Moreover, COSMIC has all the ingredients to meaningfully challenge the long-standing dominance of KDE and GNOME. While KDE occupies a somewhat different niche both visually and functionally, the GNOME ecosystem is the one most likely to see users migrate to COSMIC.
The reason is straightforward: everything GNOME lacks and forces you to use extensions (inviting a compatibility battle twice a year) comes built in with COSMIC. It restores a sense of normalcy while also delivering functionality that, in many areas, goes well beyond what GNOME provides.
Hmm. I thought I'd give Pop!_OS a look. They have an ARM version, so I downloaded the ISO image and decided I'd try UTM for a quick go.
I must say the graphics are impressive and the responsiveness is very nice. I gave the VM 8GB RAM and 64GB HDD, but for some reason the install goes into a loop. I run the install, it says to restart, and then the install starts all over and there isn't a "cancel" option.
The desktop is very MATE-like (or at least the way I have my MATE set up). There's a dock (plank), and menus are at the top, with Workspaces and Applications on the left, a date-time indicator in the center and the usual control widgets on the right. The standard Libre Office, Firefox, and system utilities, plus a store that has a good number of available apps, including some specifically made for Pop!_OS.
All in all, I'd have no problem recommending it to someone who wanted to dip their toes in the Linux world. Realizing that I'm running it in a VM on a Mac, some oddities might be due to irregularities between layers, but for a "first stable release," it's better than some I've seen.
I'm not going to swap out my MATE server, because I have too much time invested in it, but for a sandbox machine, or even a fresh computer, Pop!_OS is a real candidate!
I visited. Downloaded the ISO. Tried. Played around with.
Definitely not for me. My good old UM Iāve been using for 12 years now still doing the job in and out. I always face deception (and yes still looking aroundā¦who knowsā¦) with these flavours trying new things or giving themselves a newlook with the sole purpose of achieving same for the ultimate users.
I do understand that the āengineā behind and using the Linux kernels (KDE, Gnome and what not) may be slightly different. But one uses a car and like it first because the dashboard and seating are friendly to them; unless they are mechanics and want to play under the hood.
Not asking anybody to share my view, here.
Cosmic is basically a copy of Gnome written āfrom scratchā in Rust with more extensions and features OOTB as far as i understood it from a couple videoās i saw.
I never tried it simply because it looks exactly like Gnome, i thought it would be a totally different kind of DE, so it didnāt impress me at all after seeing screenshots and videoās about it throughout the year. I donāt get the hype of new distroās (CachyOS, Omarchy for example) and DEās/WMās lately, itās basically all the same in the end and based on something. Not much new to see imho.
We all have different preferences. I hate docks. I want a panel with a menu. If it doesnāt offer that it is not for me. I hated Gnome3 and gave it a two month try, hated it even worse after that.
I tried Pop! in a VM on an older Intel-based machine with old AMD graphics. - I agree that it seems to act like UM in many respects. It was easy to adapt to it. I found it a little slower than UM, but that could be because my VM was under-resourced a bit. Over all easy to like.
Thanks, I did not know that it was based on rust.
I found this part interesting:
The Pop!_OS desktop environment has been based on GNOME since the beginning. Eventually, however, System76 decided it was time to break free of GNOME and create something from scratch. That something was COSMIC desktop, and it was written in Rust and utilized Rust-based libraries, such as iced and libcosmic.
