I decided to give Cosmic a spin (pun intended).
My first thought is, this looks a lot like PopOS which makes sense, given that PopOS uses Cosmic.
I have to say, it's very fast and snappy. I'm not crazy about the default toolbar settings (I know I can change them). But have a menu at the bottom and a toolbar at the top takes up a lot of screen real estate. The little rubiks cube brings up the installed applications, it reminds me a lot of Gnome in that sense. Also like Gnome, you can't have two of some applications visible of the screen at the same time.
This is a beta version, but so far I haven't run into any major problems. I do highly recommend you have a nice discrete video card (Radeon or Geforce). It did install on a NUC I have here, but I kept getting "Waiting on Cosmic" errors. I would guess it expects the windows to pop up now. Not in a second or two.
I researched Cosmic a little. I found out some interesting things.
Initially, COSMIC was a modified version of GNOME, but it has evolved into a standalone desktop environment built from scratch
It's written in Rust, COSMIC aims to provide a more stable, secure, and optimized user experience
It includes features like custom theming, streamlined window tiling, and its own applications such as a text editor, terminal emulator, file manager, settings application, app store, and media player. It doesn't borrow any of these from another desktop. These apps are also written in rust, which likely helps with the fast snapiness. It doesn't use GTK3 or Qt6, it has it's own graphics toolkit called Iced.
Also it doesn't use a standard greeter like sddm, but has it's own greeter. (Simply called Cosmic greeter).
I will be playing with this a little bit more. I installed it on Qemu/KVM VM also, so I could take the screenshots above. I had to install it in a weird way, but remember this is just a beta version.
Bottom line, I like the speed of it. Noticeably faster response than any other desktop I have ever used. I don't really like the Gnome like application menu, and the fact I can't view my applications while I have a browser or terminal open at the same time.
For people who don't like debian/apt this gives another option to use Cosmic. Also in the past PopOS has had hardware compatibility issues with non System76 hardware. I can usually get it to work, but it sometimes takes a little ... umm.. massaging. Under Fedora, it runs on any hardware Fedora runs on.
My first thought is, this looks a lot like PopOS which makes sense, given that PopOS uses Cosmic.
I have to say, it's very fast and snappy. I'm not crazy about the default toolbar settings (I know I can change them). But have a menu at the bottom and a toolbar at the top takes up a lot of screen real estate. The little rubiks cube brings up the installed applications, it reminds me a lot of Gnome in that sense. Also like Gnome, you can't have two of some applications visible of the screen at the same time.
This is a beta version, but so far I haven't run into any major problems. I do highly recommend you have a nice discrete video card (Radeon or Geforce). It did install on a NUC I have here, but I kept getting "Waiting on Cosmic" errors. I would guess it expects the windows to pop up now. Not in a second or two.
I researched Cosmic a little. I found out some interesting things.
Initially, COSMIC was a modified version of GNOME, but it has evolved into a standalone desktop environment built from scratch
It's written in Rust, COSMIC aims to provide a more stable, secure, and optimized user experience
It includes features like custom theming, streamlined window tiling, and its own applications such as a text editor, terminal emulator, file manager, settings application, app store, and media player. It doesn't borrow any of these from another desktop. These apps are also written in rust, which likely helps with the fast snapiness. It doesn't use GTK3 or Qt6, it has it's own graphics toolkit called Iced.
Also it doesn't use a standard greeter like sddm, but has it's own greeter. (Simply called Cosmic greeter).
I will be playing with this a little bit more. I installed it on Qemu/KVM VM also, so I could take the screenshots above. I had to install it in a weird way, but remember this is just a beta version.
Bottom line, I like the speed of it. Noticeably faster response than any other desktop I have ever used. I don't really like the Gnome like application menu, and the fact I can't view my applications while I have a browser or terminal open at the same time.
For people who don't like debian/apt this gives another option to use Cosmic. Also in the past PopOS has had hardware compatibility issues with non System76 hardware. I can usually get it to work, but it sometimes takes a little ... umm.. massaging. Under Fedora, it runs on any hardware Fedora runs on.
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