this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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It's a more than 4 years old blog post.
I can't tell much about the things that the writer complains about. But concerning Cosmic: I think a new additional DE is a win. People who like it can use it, others can skip it. More variation means more choice.
Personally: I find Cosmic still a bit barebone. It is very fast. It think it looks quite good (besides their wallpapers). It's not yet there, where it needs to be for me to use it as a daily driver, but I find it impressive what System 76 released in their first final version.
Gnome is the most beautyful DE in my opinion, but I find it's UX absolut horrible. I hate usining it without quite some extensions and I do absolutely not use it. Look at it, yeah. But using it is not intuitive at all for me.
Luckily, there are other DE's I like. That's the beauty about Linux.
Extensions are there to be used, just use them. Imagine using kde or firefox without adjusting it. There is a base version that fits for everyone and people can write extenions.
Yes, many extensions should be in the base version but who am I to tell the GNOME devs what to include? The extension manager should be included by default. It's the distro's maintainers fault if it's not included at this point. They should be easier to discover, but again, I am not really helping to improve the situation either.
Except if you use any kind of rolling or semi-rolling distro you will have to deal with extensions breaking every major update. If a different DE offers these features out of the box, it makes way more sense to me to just use that.
you can bypass the version validation check
This. I find that most extensions don't break as gnome isn't making radical upgrades.
Yes but if the only extension that breaks is important in your workflow, you’re still left with a sour taste.
That’s why, despite needing more extensions, I’ve only iept 3-4 which never break.
Yeah it’s definitely a bit weird to setup but I don’t think I can leave gnome now that I’ve finally made it mine
I think getting the base DE and 'adding modules' (extensions) is great. And some distros like Bazzite add around 10+ extensions by default.
I agree 100%. Gnome is gorgeous. I switched to KDE because they get gaming related features first, I assume because of the Valve collab.