System76's COSMIC Desktop Nearing Alpha Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76's COSMIC Desktop Nearing Alpha Release

In a Valentine's Day blog post, System76 has outlined how they are nearing the release of their alpha build of the COSMIC desktop environment that they have been developing as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Alpha-Is-Close

[Steffo]

I'm curious how stable and reliable this desktop is. Can anyone report some experience compared to KDE Plasma and Gnome?
Be aware that I'm not talking about feature-completeness. - This is a whole other topic.

[fallingcats]

I've tried it a month ago and the settings app was mostly a placeholder without functionality wired up.
While Plasma 6 is pretty stable now they still haven't weeded out some weird crashes in their settings app. (Seriously, of all places why settings?)

I hope System76 doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that lead to the "crashyness" of systemsettings5/6, but with Rust that should be easy enough probably.

[fallingcats]

I'm curious how stable and reliable this desktop is. Can anyone report some experience compared to KDE Plasma and Gnome?
Be aware that I'm not talking about feature-completeness. - This is a whole other topic.

When I tried Cosmic, it wasn't really even at a point where you wanted to use it long enough to say anything substantial about it's stability. It didn't crash immediately I guess. Maybe someone used to only running a window manager want's to chime in here.

Please note that I don't want to ding Cosmic here, I know it's a new project and just needs more time to develop. It's still impressive that they've made it this far in such a short time.

[royce]

Looking forward to trying this out, it's quite remarkable the amount of stuff they've done in the short amount of time they've been working on this. I wonder if there'll be an ubuntu-compatible PPA?

[Delta_44]

I'm curious how stable and reliable this desktop is. Can anyone report some experience compared to KDE Plasma and Gnome?
Be aware that I'm not talking about feature-completeness. - This is a whole other topic.

I'm daily driving COSMIC since half a year.
Since three months ago, COSMIC has been stable as hell.
Try it if you want!

[hf_139]

I'm curious how stable and reliable this desktop is. Can anyone report some experience compared to KDE Plasma and Gnome?
Be aware that I'm not talking about feature-completeness. - This is a whole other topic.

GNOME at the launch of Fedora 39 crashed regularly and took the whole system down with it (making the wayland compositor hand off applications and not crashing them, is not a priority to GNOMEs RedHat developers). Not even mentioning its one-click RCE exploit of the time.
If COSMIC manages to not crash all five minutes, it is already more stable than the utter cancerous crap that is GNOME.
There is no excuse to use GNOME in the year 2024. Just use something else. GNOME and GTK became a burden and need to be stomped out for good.

[Jonjolt]

I've tried it a month ago and the settings app was mostly a placeholder without functionality wired up.
While Plasma 6 is pretty stable now they still haven't weeded out some weird crashes in their settings app. (Seriously, of all places why settings?)

I hope System76 doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that lead to the "crashyness" of systemsettings5/6, but with Rust that should be easy enough probably.

With Plasma 5 I'm still trying to figure out why my system goes to sleep with windows open but doesn't when nothing is open. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[DumbFsck]

I'm curious how stable and reliable this desktop is. Can anyone report some experience compared to KDE Plasma and Gnome?
Be aware that I'm not talking about feature-completeness. - This is a whole other topic.

I can't say, if course, as it isn't out and I haven't even tried the beta.

But the amount of dogdeeding and QA they are throwing at it makes me hopeful.

[DumbFsck]

Can't wait for Carl's talk. Everytime I heard him I found it insightful and pleasingly presented.

Also the more features they show ans/or announce/mention the more I'm thinking I might actually use it when it's ready.

The only thing on this blog post specifically that I mildly dislike is the appearance of the tabs in top of the windows. It already looks better than it looks like in their shell in top of gnome, but for some reason I can't put my finger on I find it "displeasing". It is hugely personal, just an opinion based on "taste" (subjective, no right or wrong) and "vibes".

A bit more "objectively" I think the border for the OSD could be thicker or in general more visible, in these screenshots it almost makes the OSD background seem like a continuation of whatever is behind the OSD. But with how much they tout the DE will be customisable, it will for (almost) certain be adjustable to my (again, subjective) liking.