I tried the COSMIC Desktop Environment today. It's now released with the latest version of Pop! OS (24.04, which I assume is based on Ubuntu 24.04).
Now, I don't use Pop! OS, but I run Debian, and since noone has packaged it for Debian, I first had to build it.
Building COSMIC on Debian stable
The README in the cosmic-epoch has build instructions, and they are fairly straight-forward:
- Install a bunch of system packages (via
apt) - run some
justcommands.
Note: Those instructions tells you to install just via cargo. This turned out to be a small issue for me, because when I wanted to do just install, the install script wants privileged access in order to install things into the target directories. Since just is available via apt as well, I ended up using that version.
The compilation took a while. There are soooo many dependencies in all of the components, so it takes a while.
Also, I had to modify the main justfile, because it tried to use a rule that didn't exist in one of the components.
Testing out
Once I had things built and installed, I tried logging in using my normal greeter. That didn't work at all. When I selected COSMIC and typed my password, the screen blinked, the computer fan started up, and then I was back at the login screen, but it was no longer responding to some input, and I wasn't logged in.
After poking around a bit, I managed to log in on another console (via Ctrl+alt+F2), and then starting cosmic-session from there. That did start a session.
Most things seemed to work nicely once started, with one glaringly obvious exception: the cosmic-launcher didn't do anything. It just didn't start. Didn't display anything.
The DE feels snappy and fast, and I think it's going to be great at some point. The tiling is really nice.
Apart from the issue with not being able to log in using a desktop manager and the launcher issue, there is one more thing that makes it a show-stopper for me: It does not pick up custom keyboard layouts from ~/.config/xkb.
It also didn't seem to pick up installed flatpaks from the Applications window, which I thought a bit odd.
I didn't try how it works with a touch screen since the only computer I have with one available is not that fast, and since it took a good while to compile this on a CPU with faster clock speed, ~3 times the number of cores, 4 times the RAM, and a faster SSD, I didn't want to try it on the slower computer.
Conclusion
COSMIC seems nice as a combination of a more traditional desktop environment, but also with tiling. I could definitely see myself switching to using it once they fix the custom keyboard layout issue and when I am able to actually log into it using a desktop manager.
Until then, I'll be using something else.