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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- System76’s COSMIC desktop will soon be in beta.
- Even as an alpha release, COSMIC is impressive.
- COSMIC is as fast as any Linux desktop I’ve experienced.
Alpha releases aren’t to be used for any reason other than testing. Right?
That’s the common opinion, and yet here I am, working on System76’s COSMIC desktop as if it’s in stable status.
It’s not… and it shows.
Yes, I’ve experienced problems. For example, COSMIC does not like the Opera browser at all. In fact, when I first started writing this, I was using Opera, and it suffered from a memory leak, causing me to have to do a hard reboot. As soon as I logged in, I opened Zen Browser, and things are much better.
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But why did I take this most uncertain route? It starts with GNOME.
Pop!_OS default desktop
Because System76 is hard at work on COSMIC, the default Pop!_OS desktop environment isn’t getting the updates it should, and lately it’s been noticeable. For instance, when I would lock the screen, it would lock but would switch back and forth between a black screen and the greeter. That’s all fine and good, except when you’re trying to sleep and the light from your office keeps you awake.
There were also the random crashes, which weren’t too terrible to take care of, but I started growing tired of having to SSH into my desktop from another machine and run a restart_gnome script I wrote.
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Even when I’d run an update, I was starting to get notices of deprecated software on the GNOME side of things. I believe Pop!_OS is still using GNOME 42, and given that GNOME is currently at release number 49, that’s pretty far behind. I’m not slamming System76 for this because I know how hard they have been working on COSMIC, and the end results are going to be spectacular.
If only I could wait for the “end result” release. But, no, I had to jump ship now.
My experience with COSMIC
First off, outside of the aging GNOME, COSMIC is light-years ahead of what Pop!_OS was and currently is. COSMIC is highly configurable, lightning fast, and beautiful. Those are three combinations I can get behind.
And COSMIC is beautiful. Thanks to the various configuration options, you can make this desktop environment look however you want. I understand that aesthetics isn’t at the top of the consideration food chain for most users, but COSMIC does enjoy something that will: Speed.
I’ve been accustomed to the Pop!_OS Pop Shop (the app store) taking forever to open, and it’s prone to crashing. The new COSMIC Shop is the polar opposite of that. It’s incredibly fast, and I’ve yet to experience it crashing. And when I say “fast,” I mean don’t blink or you’ll miss it opening fast. I’m not exaggerating.
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Dealing with the random alpha-release issues is totally worth it when you get a desktop environment that’s this fast. COSMIC feels as if it’s as “big” as KDE Plasma and as fast as Xfce. I can only imagine how fast it will be once it reaches stable status.
As I mentioned earlier, Opera and COSMIC do not play well together, and I’m 100% okay adopting Zen as my browser until they can get along. By then, I might have made the permanent switch from Opera to Zen (at least until something changes my mind again).
The good news is that since I dropped Opera as my default Linux browser, COSMIC has had fewer problems. I no longer hear my Thelio system fan constantly whirring to keep up with Opera’s demands (which is likely a memory leak), and my cursor is no longer stuttering as I move it around the desktop.
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The collection of COSMIC apps (Shop, Text Editor, Music Player, Files, Settings, Terminal, etc.) all work great and (as is everything else) incredibly fast. Of course, COSMIC’s speed can be attributed to System76 going with Rust as its programming language for the desktop environment. Rust is fast. What makes Rust so fast? Rust is very good at knowing when to free memory during compilation, which eliminates expensive runtime checks associated with garbage collection and/or dynamic memory management. Rust also prevents data races and allows for safe parallel execution thanks to ownership and borrowing mechanisms.
In other words, Rust is fast, and COSMIC benefits from that speed. I’ve never experienced a full-blown desktop environment to run this quickly.
When is the stable release?
As of now, there is no timeline for the stable release; however, System76 did announce that the first beta would be coming in the next couple of weeks. That’s great news, because beta is much better than alpha.
One thing I do not know is if System76 will make a full upgrade possible. Pop!_OS is currently based on Ubuntu 22.04, and Pop!_OS with COSMIC will be based on Ubuntu 24.04. That means a newer kernel and all of the other goodies that come with the more recent Ubuntu release.
I know it’s crazy to use alpha release software (especially a desktop environment) for daily tasks, but I simply couldn’t help it. I’ve been anxiously awaiting COSMIC for months and decided I could no longer stand the wait. Was it worth it? Absolutely. I’m enjoying COSMIC more than I’ve enjoyed a Linux desktop in a very long time.
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However, I would not recommend anyone using COSMIC unless you’re familiar enough with Linux to use the terminal and read log files (for troubleshooting). When the beta version is released, that’s another story. I’ve used beta software for many things and generally find it pretty stable. Given how stable the current alpha release of COSMIC is, I can only imagine that the beta release will be even better.
Kudos to System76 for creating what I believe will be the best Linux desktop environment on the market.
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