System76’s COSMIC Desktop Hits 1.0

System76 has announced that its long‑shaded COSMIC desktop environment is now stable, shipping with Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS. After three years of incremental development, the first production release—Epoch 1—brings a Rust‑based, Wayland‑only desktop that blends traditional floating windows with a convenient tiling mode.

A Brief Development History

  • Origins – System76 originally shipped its hardware with Ubuntu pre‑installed. When Canonical dropped Unity, the company pivoted to GNOME, adding a tiling extension.
  • Shift to a Native DE – Maintaining the extension proved fragile as GNOME evolved, prompting System76 to build its own desktop from scratch. The result is COSMIC, written in Rust using the Iced GUI toolkit.
  • Road to 1.0 – The first alpha appeared in August 2024. Over the next 15 months, the team added core applications, polished window‑management features, and integrated a custom Pop!_OS kernel.

Key Features and Design Choices

Feature Description
Hybrid Window Management COSMIC offers floating and tiling modes per‑workspace, with the ability to toggle individual windows between the two. This lowers the entry barrier for users unfamiliar with pure tiling managers.
Wayland‑Only The desktop runs exclusively on Wayland, leveraging modern compositing and security benefits. System76 also publishes scripts for swapping in alternative compositors like niri or Sway.
Rust & Iced The core UI is written in Rust, a language prized for safety and performance. Iced, though still labeled "experimental" on GitHub, demonstrates its viability for full‑blown desktop environments.
Flatpak‑Centric Snap support has been removed in favor of Flatpak, aligning with System76’s preference for universal packaging.
Custom Applets The top panel and dock are built from modular applets. While currently lacking per‑applet configuration, the source is available on GitHub, and community applets are hosted on the Cosmic Utils site.

User Experience in Practice

The stable release feels “usable” for most day‑to‑day tasks, but several nuances persist:

  • Alt+Tab now lists all open windows, but the floating dialog still feels unconventional.
  • Window Persistence – Tiling settings do not survive workspace changes; a window toggled to floating on one workspace reverts to tiled when moved.
  • App Quality – Core utilities (Terminal, Text Editor, Files) are functional but sometimes lack polish compared to their GNOME counterparts. The media player remains minimal.
  • Customizability – Tweaks, a Flatpak app, allows theme changes and dock/panel adjustments, but font size and UI scaling options are currently missing.

Despite these quirks, many reviewers note that COSMIC provides a “good enough” tiling experience without the steep learning curve of Sway or i3.

Technical Integration and Packaging

Pop!_OS 24.04 ships with Linux 6.17.9, a kernel sourced from Ubuntu but lightly customized for System76 hardware. The distribution includes separate builds for x86_64 (with NVIDIA or AMD/Intel drivers) and ARM (Ampere Altra CPUs). Secure boot must be disabled for installation.

The COSMIC Store replaces the legacy Pop!_Shop, offering a responsive interface for Debian, Flatpak, and third‑party applets. However, it currently omits verification status for Flatpaks and separates desktop application updates from system packages.

Community and Roadmap

System76 has embraced open‑source collaboration tools: a Mattermost channel replaces proprietary chat, and a public GitHub repository hosts the code. A public project board tracks COSMIC Epoch 2, with planned improvements such as enhanced Alt+Tab options, per‑application volume control, and expanded window‑management settings.

The next Pop!_OS LTS (26.04 2026) may or may not include Epoch 2, but the roadmap signals continued investment in COSMIC as a competitor in the desktop space.

Conclusion

COSMIC 1.0 is a milestone that demonstrates System76’s ability to move beyond hardware into a fully integrated software stack. While the desktop still feels a work in progress—particularly in app polish and documentation—the hybrid windowing model and Rust foundation position it as a compelling alternative for developers and power users alike. The real test will be whether COSMIC can attract users from entrenched GNOME, KDE, and other DEs, or even draw new entrants to Linux.

Source: LWN.net article 1050268