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.
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 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.
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMJpPasSN0M&list=PL0bXfFQsIC...
It still has some of that Gnome Shell feeling that I like but with many features I want that we'll never see in Gnome, like having the top bar on all screens. Right now if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is.
If they added independent workspaces per monitor I'll switch to it as soon as it gets out of beta.
Edit.
I just watched their workspace showcase video. We have independent workspaces per monitor [1]. Is this real life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rGXNNUoW8&list=PL0bXfFQsIC...
It's my main driver for software development, it was initially a dual boot system with windows, but I found that I could use Steam with very little configuration and could do all my gaming in linux(Cosmic DE/PopOS, I have a Nvidia GPU) as well. Works out of the box with Bigwig Studio and my Soundcard (Ultralite mk5)
I use a mix of the Cosmic store and nix for packages and programs.
I don't need to use windows ever again for anything and it makes me very happy.
I'm now leaning towards the Hyprland/Omarchy approach of starting with a curated blank slate that can be easily themed, customized and extended to suit where I wouldn't have to rely on big drop releases of a single organization for any missing/preferred functionality.
Even at its young age Omarchy has some how managed to attract 134/782 open/closed PRs [1] vs 6/90 for CosmicDE (since 2022) [2] which IMO speaks to the approachability and hackability of a scriptable DE and the community being built up around each.
Edit: as the Cosmic DE repo is made up of many submodules, they all have a lot more PRs/activity combined.
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.
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
I absolutely loved it. It is such a breath of fresh air. I previously used to run i3 and a bunch of other tooling around it I can't even remember. Setup always had some weird edge case or was weird to use. Gnome always felt very bloated and laggy.
I then tried sway because I wanted to see if Wayland was any better performance and was not very impressed, although it just might be a configuration issue, the out of the box experience was just not good. And I wasn't in the tinkering mood anymore.
I installed cosmic and everything just worked. It felt snappy, no weird lags, nice but not too slow animations, even a build in window manager that was close enough to i3 that I no longer need sway or i3.
Notification, Display Management, Login, Autolaunching apps, Window Management etc. everything finally feels like a full operating system the way I have never experienced linux before. Maybe Ubuntu or Mint came close, but those came with their own troubles.
BoredPositron•1h ago
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