You’ve heard about System76’s new COSMIC desktop environment and seen screenshots and video clips of it, but now it’s time to buckle up and take it for a test flight.
Yes, the first alpha of the COMSIC desktop environment has been released along with the alpha of Pop!_OS 24.04, allowing the brave and daring to simply download an ISO file, boot it up, and explore this Rust-based newcomer to the Linux desktop scene.
And what a desktop it is!
Pop!_OS 24.04 is based on the same technical foundations as Ubuntu 24.04, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
System76 applies a number of its own carefully considered modifications and customizations, opts for a newer Linux kernel and graphics drivers, ships a different software stack (no Snaps), and uses COSMIC’s new desktop environment, compositor, greeter, and toolkit.
I have been testing the Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha for almost a week with COSMIC. As an Alpha, it has bugs, quirks, missing and incomplete features, etc. But despite the Alpha tag, everything runs fine for daily driver use.
And that’s pretty incredible.
In just over two years, System76 engineers have built an entirely new desktop environment, compositor, UI toolkit, design system, core applications, and more from scratch using the Rust programming language.
Why Rust? System76 says they chose it for “its readability, stability, maintainability, and memory safety; many vulnerabilities in modern computers originate in system memory, and Rust makes it easy to write memory-safe code.”
However, Rust is a newer language and no major desktop environment has been built with it – yet – so System76’s engineers had to integrate features much further down the stack, such as compositing, text rendering, and so on.
It is this achievement that impresses me most about COSMIC. That System76 came out of nowhere The Feature level in a few years – who knows what improvements, features and enhancements they can add in a few years!
Of course, COSMIC takes center stage in Pop!_OS 24.04, where it replaces GNOME Shell and the many “Pop Shell” GNOME Shell extensions that previous versions of Pop!_OS used.
And the new Rust-based redesign of the Pop!_OS user experience closely follows the previous UX/UI.
This familiarity with the GNOME-based incarnation of the Pop Shell Experience is entirely design. Why fix something that isn’t broken? Instead, System76 has chosen to reimplement the core UX, but it’s no longer an “add-on” that can be extended, built on, and given new features.
Therefore, COSMIC looks almost identical: dock at the bottom, bar at the top, ability to enable automatic window splitting, an OSD app picker, text-based app launcher, vertical workspaces, and so on.
COSMIC is Wayland-first, but you can run X11 apps via XWayland. The compositor supports fractional scaling, refresh rate, and NVIDIA hybrid graphics.
But COSMIC Epoch 1 also brings a lot of “new” things:
- New design language and themes
- Comprehensive topic system with shared topics
- Option for horizontal workspaces
- New panel applets and applet customization
- Improved dock and top bar customization
- New core apps including file manager, terminal, text editor
- New Settings App and Pop Store Software Hub
The theme features are quite extensive, but only affect COSMIC and its native apps that use the libcosmic/iced toolkit. Normal GTK/Qt/Electron/etc apps stick with the default Pop GTK theme (dark brown).
The COSMIC desktop is not exclusive to Pop!_OS. Today’s alpha release can be packaged and deployed by other distributions (in fact, there is talk of an official Fedora COSMIC release).
“With this alpha release, Linux developers and maintainers can use COSMIC to see what COSMIC can offer their users and help them achieve the user experience they want,” says the company.
“System76 is excited that the COSMIC integration takes Linux as a whole to a new level and offers all the amazing custom distributions and features that come with making UX creation more accessible.”
COSMIC Epoch 2 will be the second official version, due out in about a year, and will include additional features like touchscreen support. In the meantime, there’s a lot more to add to Epoch 1, including accessibility features, a frosted glass effect, and more settings.
Bugs, quirks, incomplete features, placeholder settings, and a general lack of quality assurance testing and polish are to be expected – it’s an alpha. Don’t make hasty judgements about COSMIC just because you’ve played with this version. You’ll have a fuller picture by the time the beta hits.
I’ve noticed a few quirks: some changes don’t persist or aren’t retained between boots. These include the keyboard layout (I add a UK layout, reboot and it’s gone), Bluetooth status (I turn it off, reboot and it’s back on), screen brightness (always at maximum on reboot) and so on.
Again, it’s alpha and these are not functional dealbreakers.
If you’re willing to stay up to date, be honest: download it, put it on a USB stick, and try it out (it works fine in a virtual machine, but it will run on real hardware).
Grab a copy and let me know what you think!
