System76 have today released the first alpha preview for you to try out COSMIC, their brand new home-grown desktop environment. Built with Rust, it should hopefully feel pretty familiar to most Linux users with a visual style that matches up to their current GNOME-based desktop.
While they're building it for their own Pop!_OS, with a alpha iso for Pop, it's designed to be cross-distro and they even have ways for you to test it out directly on a few other distributions already.
Pictured - COSMIC Alpha 1 using automatic tiling for opened windows
Their vision for COSMIC: "COSMIC began as our answer to user feedback we’ve received on improving Pop!_OS. The new desktop environment introduces a custom theming system, streamlined Auto-tiling, new core applications including an app store, and provides you more control over your workflow. Written in the Rust programming language, COSMIC is more stable, more secure, and better optimized for performance."
Keep in mind this is the first alpha build, there will likely be many bugs and unfinished features. Going by the press details they sent this is what's currently complete:
- Settings pages + applets for daily use for most users
- Applets provide many settings needs
- Connecting to bluetooth and wireless networks. Choosing audio input and output devices
- Highlight COSMIC’s unique features
- Panel and Dock Customization
- Appearance and Themes
- OS Interfaces
- Panels, Launcher, App Library, Greeter, Dialogs
- Apps
- Settings, Files, Text Editor, Store, Terminal
- Compositor features
- Auto-Tiling, Snapping (Manual-Tiling), Stacking, and Sticky Windows
- Excellent nvidia hybrid graphics support
- Fractional scaling
- Wayland native with XWayland support
And this is what's still to be done:
- Numerous Settings pages
- Frosted effect for OS interfaces
- Variable refresh rate
- Accessibility
- Initial Setup
- Need to set time manually
- Workspaces features, animations, and refinement
- Lots of COSMIC Files work
- Bug fixes and refinement
- Compositor software rendering
- Testing in VMs requires hardware acceleration
- GNOME Boxes uses software acceleration but it’s pretty smooth
- VirtualBox requires enabling VT-x/AMD-V and Enable Nested Paging
Check it out on the official website.
A promising start to what could be a really interesting Linux desktop environment, although as expected it is on the rough side being in alpha right now you can clearly see where they're going with it. I can imagine this becoming really popular.
When you've tried it be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
NathanaelKStottlemyer about 3 hours ago
It was on a virtual box, while I'm video editing, so it was a bit slow, but it seemed pretty good. I could tell it was the virtual box slow and not the DE. It is kind of incomplete (I don't have half the settings I need to manage a computer) and the base apps are minimal (I can find my own though) but I kind of want to use it as my daily driver.
The biggest confusion I had though is whether the Pop!_OS 24.04 release is in alpha. I know COSMIC is in alpha, but until literally today, all information from system_76 seemed to say that they'd ship an alpha (but functional) desktop in a stable Ubuntu base. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem like it's the case (unless they want COSMIC out of alpha before Pop!_OS goes out of alpha?). I hope they hurry, yes I get the latest and greatest kernel and system libraries in Pop!_OS 22.04, but it's still a two-year-old distribution and on my brand-new adder WS their customized gnome was unbearably laggy. I have disabled all their extensions which made it better, but it's still kind of slow, and I'd at least prefer the two years worth of updates to GNOME if I can't get COSMIC.
However, no stable release date for the COSMIC alpha or the new version of Pop!_OS, and I'm kind of impatient. If I can find a way to upgrade to 24.04 without nuking my files, I might just to see if I can help get this stable before the end of the year. (Not going to lie, but kind of frustrated at the experience right now, I bought a system_76 laptop with the promise of Linux that just works, but it hasn't been.)
In all, I'm really excited for COSMIC and the future it brings to desktop Linux and I love that system_76 is making it, but I'm frustrated with my current iteration of Pop!_OS and really wish they'd hurry.
Last edited by NathanaelKStottlemyer on 8 August 2024 at 4:25 pm UTC
ExpandingMan about 3 hours ago
EagleDelta about 2 hours ago
Quoting: ExpandingManThis looks nice but I have to say I'm pretty bummed that this does not look nearly as modular as I had initially hoped. I'm not really interested in a desktop environment, but I do want a window manager and the current options are less than ideal for various reasons (nvidia re wayland having been a huge pain in the ass). I would be happy to use this if I could strip it down to basically just be a window manager but it's not really looking like it'll quite do that without elaborate modification.
And that's completely ok. This isn't necessarily targeted towards users like yourself or others that do heavy WM customization, but primarily targeted for general users that want some customization, but also want simple UX/UI out of the box.
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