I'm on hyprland but wanting to move due to controversies, how is cosmic?
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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She's just a cosmic girl
Oh, yeah
From another galaxy
My heart's at zero gravity
She's from a cosmic world
Putting me in ecstasy
Transmitting on my frequency
She's cosmic
👽🕺🪩👽💃
✨🎶 Sends me into hyperspace, when I see her pretty face 🎶✨
Its in pretty good shape for a beta, and gaming seems way more stable on it versus their old version with gnome, but I'm still considering going back for now, there are just too many bugs as of now.
Is it beta now? I tried alpha 8 or alpha 9 and ran into a lot of issues (3 or 4 independent ones) with my multimonitor setup and eventually just gave up because of the frustration of having to reconfigure all 3 monitors every reboot.
Bazzite never had a problem, but locked down some dev stuff I wanted to do.
CachyOS has been solid but every once in a while I will experience one of the multi monitor issues I had on Cosmic Alpha. But I can live with that.
Yes its beta and ive had the same experience. I use a laptop and I'm constantly undocking and switching monitors and its handles that very poorly to the point I have to reboot if I'm switching monitors.
I think it's good they're making a new desktop environment, but I personally wouldn't want to be beta testing an environment on my new laptop.
I personally don't get the hype around Cosmic - I'm not clear what makes it so exciting for people? It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment. It'll be interesting to see how far it moves from Gnome and if moving to Rust is actually meaningful to the end user.
I can see it's good for the Linux world that a new and modern DE is being developed. It gives users choice and may prompt innovation in the other DEs too. But maybe I'm beyond the age where new is exciting - I value stable and familiar environment, KDE in my case.
I'm not against Cosmic in any sense - I just don't quite get the level of hype I see surrounding it. Maybe it'd be more exciting if I was a Gnome user? Maybe it's solving problems I don't seems to have in KDE?
Speaking for myself, this is why COSMIC is appealing:
- nice middle-ground between oversimplified and over opinionated GNOME and KDE complexity
- both floating and tiling are first class
- Wayland native (no legacy)
- pushing DE innovation
- commercially backed
- written in Rust
- attractive
- fast
I also love that it is driving Smithay and Iced which matures the foundations of other great projects like Niri and even RedoxOS.
KDE has vastly improved in my view and is a really great option these days. That said…
It is huge, monolithic, and difficult to modularize.
It is complex.
It occasionally has runaway resource use (eg. Indexing).
I mean you see how many people use windows
Ive been using it for a month now, latest git version that is updated several times per day. For me, its just so nice to have a fully rust built desktop environment. Its fast, smooth animations, built in tiling window management etc. It doesnt use the gtk desktop library so everything from the ground up is rust. After having only gtk and qt for so long, its really nice to see a fresh window manager with all the advantages that comes with rust.
I havent noticed bugs, just one missing feature: the drag and drop doesnt seem to work in the cosmic file manager if one side is a nfs networked file system. But its minor stuff like that remaining. Its pretty much like gnome otherwise. I dont miss anything. All the extensions I used from gnome are already default here, like tray icons.
I think this environment has the best font rendering also. Its incredibly crisp on my 4k screen.
It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment.
For me, that's indeed the main reason. I actually prefer their look and feel of Gnome, but absolutely loathe quite a few of their stubborn decisions, so I currently stick with KDE (which is also great). From what I've seen and tried, Cosmic seems to try and become a mix between those two.
That, and it's neat having a DE that offers both tiling and floating and treats them as equally important.
I recently installed Linux on an old laptop and decided to try out Cosmic alpha 7. I've been running I3 on my desktop and wanted a Wayland DE that keeps the tiling features, and I've been happy to find out that Cosmic alpha is 90% there despite still having some fairly significant bugs. I don't find it especially exciting, but it's functional without having to invest the time into setting up all the features of a DE inside a tiling WM.
The choice to ship with a beta version of the new DE is interesting. Is it that stable now and will there be a clear upgrade path to the final release?
I'm tempted to grab the beta myself and just go for it now...
For System76, the choice is to keep shipping their now very long in the tooth previous version or a beta of their new one. I have no doubt the beta is the better experience.
And they are obviously stabilizing the beta rapidly now.
You can install it and start it only if needed, there's no need to fiddle with your current DE
No it is not lol
I have no idea of the experiences of new users. The biggest issue is that PopOS has no KDE Plasma spin, so users can either use GNOME or their thing
I will give the desktop another try. Their apps are all very minimal. Cosmic files has network shares though which is nice!
I installed it in a VM to get the repo files as I found no better way. Now I use some cosmic apps on Debian GNOME