As we warp 9 our way toward The Year of the Linux Desktop, an exciting new desktop environment has dropped. System76’s COSMIC beta. Under the hood COSMIC (at least by default) is built upon System76’s Pop!_OS (though there are versions with other distributions available such as Fedora and SUSE), which itself is based on Ubuntu; I know – the relationships between Linux distributions can start to look like a backwoods family reunion. In practical terms what this all means is that if you are familiar with Ubuntu and its package management system and underpinning, then you will feel very at home in COSMIC / Pop!_OS. This release sports its very own Rust at the core compositor, a suite of new first-party apps and still maintains support for X11 apps via XWayland. There’s a lot in this release, so I’m just going to focus on the features that are important for developers. For reference I was testing this on a Darter Pro (darp10-b) with these specs:
COSMIC TERMINAL
Probably the first thing you do when installing anew distro is apt update and apt upgrade to update the built-in packages. Well, if you’re on COSMIC, you’re going to notice a shiny new built-in terminal. This is a long overdue improvement bringing GPU acceleration, profiles and natural feeling splits. These improvements bring the built-in terminal up to par with popular third-party terminals such as Ghost or Alacrity. COSMIC’s terminal also follows the entire desktop environment in having granular themeing and customization options.
POP LAUNCHER
One of the most surprising (at least to this JarJar fan) features is the Pop Launcher. Being built from the ground up to be extensible. Think of it as your personal command center. Out of the box, it’s packed with plugins for stuff you might actually want instead of just silly Gungan demos, such as quick calculations, file navigation that doesn’t make you want to just do all I/O ops in terminal, reasonable terminal access, and integrated web searches; I was actually surprised how often I found myself using the web-search for quick documentation lookup and the like while coding. The part that’ll make your picky dev-self chill out for a second: you can make it your own. Drop your custom scripts right into ~/.local/share/pop-launcher/scripts.
LIBCOSMIC
I’m taking a bit of a flyer on this one, but I find libcosmic to be very interesting and have a lot of potential. At it’s core, it’s a GUI app / applet development library. I’m more than a little skeptical that anyone who isn’t either working at System76 or just a die-hard COSMIC super-fan writing full-scale applications in this. However, I find the applet potential, especially given the tight integration afforded by libcosmic, extremely interesting. My thinking is that folks who are committed to using COSMIC as their daily driver are likely to find at least some use-case that justifies the development time of an applet. Will this break the iron grip that Electron apps have on desktop Linux users? Nope, but it’s a nice to have.
The bottom line here is that if you’re a Linux curious developer who is say coming from macOS but is having a tough time selecting a Linux distro, COSMIC should be on your list to try. Let me know what you think on LinkedIn or X. Also, if you have legacy data holding you back schedule a FREE legacy data migration evaluation for a limited time! Brought to you by Alice.
