From what I saw Cosmic has a lot of potential and looks pretty sleek too, right now I’m using KDE it’s a great desktop, but now that I have a second monitor it randomly crashes on me, I think I’ll switch to Cosmic when it reaches beta.
I’m just afraid it’s gonna be another 2 years before it’s ready for everyday use
2 years is nothing to a Linux user lol
It took me longer than that to figure out how to get out of Vim
I feel like the official mascot of vim should be a mime trapped in an imaginary box lol
If it only 2 year I can wait XD
That’s my plan. I’m back on Gnome until feature parity.
That could be a longer wait because Gnome (hopefully) wont be standing still during that time.
But they have historically moved pretty damn slow
deleted by creator
2 years is not that much
Not in the long view it wouldn’t be that bad but we’ve seen other projects take so many years. Look how long it’s taken Wayland.
Yep. I stupidly thought I could use it on my work laptop. Big nope, I had to go back after 2 hours.
It has great potential, but it’s still far from being ready… 😔
I agree
I’ve been using it as my main for months. Even as an Alpha, it’s very stable. That being said, it’s missing quite a few features that a lot of people would consider a requirement. So “ready” will heavily depend on your requirements
Exactly. I could use it as my daily if the settings panel was more complete.
Yeah I’ve been running it in one of my little VM specimen jars for a while now and I don’t remember it crashing or doing anything weird so far. Pretty good for a first alpha!
I’m using it every day now. I have one machine installed with the 24.04 ISO and it’s working fine. There’s some TODO items to come which I understand will be added by Alpha2. With a little command line knowledge COSMIC is perfectly usable now and is stable.
I’m sure my command line game is weak. Do you have a solution for connecting to Bluetooth and for timing out to login screen and blanking it after a certain period?
Bluetooth can be managed with
systemctlandbluetoothctl.https://www.makeuseof.com/manage-bluetooth-linux-with-bluetoothctl/
In my experience I find just running
bluetoothctlto enter the interactive mode easiest. You can enter commands without prependingbluetoothctl. You can usehelpat any stage. So you want to usesystemctlto make sure Bluetooth is running, then enterbluetoothctl. Make sure the device is discoverable and pairing is set to on. Start your [headphones/whatever] in pairing mode and rundevices. When you see the device runpair <numbers/address>. Only use the numbers. You may have to go into settings and select the device in the sound applet.My situation doesn’t require a logout timer, but if I’m walking away from the PC I just use the shortcut Super + ESC. Alternatively, there’s many ways you can create a basic Bash script that when invoked times down to a
systemctl suspendcommand. Or possibly the hybrid-sleep option could do what you want. Seesystemctl -hfor possibilities.Blanking the login screen is something that will be implemented shortly. Maybe I’ll work on a script for that because it annoys me too. Fortunately I rarely use it. I’ll repost if I do this.
I really don’t think the two years people are saying in this thread is realistic. The hard work and core is written. What is there is stable. I think they will get this completed much sooner. They do have a hardware business to support after all.
Thanks for the useful info. Still, I don’t think I want to fool with it until it’s available via GUI. That’s just me.
And I hope you are right about the rest being quicker.
Great! Exactly on time for the next release of Debian :)
Hopefully they plan to stabilize what they see as core functionality, and then build out features. Some people won’t consider it ready until this or that feature is added, but many of us who just want a WM+ can start using it once it’s relatively stable.
I couldn’t even connect Bluetooth until I switched to Gnome again
Well, since Cosmic isn’t going to be ready for a couple years yet, let’s try to fix your multimonitor issue. Are you running on Wayland and what’s your GPU?
Wayland, Lenovo idepad 1 2018 (Ryzen 3) second monitor is Arzopa A1 GAMUT SLIM
I’m guessing that’s the onboard AMD graphics then?
If you do an
lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'what does it return? Are you able to find anything in dmsg (journalctl -xb-1for previous boot log) that would give an error message to investigate?here is what I got
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.I don’t think I understand what I’m reading but here is all the error I could find: https://rentry.org/gni28ogyMight have to get the full log, and it should be from immediately after one of those unexpected reboots. The flag
b-1indicates journalctl to export the logs from the previous boot (-1) instead of the current log. So if you dosudo journalctl -xb-1 > log.txtafter one of these reboots and paste that file to look at, we might get something useful.I’m fairly confident that’s a problem that can be fixed with having an AMD graphics driver running. If it were nVidia, I’d be less confident.
I’m very curious how buggy it’s going to be. (Obviously very during alpha, but I’m talking release.) They seem to be betting big on customisability, and a myriad of different setups is like a fly trap for bugs, in my experience.
But at the same time, a modern language like Rust provides lots of help to prevent a bunch of them, and they might be very talented programmers, so who knows!
Honestly, I haven’t had a single bug aside from the default radio selection not being visible until you click the other option, but that is more of an ICED issue that is already being addressed. Really there are just a few power options like screen timeout and autosuspend that are missing and the UI needs a retouch, but I think its a solid base over all. It’s being led by the same developer of Redox OS so he has a lot of experience developing a modular, well performant rust system.
Great to hear! I’ve never used Redox either, so no idea how well that works too.
I can’t wait to see what they can do, considering what System76 did with just GNOME.
I don’t think anything’s going to pry me from XFCE, though, except maybe if 4.20 hasn’t made much progress on Wayland.
whats so good about XFCE
It’s very bread and butter, but also very customizable. It’s also decently lightweight. Not the lightest, but a good compromise between both.
Some distros don’t have the best default config, though.
Yes, and the desktop is delightfully simple. Makes older hardware feel new but still looks good enough on modern hardware.
If they support wayland I’m in
It’s new, so there’s no point of supporting X11. It’s Wayland only.
I meant I’m waiting for XFCE to support Wayland haha
Oh I see, fair enough
I feel like I am the only person not super-jazzed about Cosmic.
If people are excited or want to use it, fine. But I don’t know what it could possibly add to the mix besides offering mote DE choice, and Linux already has a lot of that.
It’s new and different. It’s also not really usable atm so there’s plenty of hype and little disillusionment yet.
Give it a couple years and everyone will probably have forgotten about it.deleted by creator
For me, I like the idea of a tiling window manager with batteries included. Been using tiling window mangers for ages now and cannot go back to floating window management. But all the tiling window managers are bare bones and configure everything you want from the ground up. Which I am not a huge fan of these days. I want something to work out the box with first party full tiling support (not just dragging windows to the side) but without needing 100s of lines of config to get a half decent setup.
I’m not really invested in Cosmic, I’m happy with Hyprland and will continue to use it.
I do think they did a REALLY nice job with the tiling. I don’t think you can find a more intuitive and user friendly tiling window manager. Something that’s not absolute barebones out of box and can be configured entirely with a GUI. In that regard it does bring something to the mix and is very very welcome.
I wish KDE had something like that! AFAIK I think most tiling things are still broken and haven’t quite caught up to Plasma 6 yet.
KDE has “”“tiling”“”. They called it tiling but it’s just god awful. If KDE had real automatic tiling, I would probably have sticked with it, to be honest.
I like it as an alternative to GNOME that’s not quite so GNOME-ish, if that makes sense. I do like GNOME but I find it a bit idiosyncratic sometimes, IE they seem very “my way or the highway” about some design things, and it often feels to me like you have to hunt down and keep updating endless plugins to do basic things that feel like they should be included.
If they can land in a spot where COSMIC looks as nice as GNOME but is also a bit less of a hassle to get set up the way you want it, I feel like they could occupy a nice middle-ground between GNOME and KDE possibly.
I’ve been running it on my Asahi linux for a bit over a week, and while it comes off feeling a bit bare bones, I’ve had no stability issues despite it being an alpha, in fact all issues I’ve had are minor, in fact the biggest issues come from Asahi Linux, not Cosmic.
I’ve been playing around with asahi on a Mac mini with an M2. Enjoy it but so many limitations currently. I use MacOS about as much on that PC I just can’t stand the close butting being in the top left. Lmao
I just want pop_os 24.04. I’m annoyed they’re delaying the entire release so they can add cosmic to it.
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
What is the big difference between Cosmic and Gnome? I know System76 are developing it so I would imagine they have a problem with Gnome and their hardware business.
I used popOS! for a year and did get annoyed that Gnome required extensions that were not necessarily maintained in order to allow for what I considered to be basic customisation.
On OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE now, but interested to see what the philosophical difference is between Gnome and Cosmic.
There are basically two different versions of Cosmic. The current one which is basically just an extension for Gnome. This is what has shipped with PopOS and currently still done.
But system76 had a vision for what they wanted and they did not feel building that as an extension was sustainable long term. They had a bunch of stability issues (ie gnome breaking things in newer versions they were using). So they decided to write a new desktop environment from scratch in rust that they had full control over.
I believe that the new Cosmic sits somewhere in between KDE and Gnome in terms of customization - or at least what they are aiming for. No where near the level of settings as KDE but not trying to remove every option like Gnome.
And being a new project written from scratch it is forward focused - and only support wayland.
You can read more about their decisions in a recent blog post: https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-team-interview-byoux
Great answer, thanks!
Removed by mod
I literally had a dream about switching to it last night. But it was different, as it had the things I’m currently missing, already implemented. But then again, in my dream, It was the summer of next year (2025), it’s just that they went on a faster pace than expected and released Beta 1 instead of the Alpha 2, and that actually had Static workspaces (which is unfortunately, not a planned feature rn), as well as Sloppy Focus, which IS a planned feature and coming out with Alpha 2, the PR is even ready to merge! Ultimately, only time will tell.
Tried it, my device crashes every 2 minutes in. Not worth the effort for now.
I’ve been using it on my Fedora laptop for the past week or so and it’s really nice, even in alpha 1! Can’t wait to see how it turns out fully finished!
😎👍
It sounds great. Cosmic is off to a great start and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
And here I thought you were talking about Cosmic Encounter…
