[geophile]

I have been using Pop_OS for many years, and I’m still on 22.04, which uses X11. I don’t understand the pros and cons of X11 vs. Wayland, I just want a working desktop.

24.04 uses Wayland, and while some people have had no problems migrating, many people are having serious problems. From what I can tell, it’s not a good choice for me yet. This article tells me that it may not be a good choice ever.

I am a huge fan of System76 and Pop_OS, and I am sorry to see how this migration has split the community and forced many people to make difficult choices. I suspect that I will have to leave Pop_OS once 22.04 is no longer supported, in a year.

To be fair, there are two issues. Pop_OS Is introducing a new DE, COSMIC, which is written in Rust. That new DE is another source of instability. I’m afraid that Syatem76 has bitten off far more than it can chew.

[Cyph0n]

Could the problem be COSMIC? Put differently, why do you assume that the issue is with Wayland rather than the work System76 did to support Wayland?

Because many other DMs and WMs do not have issues with Wayland.

[geophile]

Yes, I believe I said exactly that.

[Cyph0n]

No, because you’re concluding from your experience and a single article that Wayland in general is bad.

I am saying that perhaps your experience has nothing to do with Wayland directly, so maybe you should still give Wayland a chance.

You can see many others in this thread contradicting the article’s complaints.

[geophile]

I stated no conclusions. I have not tried COSMIC, and I said that it’s COSMIC and Wayland seem to be problematic for people who have tried Pop_OS 24.04. (The one fact I do know is that Synergy, which I rely on, is still working on Wayland support.)

My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.

[Cyph0n]

Ah, perhaps I misread your conclusion then. I hope COSMIC irons out the issues.

[VHRanger]

Yeah I'm another pop os user.

Cosmic works great for a laptop. But it's a PITA for a desktop. It doesn't deal with multi monitor setups well. There's a recent new bug where the system hardlocks on monitor power state changes, which is unacceptable.

So: great for single screen laptop, not good for desktop or server

[yehat]

I'm absolutely in exactly the same position (Pop_OS 22.04) and unwilling to upgrade to 24.04. Which I tried for many months on two spare machines - a laptop and a desktop. The difference is quite stark, there are positive things, but it doesn't feel "my" desktop for many reasons. On top the stability is not there yet. At the end of 22.04 road I hope to find something of similar quality, but really don't like to be forced to rely only on Wayland as dependency. One of my critical pieces of software (barrier/deskflow/input leap KVMs) is not working well with Wayland.

[danbolt]

I’ve been using COSMIC on a spare laptop, and enjoying it, but I’m stuck on 22.04 until their Iced rebase finishes and have IME working. [1]

Making a new DE plus compositor is a lot of work, but I do hope it works well for the Pop_OS developers.

[1] https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/issues/2174

[gdelfino01]

I'm on the same boat. I wish I could use COSMIC with X11. I am now looking into installing a different Linux distribution on my System76 laptop.

[octorian]

I recently upgraded to Pop_OS 24.04 because I was sick and tired of being stuck with an outdated base.

But after trying the new Cosmic desktop, I basically ran screaming back to Gnome/X11 (with a couple of extensions to give me the old desktop experience from 22.04).

Once 26.04 drops, along with Cosmic Epoch 2, I may give it another serious try. Or I'll just go to KDE6/Wayland and see how that goes. (I do use KiCad from time to time, so I wonder how usable it'll be on Wayland down the line.)

(For reference, my biggest gripe with Cosmic right now is how it can't seem to figure out how to manage window focus. Modal dialogs can lose focus to their base window, and sometimes become covered by that base window. And focus-follows-mouse hasn't been done right ever. Both have issues written up, I just hope they get attention. Meanwhile, throngs of people seem to "swear" it "works fine for them.")