Is The Cosmic Desktop Really Ready?

Cosmic is an upcoming Linux desktop environment that promises good customization, tiling capabilities, and just generally to be very fast. Built by the developers of Pop OS, a distribution that has a good reputation for their Nvidia support, it provides its own design language, incorporates many of the most liked features of other desktop environments, and includes their own core applications. And since Cosmic is now already in beta, slowly preparing for a stable release, I think now is the time to take a good look at it. In this video, we're going to check out some of the improvements they made for the next release of Pop OS, how it compares to different desktop environments, and how I feel about Cosmic myself. Let's get into it. This video was made possible by channel members of our community. If you want to participate in selecting new video topics, see what's going on behind the scenes, and gain access to various tips and tricks, then please make sure to check out the join button or the link in the video description down below. It has been a while since the last time I checked out Cosme and since then there have been many updates and the beta release of Pop OS 24.04 which includes this new desktop environment out of the box and it's what I used for this video. However, if you like to use Cosmic on a different distribution, then you can try it on one of these as well. After the installation, which was quite easy, the first change that I noticed was the setup guide, which now features some customization options to ease users into Pop OS. You can choose between six different preconfigured themes and it provides you with two default layouts depending if you like a no Mac experience like Pop OS has had for years or if you prefer a more Windows and plasma-like one. Especially for newcomers, options are important and having them straight in the setup guide is a really nice thing to have. While there haven't been any major design changes since the Cosmic Alpha, there have been many improvements to the core applications and desktop environment underneath. Let's get into some of these changes, but also highlight some of the problems. The Cosmic Software Store comes with laptop support out of the box, which means that not only do you get access to many applications from its Ubuntu base, but also to a broader selection without having to fiddle with anything. Discord, different web browsers, officially supported programs, and much more. While I personally find the design of the store a bit unintuitive, it is very fast, and once you get to know it a bit, it's not that bad. There are still some features missing, like if I flat the quer to feature some add-ons.