Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment
blog.system76.com
blog.system76.com
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.
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.
- 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)
(which I use on top of Pop!_OS, oddly enough).
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.
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.
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!
They show icons for Steam, Chrome, Firefox, Zoom, etc... Does that mean they are maintaining their own fork of those applications built for COSMIC?
The version of Chrome (for example) that Google distributes uses GTK which is GNOME, no? So I was wondering if System76 forked that and made a version that uses the COSMIC API.
I do not care much about "look and feel"
It benefits you when an application doesn't do surprising things. Even basic things like clicking in an edit control, it's better for you if that results in the same outcome across all apps (stuff like does it select all text? does it place the caret at the end?).
Even for command line apps, consistency is good (see https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...). Are options specified with a hyphen? Two hyphens? A slash? Are lists delimited with comma or semi-colon or something else?
Qt4 and Qt5 applications are unsupported, but IgKh/CuteCosmic has a Qt6 Platform Theme that integrates with the cosmic theme system and applies that theming to Qt6 applications. Though it won't work in 24.04 because most of the KDE/Qt apps in this release are based on Qt5, and the version of Qt6 is too old.
I thought this was pretty obvious.
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.
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.
I did have to get a reasonably new Gnome, Ubuntu LTS had one that was broken with fractional scaling.
Please just give virtual desktops first class support and lets forget about the Activities experiment. Most users hate it.
The attitude regarding it is about as bad as Gnome forcing Overview on everyone, refusing to provide a first party dock or lightweight launcher. Despite almost every distro and 95% of Gnome users immediately installing Dash to Dock.
What appears is an unholy amalgamation of a launcher, a workspace strip, a window overview, workspace peeking, and a dock.
Worse yet is that every time you go in or out of this overview, an animation plays, making things fly and animate everywhere constantly, whenever you want to take any action.
Whenever someone points out to Gnome developers that most people only want to open a launcher to type "52*93" or find a contact, that they just want to mouse over a dock to have a lightweight way to see if an application is open (and to switch to it), they get irate and tell you their vision is vastly superior.
Gnome could be pretty great if the developers their attitude to their users wants and the feedback on their issue tracker wasn't extreme snark and "actually we are right". Even if clear UI defects are pointed out, no, in fact they are right.
The Gnome peoples also frustrate any attempt at improving Wayland at a more rapid clip.
There is a reason why Valve went with KDE. KDE has its own set of problems, but at least they are receptive, cooperative and friendly. I genuinely hope Valve puts enough money into KDE that Gnome with its high and mighty attitude gets completely railroaded.
Along comes a Luddite and puts icons on it, totally ruining its beauty. For fsck's sake! Just No.
Thankfully, along comes GNOME and it just says No.
I agree.
Took me some time and asking in their irc-channel, but actually the basic setup is super-simple, and was too 'intuitive' for an old greybeard like me :-)
You right-click on the launcher icon, or the systray and "Add or Manage Widgets", then a window appears where you can pick all sorts of widgets in a bar to the left, which then appear in a subwindow to the right. You just want the Pager, and remove any instances of that Activities Pager thing, if it is/they are already present(because you can have multiple instances in different places(leftover from earlier tries, maybe)).
What I didn't get was that you can pick that pager-widget from the subwindow, and move it anywhere you want it to in that whole taskbar-panel(outside the edit window!), by holding the mousebutton down(drag), until it is exactly where you want it, and then releasing the mouse-botton(drop).
And then "Exit Edit Mode" in the still open window, which then closes. That's all there is to it.
(Similar to how you customize the appearance of Firefox)
From then on you can configure the pager by right clicking onto it, and virtual desktops in system settings like you want them. Maybe having it appear larger with some key-combo, or whatever.
During the time I cursed it, I discovered the activity thing isn't really active anymore, they just let it there for the people who want/like it, meanwhile the real virtual desktop thing didn't get much attention, but that may change in the future?
Hopefully?
Then activate and position the Pager like I described above, and after that how it presents them.
Nonetheless I'm thinking that could be more integrated, and the pager could be larger, when howering the mouse pointer over it.
I don't think this is true. Speaking as an upstream dev, we've never been very happy with Activities, either.
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/issues/35
Clearly you've had some interaction that upset you and I apologize for that, but I've never come across any Plasma dev who felt we nailed that one (and I wrote large parts of the panels, the menu, the icon desktop, etc.) I was genuinely surprised by your comment.
It's funny to see the two things that prompted the discussion (naming desktops and per-desktop wallpapers) come up heavily under that issue you linked.
Like I mentioned in another comment, I like that KDE devs are much more constructive than Gnome devs. In that issue you can clearly see you're asking users to rephrase their feedback so it is more useful.
With Gnome, I've for example opened an issue for something that isn't according to visual HIG practices. Implementing this would lead to more visual clarity and it would look better to boot. I got told that no, actually they know better. It was pretty clear that they thought that if code or design originated from their shop, there could be no (better) alternative.
When I linked and gave mockup examples I got snarked, and when I snarked back I immediately got dressed down for rule violation by some mod figure that completely ignored their dev's initial snark. Just very, very unpleasant people.
Apologies for the rant haha. Anyway, thanks for linking that and for responding!
Now that SteamOS is officially released, I just use KDE. Maybe COSMIC will be better at touch eventually, but since it's a traditional laptop company, I'm not sure.
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.
Install GWE or Lact and you should be able to tweak the fan curves manually from Linux.
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.
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.
This makes it very difficult for Wayland to evolve in a way that people want, as Gnome is the biggest player by user count.
The youtuber Brodie Robertson does regularly updated on all the discussion and proposals and why are the moving forward or not moving forward. And what the issue with the processes are:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjzjpJ02WDOsPPtwUqqE...
If that's not good enough, you can find all the issues with the discussion, but be ready for the same issues to be discussed endlessly in a cycle for years and years.
Gnome is not the only issue but they are on of the biggest. The refuse to implement certain things even when pretty much every other system on the planet both linux and non linux support it. And those are things that many applications relay on. And because of the way the standardization process works it was for years really hard to get many things into the standard leading to basic things missing and applications having inconstant support or apps that are just broken.
Having more voting members and more members with some real money and development power and more composites has already changed the dynamics.
Also we need to take into account that many open source projects eventually run out of steam, which is what I see as most likely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Cf. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/kde44...
EDIT: I refer to this effect: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eOrvbaKz5H4
It is called magnification effect.
But that's a weird line to draw for which shells you find unacceptable.
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.
COSMIC isn't yet close to a solution for remote desktop, so I expect to have to wait a few more years. (T_T)