opinions here are casual and personal and unfiltered please don’t treat this seriously
After ~2+ years of waiting, Cosmic DE has finally been released properly, and I can upgrade my kernel os version to 24.04 at long last.
Cosmic DE is yet-another desktop environment, but built with rust.
Compared to the POP!_OS riced-up gnome DE that <= 22.10 kernel versions were using, cosmic uses wayland (not x11) and moves away from gnome, to, well, cosmic itself. I was worried about compatibilty issues so I dedicated an entire saturday to make sure it doesn’t completly fork my desktop up.
Not so painful migration
I tried to do an upgrade with the good ol sudo apt full-upgrade -y.
This was incredibly broken and the shell hung halfway. fork this shit no one can do this properly.
So I did it the n00b but reliable way - flash the 24.04 ISO image and do a clean refresh install.
The install process is the same as usual. It was clean, fuss-free and fast (windows can learn a thing or two smh).
A simple reboot and viola! Welcome to cosmic DE.
Nothing big borked 🙏
Compared to upgrading the kernel (not OS) back then which had some upstream thing that borked my networking stack, nothing horrendous broke. Everything just works, which is a huge +1 when talking about usability.
And the end of the day we as users just want shit to work. and shit works. good job system76!
I was nervous about certain apps breaking, such as my VPN provider’s gui app which was specifically built for gnome. But shit works, so that’s good.
The usual apps work as you would expect, text editor (vscode), browsers, and more.
Windowing can be better
First - the good thing about workspaces on multiple monitors is that its seperated. I can switch workspaces on one monitor and it does not affect my other monitor. I like this. I can be more productive with this. Good.
Games work fine, as usual. Kudos to s76! Heroic games launcher and steam are not borked, and can talk to my GPU properly. The windowing is not forked (more on that later), so its OK. Gameable!
However, maybe its my 4k monitor mixed with my 2nd 1080p monitor, but for some cursed reason when game windows launch on my 2nd monitor, it is impossible to transfer the game window to the other monitor’s workspace. Maybe its a resolution problem. But that means that when launching games, for the few seconds where it starts up I have to have focus (be active in) the monitor i want the window to spawn on.
I cannot count the number of times I launch a game, and while waiting switch to my side monitor reading hackernews or youtube or some brainrot shit, and then i realise i did an oopsie and i have to restart my game and CLICK INTO the main monitor.
Is this a wayland thing? cuz damn this is frustrating.
Too Snappy
Compared to gnome, user interactions are quite snappy. Snappy in a slightly bad way, not responsiveness. Things are not really ‘smooth’. So moving shit around the dock and workspaces don’t feel particularly good. Sometimes when transferring a window to another workspace the entire damn window moves along with my mouse and covers the workspaces rectangle im supposed to drop it in. So I have to kind of put extra focus into seeing if my cursor is inside the rectangle for the window to be properly transferred to another workspace. A nit from me but it pisses me off that it doesn’t feel as smooth as the older gnome verison.
NOTIFICATIONS KIND OF SUCK ALSO FIX TELE PLS
I almost forgot about this. But for better or worse my telegram notifications popped up and I hate it.
telegram desktop notifications really really suck on cosmic. its not pretty. and it renders text wrong. why are html tags not processed?
and for some reason if i close telegram’s window i cannot fORKING open it again! not with the topbar notification, not with the app bar itself. I have to quit telegram and reopen that shit. just to see a reddit shitpost by my friends.
Cosmic apps out of the box are OK
No big complaints, shit works similar to the old gnome experience. For example, their file explorer cosmic files being able to work and look similar to nautilus on gnome. Tabs and stuff works.
Stupid wishlist
If someone from s76 is reading this PLEASE add default user icons, i dont want to download a picture to use as my user icon bring back the cute cat from gnome or some shit.
Also some icons are broken. what do you mean it’s transparent?
Conclusion
Cosmic works. It feels fast. It feels decently good tbh. Apart from minor UX teething issues, I can work with this.
Thankfully so since i really dont want to do a kernel version rollback.