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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
They show icons for Steam, Chrome, Firefox, Zoom, etc... Does that mean they are maintaining their own fork of those applications built for COSMIC?
I thought this was pretty obvious.
It may sound a little odd but I'd describe my time with Pop!_OS as "quiet". It feels good to be total control again. I don't have to constantly disable things and there isn't a Copilot icon on my dock that comes back from the dead every few days.
Obsidian, 1Password, VS Code, Warp, etc. all work without issue.
I still think the name Pop!_OS is dumb, they should just call it CosmicOS, as this new desktop is their defining feature and its a great name.
What is really amazing is that thanks to Cosmic now becoming an important part of Wayland, along with others, the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it.
My with for Pop!_OS next major feature would be to embrace ZFS and build around it.
I'm also looking forward to seeing full Cosmic on ReduxOS.
Can you expand on what you mean here? I only somewhat follow Wayland/X11 migration/development, but from what I understand gnome is on Wayland, enough so that they apparently dropped x11 support from their upcoming release in march.
The youtuber Brodie Robertson does regularly updated on all the discussion and proposals and why are the moving forward or not moving forward. And what the issue with the processes are:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjzjpJ02WDOsPPtwUqqE...
If that's not good enough, you can find all the issues with the discussion, but be ready for the same issues to be discussed endlessly in a cycle for years and years.
Gnome is not the only issue but they are on of the biggest. The refuse to implement certain things even when pretty much every other system on the planet both linux and non linux support it. And those are things that many applications relay on. And because of the way the standardization process works it was for years really hard to get many things into the standard leading to basic things missing and applications having inconstant support or apps that are just broken.
Having more voting members and more members with some real money and development power and more composites has already changed the dynamics.
This makes it very difficult for Wayland to evolve in a way that people want, as Gnome is the biggest player by user count.
Also we need to take into account that many open source projects eventually run out of steam, which is what I see as most likely.
They don’t have a pop os iso for arm64, but they do have arm64 Debian repo. So I just took DGX os (what Nvidia ships on the device), added the pos os “releases” repo, and installed cosmic-session.
It works like a charm and provides a super useful tiling experience out of the box.
This is replacing my M3 Pro as my daily driver and I’ve been pretty happy with it.
I recently upgraded to an ultrawide monitor and find the Cosmic UX to be hands down better than what I get in the Mac with it.
If you want a Linux desktop with the productivity boost of a tiling window manager with a low learning curve, it’s pretty good.
There are a couple less than ideal edges IMO, but it's gotten to be a very solid experience. I've been really happy with Pop+Cosmic myself. I appreciate that they keep the kernel more current than upstream Ubuntu as well.
Note that if you're that far behind on a project, the rational choice is to significantly cut its scope, and push the rest to the following releases.
Also, they didn't do a release while COSMIC desktop was under development, and the release cycle was alpha/beta on a full baseline to match the COSMIC development... unless you think you can develop a full DE in Rust faster than that.
How is this supposed to convince people who are already happy with the KDE or Gnome or other variants of Ubuntu and which ship without such monumental delays, thay they should switch to Popos variant of Ubuntu?
Such a long delay isn't reassuring at all.
The punctuation hasn't bothered me once in that time.
I've enjoyed a much more stable Linux desktop experience than I had on other distros in the past when I tried though.
Well Ubuntu24.10 was way more predictable. PopOS issues: explicit sleep will not come out of sleep w/o a hard reboot (hold power 25sec). Lid works at least. touchscreen: no auto virtual keyboard, pressing a system icon just highlights them (vs pulldown menu) flipping to 2in1 tent mode, no rotation not set up. no drivers for WiFi7 (ubuntu had it). natural scrolling works on touch, doesn't work on mouse pad...well it doesn't work basically.
Going to submit bugs, maybe heading back to Ubuntu as I want this laptop to be my new dev machine (needs to be solid).
Stacks, snapping, and sticky windows
◦ Stack windows to combine them into tab groups like a browser
••• Right click on the header and choose Create Window Stack. Then drag another window to the stack.
••• When tiling windows, simply drag the window on top of another to create a stack.
Tabs are an interesting way to handle multiple instances of the same app (though this sounds like cosmic might mix them too). But in Windows for example, each app would have to do it's own implementation of muli-document handling. Browsers just brought us the tabs metaphor to manage them. I always thought that should be done at a higher level than the apps, and now it's here! I was thinking toolkit level, but go a level up to the DE and mix apps.
Cf. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/kde44...
EDIT: I refer to this effect: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eOrvbaKz5H4
It is called magnification effect.
But that's a weird line to draw for which shells you find unacceptable.
It goes from bottom to top of the window with a continuous effect, it squishes down in width then gets warped/pulled to the dock icon to minimize.
The effect is like when Genie from Aladdin enters or leaves the lamp, but without smoke.
COSMIC isn't yet close to a solution for remote desktop, so I expect to have to wait a few more years. (T_T)
