Most things can be solved with Gnome Shell extensions, but I have to admit that having to install 5-6 extensions for basic DE features, like managing where notifications show up, makes it easier to switch to something else.

I don't understand, on Gnome when you maximize a window (drag to top) you can still see the time.

Now if you're talking about complete fullscreen, like when watching a video, I' don't understand the use case. Either you want fullscreen or you don't?

I'll probably be switching over too, from sway, once Cosmic is out of beta. I love tiling, and the only thing I miss while using sway is the lack of a single integrated settings application. It's possible to couple together individual apps to manage Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Monitors and everything else, but a single settings app is much better than babysitting a dozen separate ones.

"Right now if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is."

This drives me crazy. I'm in a flow, distraction free via the full screen and break it to see what date or time it is. Even on a multi monitor setup. Which usually ends up meaning I get pulled out of that flow because I see a new notification on some other app or because I grabbed my phone to check that info.

I accidentally upgraded to the alpha (identical laptops, picked the wrong one and jumped into it) and it's been very rough and not just around the edges. Can't wait to go to beta, hopefully this addresses most of the issues. At least even the alpha was rock solid in terms of stability, so definitely fine for daily use but I didn't enjoy the user experience.

> [in Gnome] if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is.

I know in FOSS there's a ton of enthusiastic and just non professional work (nor there should be expectations of it), but still... I'd hope the user-facing interface for an OS (or any UI, really) should be designed by people with a background on design, which doesn't seem to be the case at all with this idea. It's another example of why most of us developers should not be even touching the world of laying stuff out visually :)

I'm using niri with quickshell now and it has a similar feel, as quickshell implements many features in a unified way as in Gnome Shell.

In niri you can have the bar on all monitors, and you can also configure a window to fill the available space and have it "think" it's full screen while the top bar is still visible (see the toggle-windowed-fullscreen setting).

    git clone https://git.outfoxxed.me/quickshell/quickshell

    sudo apt install cmake qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-shadertools-dev  spirv-tools pkg-config  libcli11-dev qt6-wayland-private-dev qt6-svg-dev ninja-build qt6-svg-plugins libjemalloc-dev wayland-protocols libdrm-dev libqtqmlmodels-dev 'qt6-*-private-dev' libpam0g-dev

    Do not install ddcutil: it prevents detection of the external monitor except if the monitor is turned off and on again.

    cmake -GNinja -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCRASH_REPORTER=OFF

    ignore warnings `The qml plugin 'xxx' is a dependency of 'quickshell'...`

    cmake --build build
    cmake --install build

You mean like GNOME used to be usable, before the big rewrite.

If you don't like tinkering, the likes of i3 and sway are not for you.

As of just a couple years ago, I was able to run the latest Pop on even a late 2011 MBP. It's the only distribution I found that cleanly handled the wifi stack, display, and power management, although it took some tweaking for power management in particular to work right.

Hello! I have a mid-2014 Macbook Pro and I couldn't get my wifi working with PopOS. Do you have a webpage, or set of commands you could share?

I guess the gnome version will be available until cosmic moves out of beta. That might still take some time.

I have an old 2019 MBP, now I am tempted to try Pop on it. Does the external displays work?

Same - I got tired of waiting and moved to KDE on Fedora. Zero complaints and regrets. People said that Fedora is too bleeding edge and things break but fingers crossed, it has been an awesome experience.

Moving from an LTS to a non LTS is not a great thing if you're after stability.

I feel you. It’s not the worst I’ve seen by a long shot but it’s still not “right” and as a result would find it irritating to use.

Some of the whitespace can be configured in the settings. I am not sure if the problems you mention can be adjusted there though.

I like the function but it does all feel just a bit off and half backed. Im relatively hopeful it'll get there.

There has been a UI/UX designer since day one.

Maybe it's just media bias, but I have seen interest and work for GNOME really drop off the last couple of years. You could see something cool being worked on every couple weeks (at least reported on).

I remember this goal to change the window management to be more like a tiling WM (similar to Niri) that seems to have faded away. I recently moved from GNOME to KDE, one reason being KDE adopting Wayland protocols quicker and constant performance issues with GNOME.

I think it’s related to what is mentioned in this blog post.

https://blog.system76.com/post/closing-in-on-a-cosmic-alpha

> The official release of COSMIC DE will debut on Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS, which will be based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Running and testing on 24.04 gets us closer to a final, polished release.

It seems it’s because Cosmic development is being based on Ubuntu 24.04, so it’s more about that base than the date of the Pop_OS release.

I've been on Pop for about 5 years, through several major upgrade cycles, and it's nearly flawless. The bundled Pop!Shop app store is the notable turd in the pool, but it's optional. It has a system restore partition (that I've never had to use), boot-the-previous-kernel (that I've used once), full-disk encryption by default, so many little things that I appreciate. Everything Just Works, on both my old Thinkpad and my new Framework.

When I have had trouble (e.g. stuck updates, other apt woes, Bluetooth weirdness), System76's help pages have been great. If they don't cover it, I just search +Ubuntu and the advice I find almost always works.

I have no idea what WM or DE or anything I'm running, it's just here and it stays out of the way so there's no situation where I would be confronted by having to know its name. That's a bit annoying (I did finally find out that "Files" is actually "Nautilus", which helped when searching to understand some behaviors) in that it limits my ability to meaningfully search for, or change, these details, but I think if it was a big deal, I'd figure it out. It's just fine.

That I can run an OS for 5 years and not know my WM or DE, is pretty cool, IMHO.

I switched from Ubuntu shortly after they started using snap everywhere (so around 20.04?).

I really like it, everything mostly just works well without any hassles.

I'm keen to try out Cosmic, although I would have preferred that they had a Gnome based 24.04 release last year rather than making everything wait for it.

But I'm still a happy user. Just hope they stick to the 2 year LTS cadence in future.

I have been using PopOS for a long time. Its kind of like Ubuntu with some of the dumb Ubuntu stuff removed. Their PopShell for Gnome was just far, better then normal Gnome.

I have been following Cosmic and using it quite a bit. For alpha it was great. I have been daily driving it off and on and its mostly pretty good. I would say I prefer it over vanilla Gnome.

So its my plan to keep using it, I have no intention of going to Ubuntu again.

I have been using Pop!_OS on my old Intel-based Dell laptop for over 5 years. Now, I'm alternating between my M1-powered Mac and Pop!_OS as my daily driver. Before, I used Ubuntu for over 10 years and tested various distributions.

Pop!_OS is probably the best Ubuntu/Debian derivative I've used. It's buttery smooth for everything I need it to be. I haven’t encountered any bugs or major problems that are strictly related to Pop!_OS. It feels like Ubuntu, without slow Snaps (Pop!_OS is Flatpak-centered), Canonical ads (Ubuntu Pro, MicroK8s...), and with a slightly modified GNOME desktop environment.

If I had to find the worst thing about Pop!_OS, it's a negligible issue stemming from muscle memory after using macOS. The Super+Left/Right Arrow keys on Pop!_OS are used to switch between applications, while on macOS they are meant to move the text cursor to the start or end of a word. I haven't found the option to disable it yet.

> I'm weary to try a new OS that has fewer users

"Weary" means "very tired". I think you mean "wary" -- nervous, hesitant, scared.

"I am wary of trying a new OS..."

It was, for me, one of the best experiences for linux desktop. In a very practical way, it was popos that got me off of windows at home. There are some issues, but they seem to mostly revolve about me getting opinionated over what something 'should' look like ( so I occasionally try other distros ).

It is less bloated than ubuntu ( but still has heavily embedded stuff that is hard to remove like accessibility -- the amount of times kid pressed key combination to turn on voicing each key was super annoying ). Store is slow af. But all of those are smaller things.

edit: note about the store

They’ve got a decent live USB version that runs their installer if you want to try it out short-term, though obviously that doesn’t really give you a real sense of the day-to-day. One thing that really impressed me about the live distro was that it worked out of the box with the propriety nvidia drivers.

Haven't tried the latest stuff yet but I've been on PopOS for a few years now and it's pretty seamless.

Just to be clear, the news here is that Pop OS now uses the Cosmic DE (which just reached beta).

Unlike the previous Pop OS DE, Cosmic DE is not tied to a particular distro. For example, there's an official Fedora Spin [1].

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/cosmic

No snaps by default. So it fixes Canonical's folly.

Which bugs in particular? I was thinking of installing it on another drive.

The number of PRs for Cosmic you shared is very misleading. The parent repo is full of submodules, so if you want to present the number of PRs to Cosmic as a whole, you need to count the PRs for each repo. For example, the software library app alone has more than double (3/182) the number you presented (6/90).

> Omarchy has some how managed to attract 134/782 open/closed PRs [1] vs 6/90 for CosmicDE (since 2022) [2]

You're linking to the PRs on one of many Cosmic repositories, the top-level wrapper repository. The total number of PRs on all Cosmic repositories it includes is far larger than Omarchy.

This is fine, but Hyprland/Omarchy is a different paradigm than you average Gnome/KDE distro... As much as I would love to love Omarchy, it is just not my cup of tea, I just like to operate on windows floating everywhere, and get pissed that I can't find what I'm after and Super+Tab two full rounds before landing where I want to be, I just like that, I thrive in this chaos... I settled for Bluefin which is by far the best developer experience I have ever had in my life, it is just the perfect distro for coming from either Windows or macOS...

The reality is that hyprland is not a desktop environment and, even with a few dozen extra packages installed, it doesn't cover even a quarter of the use cases something like KDE does.

For many people that's fine, but you're comparing apples and oranges.

I agree with this.

However, I have a Starlabs convertible tablet, which I have just not gotten comfortable with on Arch.

I've considered going the sxmo route, but the volume buttons aren't that good. So I'm thinking maybe KDE plasma? Maybe the hardware is just not good enough for me to be happy.

There really isn't a solid arch config, to my knowledge, on tablets. I'd love to have the scriptability of Omarchy on something that worked well with an OSK and touchscreen. It may be hard to do this, however, as elements like "Activate OSK when text box selected" might be reliant on DE properties. Im not sure

A UNIX graphical system without a proper developer stack, with frameworks for all layers, means everyone does their little thing, the people that can't be bothered just ship Electron or something just as bad, and for all user purposes to manage windows, and a couple of xterms, one could just be using FVWM from 1994.

Which is how I look to most of these new desktops.

Omarchy is mainly composed of configuration files which makes it a lot easier to interact with.

> curated blank slate

On approachability, I think with COSMIC the use of Rust is going to negatively impact it in that area. I don’t think a scripting language needs to be used, but something more C-like in syntax is a must. Rust is intimidating looking to those who don’t know it which is likely to bottleneck contributions.

Universal Blue has this too

I can’t say much about fedora But pop os is not bleeding edge or glitzy. It’s kind of a workhorse distribution. I like Pop!os, despite its strange name.

I’ve used it pre installed at work/ home and installed on a work machine to get the nvidia card working after being unable with the original Ubuntu OS. Pop is basically Ubuntu so software that works on Ubuntu works on pop. It’s pretty bullet proof.

The “pop shop” (oddly named installer program where you don’t spend money) has a lot of the open source applications with one click install.

I think both Fedora and Popos can be run via usb stick if you want to try them out.

Works in KDE just fine

The desktop is literally not broken at all.

This is already standardized, there's already multiple implementations, and it works in all major desktop environments.

This is a brand new DE that just got out of alpha.

Its not gonna implement all protocols, because duh. Let's not be melodramatic.

This happens literally every time something new happens on Linux. "Oh it's so fucked and broken and Linux sucks!!"

Okay, it's new. There are mature options. Use a mature option. This is how things have always worked for all ecosystems.

This is solved by using X11.

Yes, I didn't even know they didn't had a version based on the last LTS (that was release more than 1 year ago). Especially considering that they have a strong focus for developers, and developers in general wants the new-ish libraries otherwise things starts to break or just in general compatibility issue with newer programs or libraries that you may depend for work.

It does seems to me that it would be better to invest one more release cycle in Gnome before switching all efforts to their Cosmic DE. But good luck for the team nonetheless.

Reading through this thread, I've never been happier with macOS as my daily driver. I don't think or worry about my OS at all, other than being reminded on HN how terrible it is.

Don't both gnome and kde also have tiling support?

I hope it will make the space more interesting. Also with other projects using cosmic as a base to build on top.

I was running i3 on Arch before. Then, I moved to Gnome Shell and have been daily driving COSMIC for a couple months. I think you will like it. At least on Alpha there were a couple rough edges here and there, but no deal breakers for me.

I was using Manjaro i3 X11 for 3 years. A few months back I switched to Arch Hyprland Wayland and so far I am very happy with it. I use it for programming, video editing and gaming. No major inconveniences.

I really identify with this. I think the worst offender was KDE when I could [meta]+drag and move taskbar applets all around the screen like a regular window. Like you said it's understandable since there is a vast funding difference between windows/MacOS and the linux DEs but it is unfortunate.

Yes it does. We could argue if it’s update or upgrade, but I think it’s clear what you mean.

Yeah the version numbering is a mistake. They should version based on their release, not the underlying base.

Your comment could have been posted under almost ANY story on HN. "Why should we care about .... ?" In other words, it's a very low value comment as far as discussion goes. If you don't care about it move on, nobody said you had to care.

Because there are a number of existing frustrations with GNOME that can not be fixed in GNOME, because GNOME Foundation has their own specific vision, which not a lot of people like.

KDE is good but has its own flaws, and it's a different workflow

Pro-tip: These are inside thoughts, no need to comment, just have the thought and move along.

Who is "we". But to answer your question, it was created because System76 didn't find an existing DE that met their needs even after extensive changes to them.

    Downvotes

As someone else mentioned, it's because it's a very low value comment.

It provides nothing to the discussion except a bad attitude.

It's clear from the fact you're asking it you don't about the topic. Go investigate Cosmic desktop, if you don't know why we should care about it, and you can find out for yourself whether or not it's worth caring about.

If you find out that you don't think this is something that should be discussed, don't up vote the thread and move on, simple as that. If the thread gets many upvotes anyways, you can infer people care about it, even if you don't. Comments like this only pollute the discussion and make everything feel negative.

It's a big part of the reason the internet has become such a drag, that people always feel the need to comment every little thing, even if it only adds negative value.

I personally care because it’s Rust based and that means I’m likely to participate in development and feel comfortable with the tooling.

As a broader picture — it matters since the creator is System76 which sells laptops and desktops and moves towards giving a full Linux on Desktop polished experience. You really can only go so far if you are not deeply involved in the DE yourself.

p.s.: your question is very legit imo, don’t get the downvotes

Perfectly valid question. I remember Ubuntu getting lost down a rabbit hole of their touch screen desktop wm that had soo many warts. I guess if you don't have the power to steer a project you fork or try something else. Then realise you neither have the UI chops or technical finesse to pull something off. Windows has been atrocious UI wise since Win 8, failed to pull anything off cohesively and just left a mess. Much like Ubuntu, but with what you would expect a well funded dedicated UI team.

UIs generally sick in Linux with the exception of the shell. And even that could be sexed up hugely.

The best thing about AI tools for me is that they make up for shortcomings in the UI and have become a very important go-between for me.

Should be new. They released some showcase videos a few hours ago [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMJpPasSN0M&list=PL0bXfFQsIC...

The version number is 24.04 because it's based on the latest Ubuntu LTS.

They have delayed 24.04 to wait for Cosmic to be ready. They push new kernels to the older release as well.

Interesting that a normal, justified question receives this many downvotes...