System76 has now released COSMIC DE on PopOS!
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I think that it is now time for me to try Linux for the first time, now that COSMIC is officially out of alpha/beta and is fully stable. I am quite excited to use this after 3 long years of waiting. I just need the hardware for it.
Do share your experience with trying it here.. and you don’t need a powerful PC to try this, an older computer can also work. I hope you know that.
Good watch! Seems like a really well polished update. I found the line at the end where he says that Fedora is his distro of choice but Pop!_OS is his daily driver an interesting distinction.
Why would you start your Linux journey with something so new and thus likelier to encounter new bugs instead of a DE which is more established?
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Let the man live.. and be adventurous.
Also, it is stable and was just released. Pretty sure it is has no major problems from what I know.
I am very certain that COSMIC is pretty stable and complete by now. It has been in constant and active development for 3 years with multiple alpha and beta iterations before the stable release finally has arrived. System76 has a customer/user base that expect quality and stability on their hardware, so I don’t think that they would have jeopardized with a chance of losing their hardware customers who depend on their support by releasing an unstable and incomplete desktop environment without tons of testing and QA vetting to make sure it is ready enough for full release.
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Thanks man! Agreed! I really can’t wait to try this out. Fun fact: System76 is actually based in my home state of Colorado, so this also adds to why this makes me excited. I get to become a user of a Linux distribution that is being developed in the same place that I grew up and lived in.
May be a pilgrimage to their HQ and a tour is warranted?!
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What about COSMIC pushed you towards trying linux? Is it the local connection to System76?
Mainly, yes. Beside that, I also like that COSMIC adopts its own desktop UX paradigm rather than attempting to copy the macOS or Windows layouts like how other Linux desktops usually do by default (although I guess some could say it skews a bit towards the macOS side slightly). One of my primary interests in it is also that it is a hybrid between a tiling window manager while still being a full traditional desktop, so it conbined the best of both worlds. Regarding PopOS itself, I generally just find myself gravitating towards Ubuntu-based distributions, meaning good support, excellent Linux app compatibility, and a nice balance between being LTS and newer software. PopOS has also been known for as being one of the best for gaming and hardware compatibility.
Honestly I think it still looks a lot like GNOME, which makes sense as that’s what the system had been using until now, so probably a major point of reference.
Yeah I think the video was right to point out how desktop oriented (in a good way) this OS seems to be.
It will be interesting to see how people like gaming on Pop vs some of the recently popular distros like Bazzite and Cachy.
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Based on your experience, what is the minimum hardware configuration (RAM, CPU) required for COSMIC to function properly ?
On the other hand, can we run seamlessly any Gtk program on this DE ?
It’s whatever System76 themselves recommend. It’s not a lot. Even a 10 year old computer should be able to run it. So, have a look at the website as they make PopOS.
And how do you deem COSMIC compared with Budgie DE ? (I put into perspective these to DEs because Fedora has chosen them for its different atomic versions. I don’t think about the traditional DEs - GNOME, KDE -, and not even Sway that is quite a standalone DE)
N.B. : in the next Fedora release, Budgie 10.10 will work only with Wayland (like to COSMIC)
DE’s are highly preference based. You should use what you like. I generally prefer the original DE the distro comes in. For example: I prefer Fedora GNOME. And PopOS was GNOME too but is now COSMKIC and that’s what I’d use too.
It’s hard to compare each DE because the only difference primarily is how it looks and some of its functionality it may offer. It’s all the same otherwise.
Indeed, the main difference lies in their support for Wayland/X11 (even though there is a current trend toward Wayland for all the DEs)
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Unless you have particular reasons to not be on Wayland, it appears to be better. To me at-least. I mean, distros I use work well for me so that’s why I say that. But others may have different requirements.
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I wanted to try COSMIC, so I installed it via the command line on Fedora workstation. I am already loving it. Had to relearn a few keyboard shortcuts, customize, and debloat a little, but it is running great for me. Honestly running smoother and faster than gnome. The tiling window option is glorious. No more dealing with gnome opening my windows in all different sizes right on top of one another and never remembering to open them full screen. Search works well, and I assume is safer than the gnome search function since COSMIC is written in Rust, but someone please correct me if I’m wrong about that. Plenty of customization options, in my opinion, but not so endless like KDE (which I used to use and love). One thing that may seem trivial, but for me is not…when I give the shutdown command, it SHUTS DOWN right away. On gnome the shutdown and reboot commands would take a few seconds to initiate, which isn’t ideal if I want to kill my session immediately. There are some tiny formatting issues like inconsistent font size and scaling in the UI, but nothing major. I’ve seen a lot of people talking about glitches in COSMIC…well, this is linux, there are going to be some glitches (at least in all the versions of linux I’ve ever used)…but definitely no more than gnome, and COSMIC is much, much more functional (unless you add extensions to gnome, which I do not and do not recommend). Might switch out some of the default apps, but I’m going to try the default ones for a while first to see how I like them.
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Nice intro video… System76 is even offering a version for ARM processors… very cool.