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Going boldly into the COSMIC desktop environment
After three years of development, Linux hardware provider System76 has declared the COSMIC desktop environment stable. It shipped COSMIC Epoch 1 as part of the long-awaited Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS release on December 11, just in time for Linux enthusiasts to have something to tinker with over the end-of-year holidays. With the stable release out the door, it seemed like a good time to check back in on COSMIC and see how it has evolved since the first alpha. For a first stable release of a new desktop environment, COSMIC shows a lot of promise and room to grow.
System76 is, first and foremost, a provider of Linux laptops, desktops, servers, and other hardware. It originally shipped its hardware with Ubuntu preinstalled. It created the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS distribution in 2017 after Canonical discontinued work on the Unity desktop. Rather than trying to maintain Unity alone, the company offered GNOME as its default desktop instead. Eventually, System76 introduced a GNOME shell extension to add tiling features, but maintaining the extension in the face of GNOME changes proved to be difficult. Ultimately, System76 decided that it would build its own Rust-based, Wayland-only desktop environment.
As the version number indicates, this release is based on Ubuntu's 24.04 LTS, which has been out for about 18 months now. Pop!_OS users have had a longer-than-usual wait for the release because System76 decided to focus on its new COSMIC desktop environment rather than putting out a 24.04 release last year with the old GNOME-based desktop it had also called COSMIC.