I just tried out the COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) created and engineered by System76 (people who are behind POP!_OS). It was an incredible experience even though it was just a pre-alpha.

COSMIC was engineered virtually from the ground-up to be System76’s solution to move away from GNOME and onto their own tech stack. The entire DE is written in the Rust programming language utilizing the iced application framework with their in-house application library libcosmic (similar to how KDE uses Qt+Breeze+Frameworks or GNOME uses GTK + Libadwaita).

Impressions

If you’re familiar with POP!_OS 22.04’s take on GNOME, then the workflow is no different here with emphasis on features such as tiling, application dock, application launcher, universal search launcher and of course: auto-tiling.

One of the exclusive features of COSMIC is its 1st class support for custom theming on the fly. You’re allowed to theme the desktop in almost any way you can (even with nauseating colors) and the DE will adapt to your preferences.

It can even theme gnome apps! (I read other books dw)

Auto-tiling is also great to use, you can toggle specific windows to be floating or tiled.

Theme integration with Qt apps are a work in progress + some quirks of running COSMIC in a container with KDE. So far, I really enjoy how buttery smooth everything is (besides some pre-alpha stuttering), the entire desktop feels like a really cohesive experience. It has the efficiency of a tiling window manager but the convenience of a DE.

It has an overview!!! (super+w)

You can also stack windows on top of each other

Not everything is implemented (obviously) but just the promise of a DE that does tiling and window management like this has me sold.

How to try out COSMIC?

NixOS

There’s a flake

Fedora Atomic Desktop

You can use a universal blue image and rebase to that, it even includes options for having a fallback desktop environment of either GNOME or KDE as well.

Other

• Arch has an AUR package
• Fedora has a COPR repository
• Compile from source (instructions)

Note that this cannot be used in production: cosmic is pre-alpha software as well as needing to turn off SELinux.

Or wait until POP!_OS 24.04 is released with a stable version of COSMIC this summer. This has been my first time running COSMIC but when the stable version drops you bet I’m switching over (though no one can take away my Fedora atomic distro).

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