the FUTURE of Desktop Linux - COSMIC

This is my first look at the upcoming Linux desktop developed by System76. For many, desktop Linux has felt stagnant over the past year. Major distribution updates have been largely uneventful, and many distros seem to release gimmick features that aren’t particularly useful. However, there’s a fresh wind of excitement in the air with the upcoming alpha release of the Cosmic desktop environment. Here’s a dive into why Cosmic might be the breath of fresh air that desktop Linux needs.

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00:00 - Linux has been a bore
00:46 - Installing COSMIC
02:36 - COSMIC Greeter
03:41 - Display Scaling
04:21 - Workspaces
04:51 - Dock Customization
06:47 - General Settings
07:47 - COSMIC Terminal
08:19 - Windows TILING!
09:34 - COSMIC Editor
10:18 - COSMIC Files
11:02 - Wallpapers
11:27 - Applets
12:25 - Appearance Customization
13:05 - Panel Customization
13:30 - COSMIC App Store
15:58 - COSMIC Randr
16:48 - COSMIC Screenshot
17:33 - EVEN MORE

[roberttranceedm]

You will be even more excited to know that Qualcomm right now actively working together with the Linux kernel developers and the larger Linux community for an absolute FULL support for their new Snapdragon X Elite chip series and also for older SoCs. It's coming together this year and beginning next. So, Windows won't be the only options on the new, shiny beasty laptops that came out already with X and will come later on.

[mmstick]

I will fix some of the issues in the video. There is functioning icon theme support, but changing the theme mode will clear cached icon theme data at the moment. Some changes on that page are needed to not overwrite the page data on theme mode changes.

[WhimsicalArtisan]

I get that you’re bored but the truth is that boring is exactly what people want out of an operating system. We are currently in a situation where we need to take the needs of average users seriously now due to all the AI madness that’s happening across the tech sector. Many refugees coming to Linux. I hope that Cosmic helps that and doesn’t add to their confusion.

[bon]

Scroll speed! Are we really just going to skip over the fact they have this in the Finally Linux with mouse/trackpad scroll speed built in!

[henriquepicanco]

GNOME visual are not bad, but some choices are questionable. COSMIC it's an opportunity to take the best of GNOME, like CSD, headerbars, and mix with the best of KDE, like proper customization, a functional system tray, support for the DE draws windows decorations if needed and more powerfull programs.

[justahumanwithamask]

They should add 110% scaling for laptops

[ettoreatalan]

The fact that the COSMIC DE allows you to adjust the scroll speed of the mouse easily could indicate that the COSMIC developers actually want to develop a desktop environment for the average user, the long-time Windows/macOS user.

[sonsieface]

Appreciate you taking the time to spin this up and poke around - looking good so far. Hope we can get our grubby little hands on it for real later this year.

[kandym]

DE's might not have much going on but linux gaming has been huge this year and M$ is pushing users towards it :)

[MrTomro]

agree, completely lost interest in linux news, got very stale since like a last year or so. Cosmic could be a nice change.

[oztntdq]

I tried the latest build and was very impressed. I loved how easy it was to theme. Really a comfy middle ground between GNOME and Plasma. You can not only easily change the accent color, but also the main windows colors. Not several dozen colors to mess with like KDE but just enough to totally change the look in minutes without downloading themes.

I really like the balance of customization, powerful features and ease of access. I really am excited and think it will be pretty popular.

[minefacex]

The main reason why I am excited is that this is basically pure Rust, so a huge amount of hardening will come with it just because of that.

[frankhuurman]

Pretty excited about a new DE, hope they can polish it the coming months.
I'm pretty fond of GNOME so if it's a bit like GNOME but more performant with better customization/defaults (like dash-to-dock that almost everyone uses) then I'm already a fan!

[brainstormsurge]

I really like how the settings UI for trays. While KDE is good it often feels clunky.

[Schild]

Very cool and exciting to see! Thank you for the preview of COSMIC.

[uqdbrkc]

I have to say that originally I found the gnome system of minimal features that require extensions bizarre. That's because for some reason when I was first using a gnome DE the firefox plugin needed to install gnome extensions didn't work for me. I remember thinking, why the heck do I need a firefox plugin to get basic features of my DE? And then of course I had the experience many have had of an extension I'd used for years suddenly breaking or no longer being available and one broken extension disabling all the others. So frankly I just like this idea of applets that are built to integrate seamlessly with Cosmic, that run as separate processes, that won't break, that probably use less resources, and that can be turned on and off in a settings panel. The gnome system seems perverse. So I don't care if it looks just like gnome. The important thing is it doesn't work like it.

Plus I prefer the UI features of the current Pop and the built-in tiling WM. People forget, but splitting up the gnome activities overview into several targeted launchers like rofi made sense as a way to streamline workflow. And it was built in so you didn't have to do a rofi configuration. And they forget how great it was to have the equivalent of i3 wm accessible right inside a full-featured desktop.

[mba]

Can't wait to try this out. I love pop_os because of their automatic tiling set up. I want to use tiling but I also don't want to use tiling (because of all these setups you have to do 😂)

[urmensch]

Good to see that it seems to work for you pretty well . When i tried it on my Arch install a few months I just got a black screen when trying to use it and in the end i was too lazy to attempt to fix it

[acidiclight]

I love that the terminal has a traditional "file edit view etc" menu bar. I get really annoyed when desktop apps do hamburger menus that have more than a few options (and especially when they have submenus), because they're really difficult to use with a screen magnifier.

[pablosanmartinvarela]

Can you set up a workspace grid (2×2 or 3×3)?