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Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment
- foxheadman 10mo agoI used to hear about COSMIC and think "Glad to see more choice, but I doubt this will go anywhere". I wanted a Sway-like experience but with a desktop experience, and so tried it. It's surprisingly good: a DE with powerful enough window tiling. It's now my daily driver. Since they're backed by a sole company, I'm still not convinced on their longevity, but remain hopeful! I'm not familiar with Pop OS, which I now realise is what the post is.
- nartho 10mo agoI like tiling a lot more than I like floating windows. Cosmic is my daily driver and is awesome. I just wish it had a bit more customization options, I don't want to spend days rummaging through wikis like with hyprland but having a bit more control over it would be nice, not a deal breaker though
- panick21_ 10mo agoI think even if the company goes away we will see this continue. It modern it rust and some if its fundamentals are already used by other projects. Of course not same way, but its not just going away.
- pjmlp 10mo agoI was introduced to UNIX in 1993, Linux in 1995's Summmer, and have lost count how many X Windows desktops or windows managers have come and gone in 32 years.
- criddell 10mo agoWhat's been your favorite? I wasted too much time tweaking Enlightenment. I remember that was fun but I don't really remember much about actually using it. OS/2's Workplace Shell feels like the biggest lost opportunity (and has nothing to do with UNIXy stuff). I really liked Rexx and the SOM stuff felt cleaner than what became COM in Windows.
- mghackerlady 10mo agoEnlightenment still exists and works well, I just wish more apps were written around EFL so themes were easier
- LargoLasskhyfv 10mo agoIn two variations actually. One is a fork of E17: https://mokshadesktop.github.io https://mokshadesktop.github.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moksha_(window_manager) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moksha_(window_manager) https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/av_linux_25/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/av_linux_25/
- throwaway888666 10mo agoEnlightenment? Nothing beats the bodhi moksha desktop https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/ https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
- baobun 10mo agoSome underappreciated and forgotten tiling wms that are still viable today: - ratpoison ("tmux for X11". Ultralight, great for kiosks and similar where you barely want a WM at all) - stumpwm (ratpoison on steroids in Lisp) - Xmonad (A bit different tiling dynamic that some prefer. I dig it despite Haskell, not because of it) - Qtile (Very flexible and easily hackable in python yet reasonably stable and fast. You can reproduce for example the Xmonad or i3 experiences pretty easily)
- leephillips 10mo agoAnd the one I use and love: DWM. (which I use on top of Pop!_OS, oddly enough).
- pjmlp 10mo agoWindow Maker/AfterStep were my all time favourites in GNU/Linux world. I used to be in the GNOME camp during its early days, even wrote a tiny article to The C/C++ User's Journal regarding Gtkmm, nowadays I rather use XFCE. The original fvwm also holds a special place, that was the first I used in GNU/Linux, back in 1995, and I got to customise it quite a bit. SOM was great, it also supported implementation inheritance, and had metaclasses concept as well. I like COM as idea, I dislike how badly Microsoft keeps rebooting the developer experience, and isn't able to provide modern toolig as easy as it was from VB 6, Delphi, C++ Builder. For something that has become the central mechanism how Windows APIs are delivered.
- panick21_ 10mo agoBut X has stuck around and to think all that just because everybody was afraid of Sun.
- criddell 10mo agoI skimmed the linked story and I still don’t really know what POP!_OS is. They are using the Linux kernel and wrote their own desktop environment, but what’s in between that? Does it include all the GNU system tools? Is there a lot of software that takes advantage of the COSMIC desktop environment? Do they have an App Store? Is it closer to something like Ubuntu or is it more like Android?
- jsk2600 10mo agoIt's based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with their own DE
- dsego 10mo agoDoes it use snap packages?
- cguess 10mo agoyes
- akdor1154 10mo agoThey attempt to avoid them, though snaps are still available if you wish. Flatpak is installed by default and used by their app store, and Firefox is packaged as a deb so you can avoid the snap. I consider it a deshittified Ubuntu.
- KronisLV 10mo ago> I consider it a deshittified Ubuntu. This is more or less what I have used Linux Mint for (their Cinnamon desktop version is pretty okay, also used the XFCE one). Nice to have more options!
- panick21_ 10mo agoThey are vendor of hardware, so much more aggressive about pushing new hardware support.
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoHave you tried the new-ish KDE window tiling? (Super-T by default) I had a similar desire to you, and am quite happy with what KDE provided. It'd be interesting to read a comparison between the two. Although I'm happy enough with what KDE gives me that COSMIC would have to be substantially better before I'd endure the switching costs.
- tmtvl 10mo agoI hard bounced off COSMIC with the complete lack of theming. I can't even set my clock to a reasonable format in it. The only thing it has going for it is sane multi-monitor support, which neither KDE nor GNOME have gotten right so far (though at KDE there is some activity around it, dunno 'bout GNOME).
- dontlaugh 10mo agoWhat’s wrong with Gnome’s multi monitor support? My two monitors even have different pixel density.
- akdor1154 10mo agoGnome works OK with integer scaling, more granular than this and you're up shit creek. E.G. can you set one screen to 150% and one to 175%? (I think the answer to this is 'technically yes but then everything goes a bit blurry because they do it by rendering at 2x then downscaling') Proper mixed dpi scaling means stuff will render pixel-perfectly instead of downscaling hacks.
- dontlaugh 10mo agoI have two 4K monitors, one at 150% and another at 175%. Nothing is blurry. I did have to get a reasonably new Gnome, Ubuntu LTS had one that was broken with fractional scaling.
- tmtvl 10mo agoCan't switch between workspace 1 and 2 on my right monitor while leaving my left one on workspace 3. In fact, I believe by default I wouldn't even get workspaces on my secondary monitor. Because who needs 'organization' anyway?
- dontlaugh 10mo agoI see. I’ve always preferred to switch workspaces together.
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- mjorgers 10mo agoI have yet to try it in depth, but being able to stack different apps into the same window is awesome. Reminds me of Konqueror, where you had the same app for browsing the internet and your local filesystem.
- jklinger410 10mo agoI will try this once a designer has had a chance to clean it up
- mghackerlady 10mo agoIt's clean enough, most of the changes you want can be done through theming
- LatencyKills 10mo agoI've been using 22.04 for about six months (AI development and some Steam games) - I really enjoy it. The 24.04 upgrade was flawless. It may sound a little odd but I'd describe my time with Pop!_OS as "quiet". It feels good to be total control again. I don't have to constantly disable things and there isn't a Copilot icon on my dock that comes back from the dead every few days. Obsidian, 1Password, VS Code, Warp, etc. all work without issue.
- wwweston 10mo agoAI dev - any chance it works well with nvidia 5xxx series cards?
- dewarrn1 10mo agoNot your question, but 4xxx-series work seamlessly.
- bigyabai 10mo agoIt should. The Linux/Nvidia experience is pretty much plug-and-play if you have modern drivers.
- sharms 10mo agoYes they have an Nvidia image and I just used it on a 5080 last weekend, worked perfect
- physicles 10mo agoPiggybacking on this… do all nvidia cards have the same issue with Linux drivers, where the fan won’t ever go below 30%? I have a 3090 on Ubuntu 24 and hours of googling netted nothing that worked.
- bigyabai 10mo agoThat might just be your card idling at a hot temperature; my 3070 Ti is idling with 0% fan according to nvtop and LACT both. Install GWE or Lact and you should be able to tweak the fan curves manually from Linux.
- Vinnl 10mo agoI guess that also means the first stable release of Cosmic - congrats to the team! Honestly I expected it to be delayed more, so good on them for pulling that off. Hopefully it's actually stable.
- tracker1 10mo agoIt's been pretty stable for me since the later alphas when I switched. The only real hiccups I've noticed have been with keyboard only navigation in a few areas, mouse has always worked well. I'd guess that A11y is also less than ideal as well, so if you're reliant on a screen reader or the like, best to wait quite a while longer until iced etc. catch up.
- Manfred 10mo agoI use Pop!_OS for my gaming PC and I generally enjoy it. It could do with less punctuation in the name because it makes it harder to search the internet for distro specific information.
- dardeaup 10mo agoI would be more inclined to use it if it didn't have punctuation within the name.
- Tostino 10mo agoI've been using it as my daily driver for ~3 years now. The punctuation hasn't bothered me once in that time. I've enjoyed a much more stable Linux desktop experience than I had on other distros in the past when I tried though.
- tracker1 10mo agoI just use "PopOS" as the name myself in reference, a lot of others do the same... I agree the actual marketing format is kind of ridiculous.
- taeric 10mo agoKudos to the team on getting this out! Been looking forward to updating for a while.
- panick21_ 10mo agoI have been using is since early Alpha and overall its pretty good. Certainty bug early on but now that I'm thinking on it I don't remember hitting any real issues in a few months now. I still think the name Pop!_OS is dumb, they should just call it CosmicOS, as this new desktop is their defining feature and its a great name. What is really amazing is that thanks to Cosmic now becoming an important part of Wayland, along with others, the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it. My with for Pop!_OS next major feature would be to embrace ZFS and build around it. I'm also looking forward to seeing full Cosmic on ReduxOS.
- ender341341 10mo ago> the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it. Can you expand on what you mean here? I only somewhat follow Wayland/X11 migration/development, but from what I understand gnome is on Wayland, enough so that they apparently dropped x11 support from their upcoming release in march.
- mghackerlady 10mo agoGNOME is wayland only but either refuses to implement certain things or uses their position to prevent discussions from going anywhere
- akdor1154 10mo agoGnome is wayland, but they are very stubborn about the extensions they will/won't implement. For example, mixed dpi scaling, server side decorations, accessibility protocols all work differently on gnome or not at all. This makes it very difficult for Wayland to evolve in a way that people want, as Gnome is the biggest player by user count.
- mixmastamyk 10mo agoWow, I had heard they were late but didn't realize it was over a year and a half. Note that if you're that far behind on a project, the rational choice is to significantly cut its scope, and push the rest to the following releases.
- jack_tripper 10mo agoSame though from me. Like WTF, we're about 4,5 months away from 26.04 LTS and they're just launching 24.04 NOW?! How is this supposed to convince people who are already happy with the KDE or Gnome or other variants of Ubuntu and which ship without such monumental delays, thay they should switch to Popos variant of Ubuntu? Such a long delay isn't reassuring at all.
- panick21_ 10mo agoThey were pretty aggressive about pushing kernel version on 22.04, it really doesn't matter what its based on. I think they should just not use this version numbering, its more confusing then anything else.
- mmstick76 10mo agoIt wasn't that long of a delay. Just a couple months. Also, keep in mind that this was the first release of COSMIC. Even if it had hypothetically taken an extra six months, that does not set the basis for a release cadence. There will be regular releases from this point.
- tracker1 10mo agoFor what it's worth.. it's based on Ubuntu 24.04, which is where their version starts... they're much more up to date on the kernel, a lot of the packages are newer than upstream as well. It's a more current LTS than what Ubuntu offers, but they keep the version number. Also, they didn't do a release while COSMIC desktop was under development, and the release cycle was alpha/beta on a full baseline to match the COSMIC development... unless you think you can develop a full DE in Rust faster than that.
- uutangohotel 10mo agoIs there any reason why I'd want this release instead of waiting for 26.04?
- tracker1 10mo agoFWIW, it's still an LTS release with support ahead of upstream. ex: the kernel and several software packages are more current than upstream Ubuntu. I'd also suspect that the integration for 26.04 may take a month or so, so you'll likely be waiting closer to 6mo for 26.04 from Pop vs Ubuntu.
- kwanbix 10mo agoI tried it because another_linux_distro! Sadly, I found the COSMIC dock looks "dead" since they can not implement the genie effect as it is patented by Apple ://///////// EDIT: I refer to this effect: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eOrvbaKz5H4 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eOrvbaKz5H4 It is called magnification effect.
- bsimpson 10mo agoThe genie effect was from the original X release in like 99. If there's a patent, it should be expired. But that's a weird line to draw for which shells you find unacceptable.
- pseudalopex 10mo agoThey did not say it was unacceptable.
- MrBra 10mo agoWhat's the genie effect?
- data-ottawa 10mo agoThe window being minimized animates. It goes from bottom to top of the window with a continuous effect, it squishes down in width then gets warped/pulled to the dock icon to minimize. The effect is like when Genie from Aladdin enters or leaves the lamp, but without smoke.
- kwanbix 10mo agoSorry, It is actually called magnification effect (I am not a Mac user). https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eOrvbaKz5H4 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eOrvbaKz5H4
- johannesrexx 10mo ago[The Plank](https://github.com/zquestz/plank-reloaded https://github.com/zquestz/plank-reloaded) has the Genie effect, but it only works for Xorg.
- phkahler 10mo agoI've often said OSes and DEs have stagnated, so web browsers started innovating in areas they shouldn't have needed to. Tabs is one such area. And now with Cosmic: Stacks, snapping, and sticky windows ◦ Stack windows to combine them into tab groups like a browser ••• Right click on the header and choose Create Window Stack. Then drag another window to the stack. ••• When tiling windows, simply drag the window on top of another to create a stack. Tabs are an interesting way to handle multiple instances of the same app (though this sounds like cosmic might mix them too). But in Windows for example, each app would have to do it's own implementation of muli-document handling. Browsers just brought us the tabs metaphor to manage them. I always thought that should be done at a higher level than the apps, and now it's here! I was thinking toolkit level, but go a level up to the DE and mix apps.
- sho_hn 10mo agoFWIW, multiple KDE versions had similar group-windows-with-tabs implementations for many years, and the uptake wasn't particularly high. Cf. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/kde44/kde44-tabs.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/kde44...
- athoneycutt 10mo agoI remember that in KDE 4 and have missed it a lot, I'm very happy that COSMIC went this route to be honest.
- swisniewski 10mo agoI use Cosmic on a DGX Spark, as my daily driver, and it works pretty well. They don’t have a pop os iso for arm64, but they do have arm64 Debian repo. So I just took DGX os (what Nvidia ships on the device), added the pos os “releases” repo, and installed cosmic-session. It works like a charm and provides a super useful tiling experience out of the box. This is replacing my M3 Pro as my daily driver and I’ve been pretty happy with it. I recently upgraded to an ultrawide monitor and find the Cosmic UX to be hands down better than what I get in the Mac with it. If you want a Linux desktop with the productivity boost of a tiling window manager with a low learning curve, it’s pretty good.
- bikelang 10mo agoJust as an FYI - I just looked at the download page and Pop 24.04 now has an official arm64 ISO (including Arm w/ Nvidia)
- JojoFatsani 10mo agoPopOS 20/22 was the first "as good as mac" desktop linux experience IMO. Didn't really need to improve on it from my POV since Chrome and Steam and Proton apps worked in it just great. I'm doing the upgrade now, I hope I don't regret it.
- lioeters 10mo agoSame here. Up-thread someone said the upgrade was flawless. I'm crossing my fingers.
- tracker1 10mo agoBeen running Cosmic releases since the later alphas and through the beta cycle without issue... will update in the next few days to full release. Looking forward to it. There are a couple less than ideal edges IMO, but it's gotten to be a very solid experience. I've been really happy with Pop+Cosmic myself. I appreciate that they keep the kernel more current than upstream Ubuntu as well.
- veidr 10mo agoI've been waiting so long for this DE, but as a longtime KDE user who really doesn't like GNOME, GNOME is literally the only DE on Linux that can do Windows/Mac-equivalent remote desktop on Wayland. COSMIC isn't yet close to a solution for remote desktop, so I expect to have to wait a few more years. (T_T)
- jojosbuddy 10mo agoBeen using Ubuntu 24.10 on my ASUS 2in1 w/touchscreen and just swapped to this thinking it will be smooth like my desktop. Well Ubuntu24.10 was way more predictable. PopOS issues: explicit sleep will not come out of sleep w/o a hard reboot (hold power 25sec). Lid works at least. touchscreen: no auto virtual keyboard, pressing a system icon just highlights them (vs pulldown menu) flipping to 2in1 tent mode, no rotation not set up. no drivers for WiFi7 (ubuntu had it). natural scrolling works on touch, doesn't work on mouse pad...well it doesn't work basically. Going to submit bugs, maybe heading back to Ubuntu as I want this laptop to be my new dev machine (needs to be solid).