Desktop reactions?

Desktop Environments Cosmic
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We needed a first post, thanks Bryan!
So, if you’ve taken the time to try out Cosmic in either a full installation or a live ISO, let us know what you think. Perhaps this would be of use to help others decide if it’s worth their while.

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Though it seems strange, I decided to post my own reactions under the main vs inside the topic.
Ok, I’m utterly fascinated by Cosmic. Primarily for the tiling environment coexisting in easy friendship with a floating desktop environment.
I’ve used sway/hyprland/etc for tiling environments before, but never totally fallen in love with them. My main stay has been KDE, for the rich feature set. However, tiling environments have a definite draw (letting the WM control window placement/size/etc), but while great for customization, you need to do a whole lot more to make a WM feel like home and can’t immediately sit down and get started doing productive things, thus lending itself to the meme of creating an environment perfect for desktop ricing vs work. I haven’t been happy enough with Plasma’s tiling to use it either though.
Cosmic seems to toe the middle ground for me, and while it could use some more features, I’m quite drawn to it. There are still issues (I had one this morning with Libreoffice splash being stuck as a ‘open window’ vs dismissed), but they’re fairly minor (so far). And I believe most will be addressed in the near future as a great concentration of users will be having eyes on due to PopOS promoting Cosmic to the stable desktop.

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It is too similar to Gnome, don’t like Gnome, used v2 for years, v3 is not for me.

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Same. I know System 76 put a LOT of work into cosmic, but it feels like a tweaked Gnome more than a new DE.

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I had a vanilla Arch VM with Cosmic and I thought it was a unique DE. It’s similar to Gnome, but also NOT like Gnome just on the tiling function. I nuked the Arch VM, and am installing PopOS in its place to play with the new features.

I’m cautiously optimistic that it’ll turn into a great DE, but I’ll still rely on KDE Plasma as a daily-driver for now.

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Yes, well it’s only natural since POP_OS has used a Gnome based environment for years, that their DE would end up like Gnome (and thus familiar to their users), while trying to avoid all the bad things about Gnome (lack of customization, extension breaking ecosystem,etc).
I don’t like Gnome at all, but I like Cosmic…however, everyone has different tastes and needs.

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These reactions are all somewhat true. I feel most of them but I also do like the fact that it’s different enough and being totally re-written tweaks my interest. I’ve never been a Gnome fan ever but I will say also that I actually like the setup that EOS has for Gnome. So Cosmic will probably end up on one of my computers because I’ve gotten away from distro hopping but I can only have so many KDE desktops.

Installing it from instructions on the Github page gives a successful install without any issues.

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It’s at an early stage. It feels very basic and I’m pretty sure there are many changes under the hood but the experience from a user view didn’t really change that much in the last month.

I find it interesting and feel excited about it, but for me personally it is still to early to give it a shot as a daily driver.

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Quite frankly, I would wait for COSMIC to mature a bit.
So far, I liked the idea. The desktop itself is middle ground between a fully-blown DE and a tiling WM.
But it’s too early to tell if it’s any good for a daily driver…

I read somewhere that “COSMIC is what GNOME wishes it could be” and I can’t agree more on that.

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Actually that’s the problem though. The GNOME dev’s have their ideas and aren’t really caring if the users have some that are different…so GNOME doesn’t wish it could be anything else other than what it is.

And for Cosmic, ‘Eyes on’ is what it needs. So that issues are found and suggestions made.

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I can’t speak for System76 intentions, but my guess is they are building a Desktop which will be feature parity with Pop!OS with the ability to highly customize the desktop to mimic some functional components of other Desktops (KDE/Gnome). I think they have made a significant start (I started testing in combination with Gnome 49.1.

Off the top of my head the reason I am attracted to it is my issues with Gnome have more to do with the way the Gnome organization operates and not the functionality. I have tried to escape Gnome to KDE, but it was too customizable and you just never knew when something would break. When you just want things to work dependably (remember I notice lots of things as QA) well sometimes consistently boring Gnome is what you end up with (where I shut off all extensions).

With Cosmic, just go to Settings > Desktop and see how easy it is to tune your top bar and dock. This is what System try to get out of Gnome (where they would force them down the path of using extensions). The same extensions which often broke when Gnome put out a release. Now Gnome could have added these features, but instead forced people to continue to use extensions and threw the burden to 3rd party developers.

Tiling can be turned on individually per virtual desktop was very cool. The only thing I did not see is the ability to pick a template for the layout.

Cosmic has applets (like extensions) which lets you add tailor the top bar and dock.

I did notice that while I was playing around with the settings that Cosmic was holding onto 500 mb more RAM (16 GB total) compared to Gnome 49.1.

So I think Cosmic is not ready for me, but I intend to keep it around to play with. My guess is they need 2 years to get to around 80% parity with Gnome. And at that point I will fully leave Gnome.

Custimizable Desktop

Development coming to Cosmic

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The nice way of saying why they built Cosmic:

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This is how I would describe it, installed on another machine earlier and while it is ok ran across several bugs very early (If I encrypt the disk it doesn’t recognise the password, audio was constantly just cutting out if I tried to raise the volume and a few more that weren’t so bad, they where more to do with the user needed to log in and out to work) I’m sure they will be on top of this stuff though and will continue using it on this machine and hope for some fixes soon.

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Think we should do them a solid and get in there and file bugs. Do what we can to help them out (because KDE and Pop!OS are all about user engagement).

Bugs on system running latest Cosmic with Gnome 49:

  1. When choosing other Icon packages which are not Pop!OS\Cosmic\Breeze, the preview of icons disappear.

  2. Cosmic File will open a separate instance when connecting to remote file share.

  3. Qogir icon pack is missing icons for Cosmic Desktop:
    -Power Button
    -Wifi or Network Button

  4. The application in the system tray will sporadically stop working (so far VLC and Steam).

  5. Unable to launch individual applications on dock using keyboard shortcut (E.g. SUPER 1 to launch first item on the dock).

6.Screen dumps being generated when taking screen shots with cosmic-screensh:

  • Need to see if the trigger is Cancelling screenshot or taking screenshot to clipboard.
Dec 15 10:31:46 mani systemd-coredump[16123]: [🡕] Process 16115 (cosmic-screensh) of user 1000 dumped core.

                                              Stack trace of thread 16115:
                                              #0  0x00007f1105c9890c n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x9890c)
                                              #1  0x00007f1105c3e3a0 raise (libc.so.6 + 0x3e3a0)
                                              #2  0x00007f1105c2557a abort (libc.so.6 + 0x2557a)
                                              #3  0x000055ed8839eeba n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1baeba)
                                              #4  0x000055ed883767e9 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1927e9)
                                              #5  0x000055ed8839f2b9 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1bb2b9)
                                              #6  0x000055ed8836bc39 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x187c39)
                                              #7  0x000055ed88376829 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x192829)
                                              #8  0x000055ed88375d36 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x191d36)
                                              #9  0x000055ed8839f388 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1bb388)
                                              #10 0x000055ed8839f2e9 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1bb2e9)
                                              #11 0x000055ed8839f2dc n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1bb2dc)
                                              #12 0x000055ed88332c1f n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x14ec1f)
                                              #13 0x000055ed8833cbe5 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x158be5)
                                              #14 0x000055ed8828006c n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x9c06c)
                                              #15 0x000055ed88276476 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x92476)
                                              #16 0x000055ed88283046 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x9f046)
                                              #17 0x000055ed882ee381 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x10a381)
                                              #18 0x00007f1105c27635 n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x27635)
                                              #19 0x00007f1105c276e9 __libc_start_main (libc.so.6 + 0x276e9)
                                              #20 0x000055ed88260ed5 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x7ced5)

                                              Stack trace of thread 16116:
                                              #0  0x00007f1105d1872d syscall (libc.so.6 + 0x11872d)
                                              #1  0x000055ed883a8bab n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1c4bab)
                                              #2  0x000055ed883b1ee2 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1cdee2)
                                              #3  0x000055ed883b5564 n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1d1564)
                                              #4  0x000055ed883a92bf n/a (/usr/bin/cosmic-screenshot + 0x1c52bf)
                                              #5  0x00007f1105c9698b n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x9698b)
                                              #6  0x00007f1105d1a9cc n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x11a9cc)
                                              ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64
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I don’t think it’s the Cosmic issue, rather the icon theme’s – I believe it is Qogir’s dev team task to fix it.

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Mine has the Wifi/Network Icons and Power button and eos-qogir-icon

Edit: Not having any issues with comic.

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I had a few issues with icons but it seems to be related to the flatpak packages that had it as when I installed the repo version they showed.I am yet to try cosmic on here or another distro.

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Thanks for the feedback. I am not suggesting I would file the icon issue as a cosmic bug to fix. I might make them aware of the non ideal results. But ultimate it should go back to the maintainer of the icon pack.

On a high level I am mentioning things I am seeing just in case other have similar experiences which I can input into the bug.

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Hi Rick,

I am also using ‘eos-qogir-icons’ (latest version).

❯ pacman -Qi eos-qogir-icons
Name            : eos-qogir-icons
Version         : 2025.02.15-3
Description     : A colorful design icon theme for linux desktops
Architecture    : any
URL             : https://github.com/vinceliuice/Qogir-icon-theme
Licenses        : GPL3
Groups          : None
Provides        : qogir-icon-theme
Depends On      : None
Optional Deps   : None
Required By     : welcome
Optional For    : None
Conflicts With  : qogir-icon-theme  qogir-icon-theme-git
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 37.91 MiB
Packager        : manuel <manuel@endeavouros.com>
Build Date      : Wed 19 Nov 2025 04:05:15 PM
Install Date    : Wed 19 Nov 2025 10:32:27 PM
Install Reason  : Installed as a dependency for another package
Install Script  : No
Validated By    : Signature

Example using Cosmic Icons:

image

Example using Qogir-Dark Icons:

This better demonstrates what I am seeing. I suspect Rick is running KDE vs I am running Gnome?