It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community.
How does the community hear feel about this distribution and the company that has brought it to us?
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It used to be one of if not the greatest entry point for new Linux users, nowadays they got too worked up on their beef with GNOME, are trying to do their own thing and it honestly looks kinda pathetic.
If COSMIC is pathetic, then GNOME must be abysmally unusable. COSMIC was already planned long before there was any beef with GNOME. We listen to user feedback and prioritize development of features that our developers and users want. Good luck trying to replicate COSMIC’s theming and tiling capabilities in GNOME. Let alone the overall stability and performance of COSMIC. COSMIC Store is the fastest app store on Linux now. I’d recommend everyone to try it out.
sudo apt install cosmic-storeMy comment did sound way more aggressive than I intended, and I apologize for that, but getting this defensive as an answer when the question asked for an opinion definitely isn’t any less pathetic. I have a lot of respect on the work of the Pop team, and Pop was the first distro I have used, but none of your points are… good?
- Gradience fills the need for theming in an individual level for those that want it without breaking the look and feel of apps without the developers’ intent at a distribution level;
- Forge replicates most of Pop’s tiling capabilities, picking up the great work your team did over the years without intending to drop it for your own thing;
- Performance is something that isn’t necessarily lacking in other DEs and stable is a bold statement for a product still in alpha. Hopefully it really is whenever it gets a stable release though, I’m not rooting against your work;
- Also, it isn’t hard to say your app store is the fastest when it doesn’t have the years of crust other ones gathered from all the work put into it. I would get worried if it wasn’t.
Speaking of being defensive, not only are you being far more defensive than I, but these bullet points are both misleading and wildly inaccurate. It’s also telling that you think none of my points are good, when they are the truth. Could you possibly be even more a hypocrite?
If they are so misleading and inaccurate, then I’m all ears to why.
Again, I’m not against the project or the team, I just don’t like the direction S76 went for their own thing, instead of improving other existing projects. Having a full Rust stack is potentially pretty great though, and I’m all in for what it might become in the future, but this attitude about even the slightest of criticism speaks volumes about the people working on it.
I like it, I think it’s a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu is these days, if you know what I mean. And I’m really interested to see how the COSMIC desktop environment works out.
Also I really like their laptops. I want to get a Pangolin one day lol.
I think their current modified gnome is the best desktop that exists anywhere. Cosmic is a full desktop environment with an actual tiling window manager… a combo I think should be more common in desktops. The way they implement the tiling makes it really easy for beginners to use because you can turn it on/off by keyboard shortcut or clicking the plugin icon, and because you can just drag n drop windows to change their tiled positions (along with keyboard shortcuts if preferred). It’s hard to go back regular “window managers”.
The System76 devs have good ideas, they seem really cool, and sane! They have been a net positive for the Linux community and desktop development IMO. I am SO hyped for the new Cosmic DE!
You realise KDE’s had tiling for years, right? (Bismuth and then native)
There’s a very large gap between having tiling, and having excellent auto-tiling capabilities with intuitive shortcuts and behaviors. COSMIC’s autotiling was designed from the ground up to be just as usable with a mouse as it is with a keyboard.
Bismuth (and Krohnkite before) never worked nearly as well for me, and AFAIK are both abandoned. The built in tiling is closer to FancyTiles/tiling zones, not auto-tiling like Pop Shell. Pop Shell also has been here for “years” by that metric lol
Ive been using it for several years. I hardly think about it at all, which is pretty high praise.
For some reason, referring to a computer or VM that runs Linux as a “Linux box” triggers me.
I used Pop!_OS when transitioning from Windows 11 to Linux and ran it for about 3/4 months before deciding to try EndeavourOS. I had absolutely no issues with Pop and it really made the transition super easy.
I’m super excited to try out their new (cosmic) DE! I will probably install Pop on my 2nd SSD to test and play around with it.
I’ve been thinking about running EndeavorOS but seeing people here complain about Arch breaking when the AUR is used, makes me shy away from EOS. Do you use packages from AUR and have you had any issues with the OS? Running Tumbleweed right now.
Any problems I’ve had have been my own doing or a weird Nvidia driver issue. Having said that though, I’ve had very very few issues, it has been rock solid!
I’ve got a couple of packages from the AUR but I don’t recall ever having any issues with any of them.
The only real “issue” I’ve had has been related to the Linux Kernel on my main machine (Ryzen 5 3600 & Nvidia GTX1660 TI). For some reason, only the LTS and mainline kernel work, if I try any other kernel I get an error (something to do with Nvidia and my GPU).
Awesome! Thanks for the reply. Next time my machine needs to be wiped, I’m heading towards EOS to give it a try.
So…I’ve just updated my laptop with EOS and now my /efi partition won’t mount. Things definitely can break…unfortunately
Uh oh. How did the partition get deleted from your fstab?
It was too far from the metal for me. But it is a great distribution. Especially if you’re looking for fancy pants gaming ability or just turn-key ready to roll MS alternative.
Lemme guess: arch? ;)
😀 I sure sound like it. Debian these days though. I’m too lazy for Arch anymore.
Right? I’m ok with my computer being a bit of a hobby, but it shouldn’t be a side-job unless I’m getting paid, goddammit.
Absolutely! When I was 20ish and new, yeah. But it hit me about 3years ago thats ALL I do professionally is automate as much as I can to make life easier for users and companies. Why am I not doing that for me?
On a side note, I’m seriously loving the immutable distributions. I’m thinking that’s my new direction.
Sorry to rattle on lol
Like… I like to tinker and fiddle, but, at the end of the day, I want stable and reliable. So I love PopOS, but should I really be on Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed? Like… eh… am i old?
Lol
😀
You sound like the target audience for Bluefin. I’m running it and it’s excellent.
Pop is sick and absolutely shines on laptop.
I love the fact that System76 is an American company pushing Linux forward (well to certain degrees, anyway). I know they use hardware produced in other countries (for chassis at minimum, not sure about the rest of the components), but it’s still nice to see.
Next time I’m in the market for a laptop, I’ll certainly give them a solid look (hopefully the form factors of the more powerful systems will be less…girthy…by then).
Pop!_OS is quite solid. I’ve used it from time to time. However, I’m partial to Arch because I like to be closer to the bleeding edge (currently using Garuda for my gaming rig).
It is where i started my linux journey 3 years ago. And where i stayed all this time. It had a nice environment setup and for me with cuda accelerated ML it is amazing with the easy drivers.
Even though I wasn’t a fan of their modified Gnome DE, I really like the distro as a whole. It made it seamless to use both AMD and Nvidia cards, Steam worked out of the box, and I had no issues with using Ubuntu or Debian repos. I’m not sure whether I’ll use Cosmic or not, but I’ll probably give it a fair try eventually.
I’m interested to try their Cosmic desktop later this year.
Overall, seems like a solid company, I’ve heard good things about their laptops, although I’ve never had one myself.
Pop_OS as a distro, heard generally good things about. The few times I’ve messed around with it have been fine. The folks that stick with it seem to like it.
I have only used it for a little more than a day so far, but I’m already in love with it because it basically required 0 tinkering to get my Nvidia GPU to work, and the few games I have tried have been running almost flawlessly.
Their new COSMIC desktop is generating a tonne of buzz. It may spill over to the distro in general.
I am not a PopOS user but, watching the evolution of COSMIC, System76 seems very user focussed and makes sensible decisions. That bodes well for the overall OS.
I installed this on my touchscreen laptop after trying and failing to get many other distros to work with the touchscreen.
With Pop! it just worked.
