Look during my distro hops I tried cosmic. I didn't get the allure. Maybe for a dead simple touch screen but it's too basic. The settings are basic, it lacks depth. I wasn't a fan of the gnome like interface I guess even if you take that out. The best feature was the tiling. Beyond that I just wasn't feeling the locked down UI and brain dead simple settings. KDE is too deep and has too many menus. Mint does it best. Little depth, little options, not enough to fuck things up too bad but still allow you to make it yours.
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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UX is a subjective topic.
This.
I haven't tried Cosmic yet, but for me it's the opposite: I feel GNOME (and KDE) is needlessly complex / bloated. Give me a simple tiling window manager that's efficient, quick and always reliable. No real need for menus or fancy animated toolbar widgets, just snappy instant response to my keypresses.
UX is as varied as people's tastes, and they also might evolve with the times.
Mint does it best
I guess you mean Cinnamon, Linux Mint is the distro (and it also comes with MATE and XFCE variants).
Cinnamon started as a fork of GNOME 3, for a while Linux Mint was shipping GNOME 3 + MGSE (Mint GNOME Shell Extensions).. GNOME is configurable through extensions, but due to frictions with the GNOME team it made more sense to fork.
I’ve been daily driving cosmic on cachy, and I’ve been very pleased. Just enough customization to meet my needs, excellent tiling support, and already pretty stable with few bugs despite the alpha status. It basically does everything I was used to using a twm for but with a much simpler set up.
Damn... all this happening after I left PopOs. Hope they catchup with the current Ubuntu version of 24 as they are still in 22.7 as i can remember. tbh their outdated version is the one of main reason I left it first hand and also their nvidia driver issue harder to fix or downgrade. Hope they fix their credibility in upcoming release.
Just use cosmic on another distro?
More options is more good. The beauty of the open source community is different offerings of the same product catgory directly benefit each other instead of competing. Looking forward to running Cosmic system apps on KDE.
There's a point where we have too many options and the space becomes too fragmented and inconsistent because everyone is doing their own thing instead of improving what others made.
I don't think we reached that with DEs, but if they don't maintain this one then it's kind of going to just be a waste of time and resources that could've been spent improving a different one.
Time will tell. DEs are massive undertakings and they have a lot of catch up to do.
The thing is that sometimes "improving what others made" can be more easily achieved via either re-writing or forking the project.
And not everyone agrees on what the direction for improvement should be. Sometimes improving UX means stripping things away, or at least remodeling it in ways that make supporting the old usecase troublesome. And that can be disruptive.
I hope it will be optimized😭😭
Sweet. I have really high hopes for cosmic and system76 for making inroads with mainstream users someday. Cosmic is way more stable compared to a year ago. It will probably be good enough for 26.04
Unfortunately, System76 hasn’t shared any specific details or an official timeline yet. But don’t worry—we’ll be among the first to let you know as soon as there’s news, so keep an eye out for updates.
It's better not to have a definite timeline and to release it when it's ready. First impressions are key because this will be System76's main distro for their computers.
this will be System76’s main distro for their computers.
Just to clarify, COSMIC is a DE, not a distro. PopOS is their distro.
I'm talking about the fact that Cosmic will be PopOS default DE.
Honestly, I've given up on Pop OS and cosmic. System76 clearly overestimated their abilities with the decision to develop their own desktop environment. As a result they have been in development limbo for cosmic for multiple years now and at the same time have abandoned their existing distro and its users. Pop OS is still based on Ubuntu 22.04 with no official upgrade path.
I ~~would've~~ wouldn't frame this as the distro is unusable and abandoned.
I've been on PopOS for 3 years and haven't had a single issue even with gaming.
Wouldn’t *
Thank you, swipe to text got me there lol
That makes a lot of sense.
I personally don't like any kind of big moves in the free software space at this point. Anything that stands the test of time does so because it has the community backing it.
Whenever we put our faith into a company to do the work for us, it always ends up being really expensive and mediocre.
Don't be fooled into thinking the rules of business stop applying when dealing with a Linux company. These people still care about profit above all else and will never do anything that would get in the way of maximizing it.
I have been using the Alpha for almost 6 months. Overall it has been a very positive experience. Even in Alpha, it worked better out of the box on my laptop than Fedora and Bazzite. Especially the printer support and multi-monitor support.
eh I'm going to take a wait and see approach.
The early alpha versions of COSMIC I really liked but over time with each new Alpha release it just felt...off? like kinda leaning into GNOME "please don't actually customize me" territory? and there were a couple keybinds that just weren't there. also it felt like it was getting slower with each release.
That being said I think if you just want a very simple DE with the option of good tiling then COSMIC is the way to go. It's been awhile since I tried one of the previous alphas so if his release really is the shit then I might consider switching my WM to it.
This puts into words the nameless feeling I had while using it. If OpenSUSE eliminates support for x11 before XFCE's Wayland is 100%, I might still use it full time, though.
The tiling feature is killer, I really wish KDE had something imilar that can be easily toggled on and off.
blame the devs for that. There was an git issue a year or so ago about just that. a user asked for tiling, many other users chimed in and said "yes, please" the KDE devs said "no, we personally don't like or use tiling so you're not going to have it either." Which essentially sums up KDE development. IF they don't use or like something than neither will you.
Krohnkite?
It's pretty much the best and only option for KDE but even then it's very janky. COSMIC is going to be the best option for this but again, you're then sacrificing the customization you'd get with Plasma.
And that sums up Linux DEs/WMs. If there's something you want you'll have to sacrifice something else. because there are NO DEs/WMs out there that will have everything you want in one package unless you build it yourself.
...unless you're MaoMaoWM and you're the dev who just said "fuck it, I'm including everything"
Tried it - it works, but isn't toggleable like the PopOS tiling which has a taskbar button and a hotkey.
Keybind the floating layout in settings and it will act as a toggle! (Taskbar button I dont have a solution for tho) However krohnkite still isnt anywhere near the polish of an actual tiling wm unfortunately
I never found any way to set up a keybind - I had to deactivate and logout.
Edit: I checked again and there's no hotkey anywhere. If you have a way to do this, I'm all ears.
Should be under keyboard -> shortcuts -> window management(or something similar) -> krohnkite float
That's to float one particular app window, it doesn't disable Krohnkite altogether. The magic of the PopOS tiling is that the toggle fully enables/disables it, effectively switching between a stacked and a tiling WM with the click of a button.
Krohnkite has a float mode (basically just disable) aswell as a float specific window. Unfortunately I cant access my desktop until much later but when I do I'll grab the specific instructions