Structure76
System76 has released its alpha version Cosmic Desktop Environment For Linux and Unix-like systems. The Linux hardware company isn’t just targeting its customers with its GNOME alternative; The distro hopes to win over maintainers and application developers with its Rust-built, UX-focused desktop.
While Cosmic Desktop Linux is built on the vendor’s pop!_OS (also available in the alpha ISO), it’s also available for other systems, as you’d expect. System76 provides drop-in instructions for Fedora and Arch Linux installations.
System 76 says it’s “excited to see Cosmic Integration elevate Linux as a whole,” along with “what it can do to make UX-building more accessible.” By developing Cosmic natively in the Rust language, System76 aims to provide a more stable and memory-safe environment for applications.
Cosmic focuses heavily on tiling, keyboard shortcuts, and panel and dock customization in its pop!_OS. I’m a bit on the boring side, the single workplace type; Gardiner Bryant on YouTube went deeper In Cosmic Alpha’s tiling, panels, and GTK app adoption. I found getting Cosmic to a reasonable format that I could work with and taking its keyboard window shortcuts easier than either KDE or GNOME.
One thing System76 has made clear in its cosmic drive is its readiness for deeply integrated themes. System76 provided a few examples in its press materials, and I have to admit to a preference for its high-end examples.
-
System76 can’t officially provide this theme with the Internet Explorer logo and other recognizable icons, but it does illustrate the theme’s possibilities.
Structure76
-
Eternal software answers the question “can it run Disaster?” even in desktop environments.
Structure76
-
This? This Subtle This very Polish-RPG-influenced themed page.
Structure76
-
If you’re going to hack the web and fight Garbos, you need to keep your eyes open, Zoom.
Structure76
Promising, but certainly not productive
I’ve been using Cosmic-Top Desktop Alpha since last week on Valeant Windows with an alpha-ish pop!_OS 24.04 long-term support distribution. It runs on my Desktop Framework laptop, as System76 mentions that virtual machines will need some hardware acceleration trickery to run properly. It’s definitely an alpha, and a lot of things you’d expect to see in settings and around the system are missing or non-interactive.
What I can say about Cosmic, even at this early alpha stage, is that it’s relatively snappy and coherent compared to other systems I’ve used. There are only six main categories in the Settings app, one of which is “Desktop,” with robust settings for changing your dock, windows, workspaces, and appearance. I have a webcam on top of my monitor, which sometimes has a clamp large enough to cover the time/date combination found on GNOME desktops. The Cosmic panel controls made it easy to move this around and adjust my dock to my liking.
Showcased here is not intended for end users as much as for adventurous users or community distro packagers looking for a desktop environment that carries far less technical debt than GNOME and KDE. At the same time, there will be some tension and scraping between some applications and this new environment. Slack’s main window on my computer keeps disappearing and clicking its persistent notification in the tray won’t bring it back. I’ve always been the type to remap his caps lock key to escape, but there’s no room to do that yet, and the gnome-tweaks app doesn’t work either. Some of these may be distributive, some cosmic, and some in between. (Yes, I’m sure there’s a way to fix that keyboard via command or config file, but this was just a test run.)
The Cosmic team says that next work on settings pages, files usage, variable refresh rate and software rendering, among other bugs and refinements. Then comes the hard part of getting it accepted and installed across the wider open source community.
Catalog image by System76
