With the Cosmic DE going to Alpha 7 and probably become Beta according to the Cosmic devs, i was curious if anyone here will give a try and match a space themed distro like EndeavourOS with a Cosmic themed DE like… well, you get the point! XD
As for me, I don’t think my 14 year old laptop will like a Wayland DE that much (I’m on EndeavourOS Xfce) but i also have a more recent Thinkpad running PopOS and I might switch to Cosmic first and try the meme worthy EndeavourOS Cosmic DE after.
Try it - I have an old ThinkPad here running Arch with Gnome/Wayland - works great. And I also installed Cosmic (latest update) on it - looks good and runs smoothly.
I also checked an old MacBook Pro 2011 (so 14 years old) with Live-Fedora-System (running Wayland!). Runs well and I think of installing that.
That is very interesting to know. I had the misconception that Wayland would be unstable on older systems. The “joual” Quebec slang has a great expression when someone admit he’s wrong: “J’étais dans les patates!” (Litteral translation: I was in the potatoes)
That being said, I will give a try this weekend and thanks for the input!
Guiohm
Its getting there. I have been testing and providing feedback to them since early alpha. But there are certainly still some bugs, but it depends more on your use and setup. Vertical monitors can cause some real issues and there are some crashes in certain settings. But, it is close to what I would consider beta level, which they did say this would be the last alpha version.
I would personally not use it as a daily driver, but it runs well overall.
one observation with Cosmic and Gnome: if Cosmic is installed (from AUR), I get the Cosmic-Files-App when double-click the Filesystem-icon on Gnome desktop - somehow this default setting is overwritten by Cosmic. Strange thing.
@lenko
I should have mentioned, joe’s instructions are for a new install using the Mercury NEO ISO.
I did a fresh install of Cosmic on one of my test computers.
Most of my complaints on Alpha 6 have been fixed in Alpha 7.
First thing I did was install the following Plasma apps I must have:
Kate 248 MiB
Konsole 12 MiB
Dolphin 115 MiB
Total 375 MiB
Also installed vlc.
So I now have a Cosmic / Plasma hybrid.
I am impressed and really liking it. Can’t wait for Beta.
I am also considering Cosmic considering that it is RUST based. Have not taken the plunge though. How is it? Any issues that were identified or some common user scenarios not working? Is it as polished as say KDE or Cinnamon is? Does it lag while playing videos/audio or using other productivity tools or developer tools? What is its typical memory consumption?
I haven’t noticed anything that is a show stopper yet. There are a few minor things, but all in all works well for my usage.
It is surprisingly close as far as Gnome compatibility. Dolphin, Kate, and Konsole all automatically took on the Cosmic theme and looked like any other Cosmic app. The only apps so far that did not take on the dark Cosmic theme were the Welcome screen and vlc.
Users who like to customize their fonts, colors, etc probably will not be happy with the customizability available.
You Tube videos play very well. Audio works well. But this is on a AMD Ryzen 7 5700 G. I am waiting for Archlinux ARM to offer a aarch64 version of Cosmic. Then I will make my final decision on Cosmic.
As an opinion, Cosmic has been usable by my standards since the early Alpha days. However, I’m aware there are missing features yet and I am in the pipeline for gaming ‘deficiencies’. As always, games push things farther than anything else, and there are considerable issues remaining. It seems to me unsuitable for gaming, but fine for most Linux native applications like LibreOffice, browsers, etc.
Also an opinion, it also started a little heavy on the resource utilization, but they did some optimization in Alpha 6, and it’s better. It’s still lighter than the GNOME parent
One thing that would be a showstopper for me would be the lack of possibility to set both the top bar and bottom dock to (always) autohide.
I can do it in GNOME, yes, with Dash to Panel, an extension, but I can do that. I can do that in KDE Plasma too, natively.
When I had tried POP long time ago, I couldn’t find any way to do this.
Specially on a laptop with a 14" screen I want all the screen for the applications and not for docks and bars. Even on a desktop with a larger size monitor, I would find it unnecessary that they would show all the time when I don’t need them.
Can this be done in the current state of Cosmic?
This is what I like to see when I log into my desktop, with Tilix set to autostart:
I did not check, but I’m virtually certain all panels and docks can be set to autohide,etc.
I’ll reboot in a bit and confirm that if no one else does.
Edit: Confirmed and works too!
I’m looking forward to trying it out again. My last go with it, it was clearly not feature complete. I really wish gnome would just incorporate the pop-tiling extension into gnome proper.
Have a nice day, y’all!
(Litteral translation: I was in the potatoes)
