[foxheadman]

I used to hear about COSMIC and think "Glad to see more choice, but I doubt this will go anywhere".

I wanted a Sway-like experience but with a desktop experience, and so tried it.

It's surprisingly good: a DE with powerful enough window tiling.

It's now my daily driver.

Since they're backed by a sole company, I'm still not convinced on their longevity, but remain hopeful!

I'm not familiar with Pop OS, which I now realise is what the post is.

[panick21_]

I think even if the company goes away we will see this continue. It modern it rust and some if its fundamentals are already used by other projects. Of course not same way, but its not just going away.

[pjmlp]

I was introduced to UNIX in 1993, Linux in 1995's Summmer, and have lost count how many X Windows desktops or windows managers have come and gone in 32 years.

[criddell]

What's been your favorite?

I wasted too much time tweaking Enlightenment. I remember that was fun but I don't really remember much about actually using it.

OS/2's Workplace Shell feels like the biggest lost opportunity (and has nothing to do with UNIXy stuff). I really liked Rexx and the SOM stuff felt cleaner than what became COM in Windows.

[pjmlp]

Window Maker/AfterStep were my all time favourites in GNU/Linux world.

I used to be in the GNOME camp during its early days, even wrote a tiny article to The C/C++ User's Journal regarding Gtkmm, nowadays I rather use XFCE.

The original fvwm also holds a special place, that was the first I used in GNU/Linux, back in 1995, and I got to customise it quite a bit.

SOM was great, it also supported implementation inheritance, and had metaclasses concept as well.

I like COM as idea, I dislike how badly Microsoft keeps rebooting the developer experience, and isn't able to provide modern toolig as easy as it was from VB 6, Delphi, C++ Builder. For something that has become the central mechanism how Windows APIs are delivered.

[baobun]

Some underappreciated and forgotten tiling wms that are still viable today:

- ratpoison ("tmux for X11". Ultralight, great for kiosks and similar where you barely want a WM at all)

- stumpwm (ratpoison on steroids in Lisp)

- Xmonad (A bit different tiling dynamic that some prefer. I dig it despite Haskell, not because of it)

- Qtile (Very flexible and easily hackable in python yet reasonably stable and fast. You can reproduce for example the Xmonad or i3 experiences pretty easily)

[leephillips]

And the one I use and love: DWM.

(which I use on top of Pop!_OS, oddly enough).

[mghackerlady]

Enlightenment still exists and works well, I just wish more apps were written around EFL so themes were easier

[LargoLasskhyfv]

In two variations actually. One is a fork of E17: https://mokshadesktop.github.io

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moksha_(window_manager)

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/av_linux_25/

[throwaway888666]

Enlightenment? Nothing beats the bodhi moksha desktop https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/

[panick21_]

But X has stuck around and to think all that just because everybody was afraid of Sun.

[bryanlarsen]

Have you tried the new-ish KDE window tiling? (Super-T by default) I had a similar desire to you, and am quite happy with what KDE provided. It'd be interesting to read a comparison between the two.

Although I'm happy enough with what KDE gives me that COSMIC would have to be substantially better before I'd endure the switching costs.

[nartho]

I like tiling a lot more than I like floating windows. Cosmic is my daily driver and is awesome. I just wish it had a bit more customization options, I don't want to spend days rummaging through wikis like with hyprland but having a bit more control over it would be nice, not a deal breaker though

[tmtvl]

I hard bounced off COSMIC with the complete lack of theming. I can't even set my clock to a reasonable format in it. The only thing it has going for it is sane multi-monitor support, which neither KDE nor GNOME have gotten right so far (though at KDE there is some activity around it, dunno 'bout GNOME).

[bsimpson]

I tried a bunch of shells when I got my Legion Go, including COSMIC. It had the worst touchscreen support of any of them.

Now that SteamOS is officially released, I just use KDE. Maybe COSMIC will be better at touch eventually, but since it's a traditional laptop company, I'm not sure.

[jorvi]

I really hate that at some point in the past, KDE developers decided that they hated how deeply intuitive virtual desktops are and deprecated them in favor of something deeply unintuitive (Activities). Any issue or complaint mentioning it is shot down with "you're holding it wrong."

Please just give virtual desktops first class support and lets forget about the Activities experiment. Most users hate it.

The attitude regarding it is about as bad as Gnome forcing Overview on everyone, refusing to provide a first party dock or lightweight launcher. Despite almost every distro and 95% of Gnome users immediately installing Dash to Dock.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Plasma/KDE's virtual desktops are working for me, as 3x3, 4x4 would be too small in the widget which shows in the 'taskbar', which is only 24 pixels high, here.

Took me some time and asking in their irc-channel, but actually the basic setup is super-simple, and was too 'intuitive' for an old greybeard like me :-)

You right-click on the launcher icon, or the systray and "Add or Manage Widgets", then a window appears where you can pick all sorts of widgets in a bar to the left, which then appear in a subwindow to the right. You just want the Pager, and remove any instances of that Activities Pager thing, if it is/they are already present(because you can have multiple instances in different places(leftover from earlier tries, maybe)).

What I didn't get was that you can pick that pager-widget from the subwindow, and move it anywhere you want it to in that whole taskbar-panel(outside the edit window!), by holding the mousebutton down(drag), until it is exactly where you want it, and then releasing the mouse-botton(drop).

And then "Exit Edit Mode" in the still open window, which then closes. That's all there is to it.

(Similar to how you customize the appearance of Firefox)

From then on you can configure the pager by right clicking onto it, and virtual desktops in system settings like you want them. Maybe having it appear larger with some key-combo, or whatever.

During the time I cursed it, I discovered the activity thing isn't really active anymore, they just let it there for the people who want/like it, meanwhile the real virtual desktop thing didn't get much attention, but that may change in the future?

Hopefully?

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Edit: Actually the most logic sequence of things to configure would be to first go into System Settings -> Window Management -> Virtual Desktops and configure how much of them you want, and how they should be arranged.

Then activate and position the Pager like I described above, and after that how it presents them.

Nonetheless I'm thinking that could be more integrated, and the pager could be larger, when howering the mouse pointer over it.

[bxparks]

I'm not familiar with the Gnome terminologies. Is Overview the one where they removed all the desktop icons, breaking 40 years of GUI conventions going back to the 1970s? (It's impossible to do a search on a product called "Overview".) I blew away Gnome after that, installed Mint MATE (now Cinnamon), and vowed to never touch Gnome again.

[jorvi]

Overview is when you press the Super ('Windows') key.

What appears is an unholy amalgamation of a launcher, a workspace strip, a window overview, workspace peeking, and a dock.

Worse yet is that every time you go in or out of this overview, an animation plays, making things fly and animate everywhere constantly, whenever you want to take any action.

Whenever someone points out to Gnome developers that most people only want to open a launcher to type "52*93" or find a contact, that they just want to mouse over a dock to have a lightweight way to see if an application is open (and to switch to it), they get irate and tell you their vision is vastly superior.

Gnome could be pretty great if the developers their attitude to their users wants and the feedback on their issue tracker wasn't extreme snark and "actually we are right". Even if clear UI defects are pointed out, no, in fact they are right.

The Gnome peoples also frustrate any attempt at improving Wayland at a more rapid clip.

There is a reason why Valve went with KDE. KDE has its own set of problems, but at least they are receptive, cooperative and friendly. I genuinely hope Valve puts enough money into KDE that Gnome with its high and mighty attitude gets completely railroaded.

[bxparks]

Sounds awful. Luckily we still have other options. I hope I never have to use GNOME again.

[johannesrexx]

We put a beautiful wallpaper on the Desktop. Ahhhh.

Along comes a Luddite and puts icons on it, totally ruining its beauty. For fsck's sake! Just No.

Thankfully, along comes GNOME and it just says No.

I agree.

[bxparks]

If you want a pristine desktop, don't put icons there. If I want to put icons on my desktop, it's none of your f'ing business.

[sho_hn]

> Any issue or complaint mentioning it is shot down with "you're holding it wrong."

I don't think this is true. Speaking as an upstream dev, we've never been very happy with Activities, either.

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/issues/35

Clearly you've had some interaction that upset you and I apologize for that, but I've never come across any Plasma dev who felt we nailed that one (and I wrote large parts of the panels, the menu, the icon desktop, etc.) I was genuinely surprised by your comment.

[jorvi]

To be honest, this is like.. 5 years back? Maybe more. But I don't switch DEs that often.

It's funny to see the two things that prompted the discussion (naming desktops and per-desktop wallpapers) come up heavily under that issue you linked.

Like I mentioned in another comment, I like that KDE devs are much more constructive than Gnome devs. In that issue you can clearly see you're asking users to rephrase their feedback so it is more useful.

With Gnome, I've for example opened an issue for something that isn't according to visual HIG practices. Implementing this would lead to more visual clarity and it would look better to boot. I got told that no, actually they know better. It was pretty clear that they thought that if code or design originated from their shop, there could be no (better) alternative.

When I linked and gave mockup examples I got snarked, and when I snarked back I immediately got dressed down for rule violation by some mod figure that completely ignored their dev's initial snark. Just very, very unpleasant people.

Apologies for the rant haha. Anyway, thanks for linking that and for responding!

[dontlaugh]

What’s wrong with Gnome’s multi monitor support? My two monitors even have different pixel density.

[tmtvl]

Can't switch between workspace 1 and 2 on my right monitor while leaving my left one on workspace 3. In fact, I believe by default I wouldn't even get workspaces on my secondary monitor. Because who needs 'organization' anyway?

[dontlaugh]

I see. I’ve always preferred to switch workspaces together.

[akdor1154]

Gnome works OK with integer scaling, more granular than this and you're up shit creek.

E.G. can you set one screen to 150% and one to 175%? (I think the answer to this is 'technically yes but then everything goes a bit blurry because they do it by rendering at 2x then downscaling')

Proper mixed dpi scaling means stuff will render pixel-perfectly instead of downscaling hacks.

[dontlaugh]

I have two 4K monitors, one at 150% and another at 175%. Nothing is blurry.

I did have to get a reasonably new Gnome, Ubuntu LTS had one that was broken with fractional scaling.

[criddell]

I skimmed the linked story and I still don’t really know what POP!_OS is. They are using the Linux kernel and wrote their own desktop environment, but what’s in between that? Does it include all the GNU system tools? Is there a lot of software that takes advantage of the COSMIC desktop environment? Do they have an App Store? Is it closer to something like Ubuntu or is it more like Android?

[mghackerlady]

It's ubuntu with their own desktop and app store (kinda like mint) its also known for being the best linux experience for nvidia users. It's designed for power users and gamers

[jsk2600]

It's based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with their own DE

[dsego]

Does it use snap packages?

[akdor1154]

They attempt to avoid them, though snaps are still available if you wish.

Flatpak is installed by default and used by their app store, and Firefox is packaged as a deb so you can avoid the snap.

I consider it a deshittified Ubuntu.

[KronisLV]

> I consider it a deshittified Ubuntu.

This is more or less what I have used Linux Mint for (their Cinnamon desktop version is pretty okay, also used the XFCE one).

Nice to have more options!

[panick21_]

They are vendor of hardware, so much more aggressive about pushing new hardware support.

[cguess]

yes

[criddell]

Based on Ubuntu? So is it basically Ubuntu with Gnome removed and COSMIC added? How compatible are the two OS's?

They show icons for Steam, Chrome, Firefox, Zoom, etc... Does that mean they are maintaining their own fork of those applications built for COSMIC?

[mghackerlady]

No? They can run on cosmic, just like they can run on any other desktop. It's a linux distro, it does linux distro things and happens to be built on ubuntu. What part of this are you not getting? Remember when Ubuntu made Unity because they were pissed at the GNOME people? That's what System76 did, they got mad at GNOME because GNOME didn't like how much they were messing with GNOME

[criddell]

I'm not super familiar with the history of GNOME, KDE, or COSMIC and I've never used COSMIC and I haven't been able to see into their app store to see what apps are available.

The version of Chrome (for example) that Google distributes uses GTK which is GNOME, no? So I was wondering if System76 forked that and made a version that uses the COSMIC API.

[jsk2600]

You do not need to have GNOME in order to run GTK apps - Pop_OS ships with GTK/QT libraries so all apps works as on Ubuntu.

[beAbU]

The fact that the version is 24.04 LTS is a dead giveaway that it's ubuntu under the hood.

I thought this was pretty obvious.