in this case, it comes with the first stable release of COSMIC Desktop. COSMIC is a brand new desktop environment by System76, written in Rust, and after quite some time in development, it’s now out in the wild as a stable release.
Today is special not only in that it’s the culmination of over three years of work, but even more so in that System76 has built a complete desktop environment for the open source community. We’re proud of this contribution to the open source ecosystem. COSMIC is built on the ethos that the best open source projects enable people to not only use them, but to build with them. COSMIC is modular and composable. It’s the flagship experience for Pop!_OS in its own way, and can be adapted by anyone that wants to build their own unique user experience for Linux.
↫ Carl Richell
You don’t need to run Pop!_OS to try out COSMIC, as it’s already available on a variety of other distributions (although it may take a bit for this stable version to land in the respective repositories).
I love the fact this has managed to reach stable in such a short period of time. It really goes to show that with dedication what can be achieved.
Importantly it was properly financed and backed. I hope this is a model future development follows and doesn’t just rely on community volentary effort and or Redhat/IBM picking up the funding slack
@Adurbe
System76 is now one of a short list of companies that ships a “desktop” experience that they control on hardware that they control. The obvious example is Apple of course but Microsoft is in that list with WIndows and Surface. But I would not say that Surface has much influence on Windows overall whereas both macOS and COSMIC exist explicitly to support “desktop” hardware sales.
As you point out, COSMIC is really the only Linux desktop that has a commercial business so vested in its success. Red Hat is a major force behind GNOME but it is not like the desktop is very critical to Red Hat strategy or their overall profitability. The quality of the COSMIC desktop experience drives the commercial success of System76 far more directly. While this is just a first version, we may see COSMIC focus more on some of the important but boring nuances that Linux desktops often lack.
Many companies rely on Linux in various ways, but a vanishingly small number actually hire developers to work on and develop the systems upon which their businesses depend and profit from.
Redhat (for all it’s faults) keeps the funding flowing to Many Many projects. I’m really glad to see System76 doing the same.
It’s nice to have a new DE contender build with a modern tech stack. If nothing else, it could become a project that attracts new (young?) open source developers.
I was thinking Super ELF…
Oh… that was COSMAC.
Tried it last night — just on the live USB — and it is really very good. It has actual application menubars where this is sensible (e.g. the file browser) and during my limited testing was stable and responsive. It also worked out of the box with an Nvidia 5060, which is more than I can say for any other live system I’ve tried.
It does need a bit of polish in the “missing features” sense, though. A good example is transitional animations, which e.g. manually arranging windows, or moving them between workspaces absolutely benefits from.
Also its treatment of GTK4/LibAdwaita/non-COSMIC applications is a little awkward; tabs don’t retain consistent positions when you switch between them (for instance) since option buttons like “Search” offset the tab bar and only appear when certain tabs are selected. They also don’t observe some settings is the COSMIC Control Panel (e.g. button roundness).
This might have something to do with how System 76 has forked or otherwise handled LibAdwaita, but there are other bits of UI/UX weirdness as well. The three options in the Log Out dialog box (Shut Down, Restart, and Log Out) are presented as though Shutting Down is somehow logically different from restarting or logging out (which are both ordinary buttons while “shut down” looks like a hyperlink?).
I found a handful of other areas where it’s hard to discern relationships between UI elements based on how they are presented (i.e. when UI elements are logically similar, like being of the same category or performing similar functions, they should look and act similar to one another — think of how window controls are usually presented). This is weird since COSMIC’s design borrows liberally from GNOME and so it’s reasonable to expect that most UI elements will be either GNOME-like or an (opinionated) improvement on their GNOME equivalent instead of just looking unfinished.
COSMIC is a nice middle-ground between the overly restrictive simplicity of GNOME and the complexity in KDE. But what really sets it apart is the balance they have found between the stacking and tiling window management models.
I am really interested to see what kind of adoption COSMIC gets now that it is shipping. They plan to ship a 26.04 LTS just 4 months from now. The current version is solid but pretty basic. We may get a better picture in 26.04 of where System76 wants to take things from here.
I like to think that COSMIC is just using Pop! as a stopgap until the written-in-rust Redox is ready to host it.
@Squizzler
It would be interesting to know if System76 has any commercial ambitions for RedoxOS. They are linked through Jeremy Soller but RedoxOS is not really sponsored by System76 directly (to my knowledge).
It is very cool that Redox is already running all these COSMIC apps. I think they want to use the full COSMIC desktop as soon as they add Wayland support. Between that and the fact that Ubuntu is now shipping Uutils (also used in Redox), there is going to be a surprising amount of real world battle-testing for key parts of Redox.
It would be great if relibc found a real-world use case outside of Redox as well.