Honestly, it feels like only yesterday that System76, Linux OEM and the company behind pop!_OS, announced it was going to develop its own desktop environment, COSMIC. We’re about seven months into the more general availability of COSMIC, and the company has put up a nice overview of the various improvements that have already made their way into the code since then.
Of course, there’s a ton of visual improvements have been made to COSMIC, as well as a slew of new features: improved search, a brand new system monitor, drag and drop for tabs throughout COSMIC, and much more. COSMIC’s file manager and terminal have also seen a lot of work, with a ton of new small features and additions to bring them up to par with what people expect form a modern file manager and terminal emulator.
There’s a ton more listed in the article, so it serves as a nice “while you were away” if you’ve not been following development.
Open source UIs have one consistent flaw no matter the desktop or decade: margins. Alignment too, but margins are the main thing.
Look closely and the screenshots they provide. Nice tech, cool effects. But then the radius of the selected item does not match the one of the outer frame. No symmetry in spacing at all. The icons in the taskbar are pegged to the edges.
It’s so close to being nice, but it’s not.
You know, it’s not called “open” source for nothing 🙂
Sure, let me get right on it.
As a Cosmic user, I thank you!
Huh? Why would the radius of the inner selected thing match the radius of the outer thing? There is an order of magnitude difference in their dimensions, it makes sense that they’d have different rounded corners.
And please explain the margins you’re talking about.
I know exactly what Dr. Storm means: The different roundings of the corners do not match aesthetically, ending in different margins at different points — making it look very plumb. As larger the corner radius as more annoying this becomes.
This is a perfect illustration of the problem: https://images.pling.com/img/00/00/85/26/72/2357650/03.png
I love how quickly this project has come together. It also goes to show how relatively small a team was required.
Gnome and KDE have been unchallenged for to long and have become bloated over the years (xfce has remained very xfce).
Some grnuine competition is healthy.
@Thom I’d be really interested in your next funding round to try out This DE paired with something like Asterinas. Rust head to toe and all “newly developed” since 2025.
Can “we” really build a whole new stack in just a couple of years from scratch?!
Just looked up Asterinas, had never heard of it before so thanks for that! But it looks like it’s not a desktop environment, just a kernel and maybe a bit more. The proper comparison in that case would be Redox OS (which yes uses COSMIC DE, not coincidentally since the lead of Redox also works on COSMIC at System76).
Asterinas is definitely not a whole distro, more of a linux alternative (with linux compatibility). They do have Asterinas NixOS, which IS a distro though. Part of what makes it interesting as a comparison (to my mind) is we often think of the “west” being ahead. But this is open source and Rust project, but primarily driven from China and (claims) a high degree of Linux compatibility despite its very young age as a project. To think that that entire OS and stack simply didnt exist 2 years ago and could potentially act as a daily driver is a little crazy to me!
I recently tried the live USB of Pop OS and came away both impressed but also convinced it’s not for me. The layout is a lot like GNOME and I’m a KDE man myself.
Modern KDE out of the box has been pretty ugly for years though. The flat design craze of the 2010s seems to finally be weakening its grip, and they revived Oxygen, but what I really want is for KDE to look like it did in the 90s/2000s when it really looked like a late-90s update of CDE (which was ultra early-90s).
I’ve also been trying the Pop OS live USBs and the progress with COSMIC has been really impressive. That said, COSMIC also has a lot of bugs.
We — and I mean the people I assume read OSNews — have seen this happen a lot. The first 85% of project development, it goes lightning fast. There’s one new feature after another. The thing moves at light speed compared to older, more established projects. And we’re all like “this thing is on track to blow past Firefox/GNOME/X11/APT etc.”
And then in the last 15% of the development, things slow to a crawl. It turns out that fixing bugs is like an order of magnitude more work than developing new features. Some projects make it through that tunnel but a lot of them don’t.
So I’m cautiously optimistic about COSMIC. But I also remember when Ubuntu was all-in on Unity. The success rate for new DEs that have, like impressive corporate or organizational sponsorship is maybe 20%. Yeah, Mint has turned Cinnamon into a real DE, but that took YEARS, and for a lot of those years it was pretty janky. Elementary has Pantheon, but after like a decade of development it’s still buggier than a daily driver DE ought to be.
Meantime, there are maybe a half-dozen other distro-specific DEs that were where COSMIC is now — think the Deepin Desktop Environment, Etiole, Enlightenment and its forks, EDE, ten other MacOS look-alikes, and (of course) Unity — that are basically abandoned after making a whole lot of progress not just on the DE, but on a core application suite. Some of them are still usable, but the only one that’s polished enough to recommend as a daily driver as Cinnamon (and that assuming that the user doesn’t need Wayland).
Unity died because the parent (Ubuntu) pivoted from desktop users to enterprise. Sadly the open source community didn’t pick up the slack, as Unity basically didn’t exist outside of Ubuntu and it’s clones.
Im hoping Cosmic will be different, and more distros will pick it up and spread the load across the communities. Until that happens it’s always at risk of repeating the same fate.
is it still flat and ugly? Does it use CSD? FAT PASS!
Happy COSMIC user here, what is “CSD”?
Client-side window decorations, when the titlebar is controlled by the application rather than the desktop environment/window manager.
I’m a lifelong KDE user (though these days it’s a real eyesore out of the box, you have to use themes to get it looking good), but it is pretty old and has acquired a lot of cruft over the years. Theming it means changing 8 different subsystems that don’t talk to each other, certain features have been deprecated making customization difficult.
I’m very intrigued by a DE born post-bitmap and post-X that can start from scratch and learn from past DE’s mistakes. Does anybody know if Cosmic is good for theming? Or “ricing” as the kids say these days.