Have you tried the new-ish KDE window tiling? (Super-T by default) I had a similar desire to you, and am quite happy with what KDE provided. It'd be interesting to read a comparison between the two.
Although I'm happy enough with what KDE gives me that COSMIC would have to be substantially better before I'd endure the switching costs.
I like tiling a lot more than I like floating windows. Cosmic is my daily driver and is awesome. I just wish it had a bit more customization options, I don't want to spend days rummaging through wikis like with hyprland but having a bit more control over it would be nice, not a deal breaker though
I hard bounced off COSMIC with the complete lack of theming. I can't even set my clock to a reasonable format in it. The only thing it has going for it is sane multi-monitor support, which neither KDE nor GNOME have gotten right so far (though at KDE there is some activity around it, dunno 'bout GNOME).
I tried a bunch of shells when I got my Legion Go, including COSMIC. It had the worst touchscreen support of any of them.
Now that SteamOS is officially released, I just use KDE. Maybe COSMIC will be better at touch eventually, but since it's a traditional laptop company, I'm not sure.
I really hate that at some point in the past, KDE developers decided that they hated how deeply intuitive virtual desktops are and deprecated them in favor of something deeply unintuitive (Activities). Any issue or complaint mentioning it is shot down with "you're holding it wrong."
Please just give virtual desktops first class support and lets forget about the Activities experiment. Most users hate it.
The attitude regarding it is about as bad as Gnome forcing Overview on everyone, refusing to provide a first party dock or lightweight launcher. Despite almost every distro and 95% of Gnome users immediately installing Dash to Dock.
I'm not familiar with the Gnome terminologies. Is Overview the one where they removed all the desktop icons, breaking 40 years of GUI conventions going back to the 1970s? (It's impossible to do a search on a product called "Overview".) I blew away Gnome after that, installed Mint MATE (now Cinnamon), and vowed to never touch Gnome again.
Overview is when you press the Super ('Windows') key.
What appears is an unholy amalgamation of a launcher, a workspace strip, a window overview, workspace peeking, and a dock.
Worse yet is that every time you go in or out of this overview, an animation plays, making things fly and animate everywhere constantly, whenever you want to take any action.
Whenever someone points out to Gnome developers that most people only want to open a launcher to type "52*93" or find a contact, that they just want to mouse over a dock to have a lightweight way to see if an application is open (and to switch to it), they get irate and tell you their vision is vastly superior.
Gnome could be pretty great if the developers their attitude to their users wants and the feedback on their issue tracker wasn't extreme snark and "actually we are right". Even if clear UI defects are pointed out, no, in fact they are right.
The Gnome peoples also frustrate any attempt at improving Wayland at a more rapid clip.
There is a reason why Valve went with KDE. KDE has its own set of problems, but at least they are receptive, cooperative and friendly. I genuinely hope Valve puts enough money into KDE that Gnome with its high and mighty attitude gets completely railroaded.
Clearly you've had some interaction that upset you and I apologize for that, but I've never come across any Plasma dev who felt we nailed that one (and I wrote large parts of the panels, the menu, the icon desktop, etc.) I was genuinely surprised by your comment.
Plasma/KDE's virtual desktops are working for me, as 3x3, 4x4 would be too small in the widget which shows in the 'taskbar', which is only 24 pixels high, here.
Took me some time and asking in their irc-channel, but actually the basic setup is super-simple, and was too 'intuitive' for an old greybeard like me :-)
You right-click on the launcher icon, or the systray and "Add or Manage Widgets", then a window appears where you can pick all sorts of widgets in a bar to the left, which then appear in a subwindow to the right. You just want the Pager, and remove any instances of that Activities Pager thing, if it is/they are already present(because you can have multiple instances in different places(leftover from earlier tries, maybe)).
What I didn't get was that you can pick that pager-widget from the subwindow, and move it anywhere you want it to in that whole taskbar-panel(outside the edit window!), by holding the mousebutton down(drag), until it is exactly where you want it, and then releasing the mouse-botton(drop).
And then "Exit Edit Mode" in the still open window, which then closes. That's all there is to it.
(Similar to how you customize the appearance of Firefox)
From then on you can configure the pager by right clicking onto it, and virtual desktops in system settings like you want them. Maybe having it appear larger with some key-combo, or whatever.
During the time I cursed it, I discovered the activity thing isn't really active anymore, they just let it there for the people who want/like it, meanwhile the real virtual desktop thing didn't get much attention, but that may change in the future?
Edit: Actually the most logic sequence of things to configure would be to first go into System Settings -> Window Management -> Virtual Desktops and configure how much of them you want, and how they should be arranged.
Then activate and position the Pager like I described above, and after that how it presents them.
Nonetheless I'm thinking that could be more integrated, and the pager could be larger, when howering the mouse pointer over it.
Can't switch between workspace 1 and 2 on my right monitor while leaving my left one on workspace 3. In fact, I believe by default I wouldn't even get workspaces on my secondary monitor. Because who needs 'organization' anyway?
Gnome works OK with integer scaling, more granular than this and you're up shit creek.
E.G. can you set one screen to 150% and one to 175%? (I think the answer to this is 'technically yes but then everything goes a bit blurry because they do it by rendering at 2x then downscaling')
Proper mixed dpi scaling means stuff will render pixel-perfectly instead of downscaling hacks.
I think even if the company goes away we will see this continue. It modern it rust and some if its fundamentals are already used by other projects. Of course not same way, but its not just going away.
I was introduced to UNIX in 1993, Linux in 1995's Summmer, and have lost count how many X Windows desktops or windows managers have come and gone in 32 years.
I wasted too much time tweaking Enlightenment. I remember that was fun but I don't really remember much about actually using it.
OS/2's Workplace Shell feels like the biggest lost opportunity (and has nothing to do with UNIXy stuff). I really liked Rexx and the SOM stuff felt cleaner than what became COM in Windows.
Window Maker/AfterStep were my all time favourites in GNU/Linux world.
I used to be in the GNOME camp during its early days, even wrote a tiny article to The C/C++ User's Journal regarding Gtkmm, nowadays I rather use XFCE.
The original fvwm also holds a special place, that was the first I used in GNU/Linux, back in 1995, and I got to customise it quite a bit.
SOM was great, it also supported implementation inheritance, and had metaclasses concept as well.
I like COM as idea, I dislike how badly Microsoft keeps rebooting the developer experience, and isn't able to provide modern toolig as easy as it was from VB 6, Delphi, C++ Builder. For something that has become the central mechanism how Windows APIs are delivered.
Some underappreciated and forgotten tiling wms that are still viable today:
- ratpoison ("tmux for X11". Ultralight, great for kiosks and similar where you barely want a WM at all)
- stumpwm (ratpoison on steroids in Lisp)
- Xmonad (A bit different tiling dynamic that some prefer. I dig it despite Haskell, not because of it)
- Qtile (Very flexible and easily hackable in python yet reasonably stable and fast. You can reproduce for example the Xmonad or i3 experiences pretty easily)
I skimmed the linked story and I still don’t really know what POP!_OS is. They are using the Linux kernel and wrote their own desktop environment, but what’s in between that? Does it include all the GNU system tools? Is there a lot of software that takes advantage of the COSMIC desktop environment? Do they have an App Store? Is it closer to something like Ubuntu or is it more like Android?
It's ubuntu with their own desktop and app store (kinda like mint) its also known for being the best linux experience for nvidia users. It's designed for power users and gamers
No? They can run on cosmic, just like they can run on any other desktop. It's a linux distro, it does linux distro things and happens to be built on ubuntu. What part of this are you not getting? Remember when Ubuntu made Unity because they were pissed at the GNOME people? That's what System76 did, they got mad at GNOME because GNOME didn't like how much they were messing with GNOME
I'm not super familiar with the history of GNOME, KDE, or COSMIC and I've never used COSMIC and I haven't been able to see into their app store to see what apps are available.
The version of Chrome (for example) that Google distributes uses GTK which is GNOME, no? So I was wondering if System76 forked that and made a version that uses the COSMIC API.
I've been using 22.04 for about six months (AI development and some Steam games) - I really enjoy it. The 24.04 upgrade was flawless.
It may sound a little odd but I'd describe my time with Pop!_OS as "quiet". It feels good to be total control again. I don't have to constantly disable things and there isn't a Copilot icon on my dock that comes back from the dead every few days.
Obsidian, 1Password, VS Code, Warp, etc. all work without issue.
Piggybacking on this… do all nvidia cards have the same issue with Linux drivers, where the fan won’t ever go below 30%? I have a 3090 on Ubuntu 24 and hours of googling netted nothing that worked.
I use Cosmic on a DGX Spark, as my daily driver, and it works pretty well.
They don’t have a pop os iso for arm64, but they do have arm64 Debian repo. So I just took DGX os (what Nvidia ships on the device), added the pos os “releases” repo, and installed cosmic-session.
It works like a charm and provides a super useful tiling experience out of the box.
This is replacing my M3 Pro as my daily driver and I’ve been pretty happy with it.
I recently upgraded to an ultrawide monitor and find the Cosmic UX to be hands down better than what I get in the Mac with it.
If you want a Linux desktop with the productivity boost of a tiling window manager with a low learning curve, it’s pretty good.
PopOS 20/22 was the first "as good as mac" desktop linux experience IMO. Didn't really need to improve on it from my POV since Chrome and Steam and Proton apps worked in it just great. I'm doing the upgrade now, I hope I don't regret it.
Been running Cosmic releases since the later alphas and through the beta cycle without issue... will update in the next few days to full release. Looking forward to it.
There are a couple less than ideal edges IMO, but it's gotten to be a very solid experience. I've been really happy with Pop+Cosmic myself. I appreciate that they keep the kernel more current than upstream Ubuntu as well.
For what it's worth.. it's based on Ubuntu 24.04, which is where their version starts... they're much more up to date on the kernel, a lot of the packages are newer than upstream as well. It's a more current LTS than what Ubuntu offers, but they keep the version number.
Also, they didn't do a release while COSMIC desktop was under development, and the release cycle was alpha/beta on a full baseline to match the COSMIC development... unless you think you can develop a full DE in Rust faster than that.
Same though from me. Like WTF, we're about 4,5 months away from 26.04 LTS and they're just launching 24.04 NOW?!
How is this supposed to convince people who are already happy with the KDE or Gnome or other variants of Ubuntu and which ship without such monumental delays, thay they should switch to Popos variant of Ubuntu?
I've often said OSes and DEs have stagnated, so web browsers started innovating in areas they shouldn't have needed to. Tabs is one such area. And now with Cosmic:
Stacks, snapping, and sticky windows
◦ Stack windows to combine them into tab groups like a browser
••• Right click on the header and choose Create Window Stack. Then drag another window to the stack.
••• When tiling windows, simply drag the window on top of another to create a stack.
Tabs are an interesting way to handle multiple instances of the same app (though this sounds like cosmic might mix them too). But in Windows for example, each app would have to do it's own implementation of muli-document handling. Browsers just brought us the tabs metaphor to manage them. I always thought that should be done at a higher level than the apps, and now it's here! I was thinking toolkit level, but go a level up to the DE and mix apps.
I have yet to try it in depth, but being able to stack different apps into the same window is awesome. Reminds me of Konqueror, where you had the same app for browsing the internet and your local filesystem.
I use Pop!_OS for my gaming PC and I generally enjoy it. It could do with less punctuation in the name because it makes it harder to search the internet for distro specific information.
I tried it because another_linux_distro! Sadly, I found the COSMIC dock looks "dead" since they can not implement the genie effect as it is patented by Apple :///////////
I've found that COSMIC heavily rewards navigation via the keyboard rather than via the mouse. Typing super followed by the first few letters of whichever app you want takes a fraction of the time you'd need to pick out the relevant app from a dock.
I guess that also means the first stable release of Cosmic - congrats to the team! Honestly I expected it to be delayed more, so good on them for pulling that off. Hopefully it's actually stable.
It's been pretty stable for me since the later alphas when I switched. The only real hiccups I've noticed have been with keyboard only navigation in a few areas, mouse has always worked well. I'd guess that A11y is also less than ideal as well, so if you're reliant on a screen reader or the like, best to wait quite a while longer until iced etc. catch up.
I have been using is since early Alpha and overall its pretty good. Certainty bug early on but now that I'm thinking on it I don't remember hitting any real issues in a few months now.
I still think the name Pop!_OS is dumb, they should just call it CosmicOS, as this new desktop is their defining feature and its a great name.
What is really amazing is that thanks to Cosmic now becoming an important part of Wayland, along with others, the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it.
My with for Pop!_OS next major feature would be to embrace ZFS and build around it.
I'm also looking forward to seeing full Cosmic on ReduxOS.
> the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it.
Can you expand on what you mean here? I only somewhat follow Wayland/X11 migration/development, but from what I understand gnome is on Wayland, enough so that they apparently dropped x11 support from their upcoming release in march.
Gnome is wayland, but they are very stubborn about the extensions they will/won't implement. For example, mixed dpi scaling, server side decorations, accessibility protocols all work differently on gnome or not at all.
This makes it very difficult for Wayland to evolve in a way that people want, as Gnome is the biggest player by user count.
There are 10+ years of endless discussion about how wayland is being developed and being standardized.
The youtuber Brodie Robertson does regularly updated on all the discussion and proposals and why are the moving forward or not moving forward. And what the issue with the processes are:
If that's not good enough, you can find all the issues with the discussion, but be ready for the same issues to be discussed endlessly in a cycle for years and years.
Gnome is not the only issue but they are on of the biggest. The refuse to implement certain things even when pretty much every other system on the planet both linux and non linux support it. And those are things that many applications relay on. And because of the way the standardization process works it was for years really hard to get many things into the standard leading to basic things missing and applications having inconstant support or apps that are just broken.
Having more voting members and more members with some real money and development power and more composites has already changed the dynamics.
FWIW, it's still an LTS release with support ahead of upstream. ex: the kernel and several software packages are more current than upstream Ubuntu. I'd also suspect that the integration for 26.04 may take a month or so, so you'll likely be waiting closer to 6mo for 26.04 from Pop vs Ubuntu.
I wanted a Sway-like experience but with a desktop experience, and so tried it.
It's surprisingly good: a DE with powerful enough window tiling.
It's now my daily driver.
Since they're backed by a sole company, I'm still not convinced on their longevity, but remain hopeful!
I'm not familiar with Pop OS, which I now realise is what the post is.
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