Is the COSMIC Desktop Getting Better Than KDE and GNOME?

"While KDE and GNOME dominate the landscape, a relative newcomer is starting to make waves with features other desktops still don't fully support," argues XDA Developers.

Linux 7.0 was the first release of the kernel to officially support Rust, but COSMIC has been all-in on Rust since the very beginning, and COSMIC 1.1 finally stripped all the leftovers of C language from the desktop. It no longer has any traces of Nautilus (the GNOME file manager), and there's now a COSMIC-native system monitor to replace the GNOME System Monitor, so you have even fewer chances of being afflicted by C-related problems.

The article calls COSMIC's system monitor "much better at showing detailed information about everything from processes to network and disk usage compared to the GNOME and KDE alternatives."

Stacking Windows

As someone who used to love following Windows news, one of the most disheartening announcements was when Microsoft gave up on Sets, a feature that essentially turned every app window into a tab you could combine with other apps in the same window. I never thought I'd see that feature again, until COSMIC came along.

Simply called "stacking", COSMIC has a feature that is exactly what Sets was supposed to be, though this time, you have more control. By default, apps still open in their proper, typical windows, with a title bar as you'd expect. But if you do want to combine multiple apps into one, you can:

• Right-click the title bar (or press Super + S) to enable stacking for that window.
• Then, simply drag another window over that one to start stacking them as tabs.

This essentially gives you a whole new way to create "workspaces", as you can have a single window with all the tools you need, so you don't need to jump between different windows all the time, and you can keep a given window focused on a specific workload, but have multiple apps within it. It's a great reminder of what Microsoft took from us, too.

Tiling, But On Demand

Tiling windows is one of those features some power users simply love, and yes, there are ways to make it happen on KDE and GNOME with third-party apps or extensions, but those aren't ideal. It's an extra step to set them up, and very often they don't play nice with all the features those desktops offer, especially as new updates come out and those tools may have a hard time keeping up with the development of the desktops themselves.

COSMIC is fantastic because not only does it have built-in window tiling, it's entirely controllable by the user. You can:

• Set any workspace to use tiling or floating windows depending on your preference, all completely independent of each other.
• Choose the new default behavior for new workspaces so things are always tuned to your preferences.
• Turn tiling on or off for a given workspace easily.
• Even while tiling is on, allow certain apps to ignore it and still float above others.

Not all these capabilities are exclusive to COSMIC, but to have this kind of feature built in with this level of control is still leagues better than anything KDE or GNOME offer in this regard.

The article argues COSMIC also makes customization extremely simple without stifling your options (like tweaking color options for your desktop). "This desktop environment just keeps getting better, and it's quickly establishing itself as a major competitor to long-standing alternatives."

Community Feedback

No (Score:1) Cosmic is not ready for prime time.

After waiting on upgrading Pop!_OS 22.04 to Pop!_OS 24.04 with Cosmic for as long as I could (in hopes of avoiding the bugs I assumed would come with moving from Gnome to a brand new desktop environment) I finally did. Cosmic is not ready for prime time. The number of bugs and PRs I've had to submit since switching to it is a deal breaker if this is your daily driver OS and desktop environment.

The components of Cosmic release very very frequently (every couple weeks). Upside is, when you encounter a bug, if you can write the PR to fix it and submit it, it'll get merged and deployed to the global user base of Cosmic in a couple weeks. Downside is that at this release frequency, the software isn't getting vetted at the level a production desktop environment needs to be.

Example, I reported a bug in the compositor, a core developer fixed the bug and deployed it, but introduced a new bug (that is obvious as soon as you use Cosmic). I have System76 hardware and so I'd like to run Pop!_OS, but I'm thinking of switching to Ubuntu 24.04 just so I can be on 24.04 but not be running Cosmic.

Some examples:

• Delete a line in the editor and it crashes: https://github.com/pop-os/cosm... [github.com]
• Page-up and Page-down don't work in the file browser: https://github.com/pop-os/cosm... [github.com]
• Windows shrink each time you move them: https://github.com/pop-os/cosm... [github.com]
• After fixing the shrinking windows, windows when maximized extend outside the display: https://github.com/pop-os/cosm... [github.com]

Fragmentation (Score:2) We have duplicated code into a new language and removed all synergy effects by sharing a code base with the rest of the community. Hurray! /s Maybe one day we can have bi-directional LLM-based translators that allow features and bug fixes to perculate back and forth forks.