Following the December launch of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the first major COSMIC desktop release, System76 software engineers have continued making improvements to their Rust-based desktop environment.
In the weeks since the COSMIC Epoch 1 release, there have been two point releases so far with continuing to roll out minor new features and fixes. Some of the latest COSMIC enhancements include:
- With the COSMIC compositor there are now rounded window corners. All window corners can now be rounded and not limited to just COSMIC Apps. They can be squared if so desired via COSMIC Settings.
I have serious issues with Cosmic. When I lock the screen and come back, then it has kills all terminals except the Cosmic terminal, firefox has become… broken, for the lack of a better word, where all new pages just give gray background color and no menu items work, and the sound is reset to the laptop speaker instead of hdmi, not the disolay though, only sound. Then fullscreening terminals also makes them crash, as in they seem to refuse to take input.
It is not really usable. But since nvidia on x11 in popos started resetting the display config when the screen went to sleep, it beats the alternative.
Somebody else experiencing the Firefox thing on PopOS oh my sweet God I am not alone
Cosmic is kind of the best of the worst I’ve tried so far.
It’s where I’m settled for now, but it does have quirks, especially with steam, full screen, and being about to drag windows outside of the viewport (under the top menu)
But it’s nice, and you can theme it okay
I’ve tried running it twice full-time and ended up going to Kubuntu. My bad on judging KDE Plasma from my experience with it when Plasma 5 was new. I just used Gnome all this time. A decade later KDE is actually what I was hoping Cosmic would become someday. Really polished up compared to early Plasma 5 days
I still keep pop_os on an old laptop to monitor progress. I like it. Just needs a lot more fleshing out
When Kubuntu craters again (and it will), try the Fedora KDE spin if you want to stick with a KDE desktop.
I’ve never had anything but trouble with Kubuntu and I’ve tried it several times over the last decade. Maybe they’ve got it stabilized, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
