I’ll briefly review the (currently in alpha 6) Cosmic DE in Pop Os 24.04 from System76 implemented in Rust.

The installation is smooth and easy to follow, based on standard dialogs:

I’m selecting “Clean Install” here because I’m testing it on a virtual machine.

There’s also the chance to encrypt the drive, but I’m not trying that.

The installation process is fast, and it only takes a few minutes.

It’s time to restart the installed system.

It’s a nice-looking DE, clearly inspired by GNOME, with a nice dock.

There are also a few beautiful wallpapers, all related to the space.

Generally, the DE is very responsive and smooth, though there are still graphical glitches now and then. Remember, it’s still in the alpha stage.

The DE comes with a few typical applications, like a terminal, a file manager, and a text editor; from what I understand, they’ve all been written from scratch. Although these applications look neat and clean, they don’t seem feature-complete yet, at least comparing them to Gnome or, even better, KDE-corresponding applications.

The file manager automatically changes the size of the icons when resizing its window.

However, there’s no way to have a tree view.

The terminal allows for some theme customizations, like custom profiles and also the beautiful transparency effect (by the way, note the style of application settings in Cosmic applications):

The above screenshot also shows the installer’s default partition layout.

However, currently, the terminal only allows you to either “Select All” or the text visible on the screen: while selecting, scrolling does not work.

Then, we have the application launcher that also looks clean and neat:

The launcher that appears with SUPER is very helpful. Note that by default, it shows the windows that are currently opened so you can quickly select one of them, e.g., by starting typing or by using the arrow keys:

Press “?” for more options:

The “File Search” looks interesting: I seem to understand that it relies on the standard “find” (or maybe “fd”) to show directories and files inside of them (see the found text file), though I haven’t tried that with actual directories full of tons of files.

The Google search also looks interesting:

The software center, with the “updates” functionality, looks fine:

Let’s now come to the well-known Pop OS “tiling” features:

The tiling features are nice. Also, the shortcuts make navigating and moving tiled windows very easy. During the moving, you also get nice effects.

In the “Settings” application, you can tweak many settings.

The “Appearance” setting, besides the standard “light” or “dark” mode, also allows you to change the accent color (I switched to green).

You also have additional appearance and theming settings, including icons.

By the way, I love the thick and colored border indicating the focused window. Of course, you can remove it if you don’t like it. I find it nice-looking and useful for easily spotting which window you’re working on.

Speaking of settings, Cosmic adopts a textual file approach, which I greatly like. Configuration files of applications or parts of the desktop can all be found in subdirectories of “~/.config/cosmic”.

For example, this is the file with the terminal opacity:

And this is the accent color of the dark theme:

This makes it very easy to manage your dotfiles in Cosmic. It is much easier than Gnome, with settings stored in the “dconf” database, and KDE, with its configuration files spread around in “~/.config” with names you always have to guess.

Of course, you can customize the shortcuts:

Finally, you have fractional scaling if you want:

To conclude this first look at Cosmic, considering it’s still in the alpha stage, I was very impressed by its responsiveness, cleanness, and beauty.

However, if I had to use it as a daily driver, I’d probably use other applications for tasks like file explorer, terminal, and text editor.

I’ll have another look at this DE soon!