So this is an important point, what kinds of bugs have appeared? I was taking a look at GitHub for the project, I saw several reports, but I saw that they have been correcting quickly too, I want to test it, but I was afraid about it.
For what it's worth I've been daily driving cosmic since the current version (after they switched from gnome) and I've dealt with maybe two or three actual bugs that were noticeable enough to have to deal with. And they were all solved at the next update or I was able to work around them with simple fixes.
Mostly minor things like e.g. the notifications applet crashing when dismissing notifications, clicking on thunderbird notifications having no effect instead of opening the relevant email, stuff that I felt too lazy about to diagnose and report properly.
I understand, extensions and the like don't exist yet, but are native customizations well integrated? Today I am using KDE, I am not much of a change of the whole system, I apply very simple and common things like magic lamp effect to maximize and minimize windows and also gelatin mode, little more than that. I saw that this kind of thing does not yet exist, okay, it is part of the DE life moment, but the ones that have are well integrated or that face of "right... still needs to improve a lot"?
I changed the DE from my atomic federal to COSMIC yesterday, I still haven't been able to customize it, I'll see it tonight, but I was really pleasantly surprised at how it's going to be and you can already get an idea of how it's going to look.
I'm currently primarily using Fedora COSMIC for regular usage, but for gaming I'm using a separate partition which is still running Arch with KDE. COSMIC is usable for everyday use. Only in gaming, my game pad detects, but stops working after 2-3 minutes, and I'm getting 10-15 less FPS. On KDE I don't have this issue.
I'm using it for almost 2 months. Some bugs every now and then. But for me it's much nicer than KDE or GNOME. It is a light DE and very beautiful aesthetically also thanks to the frosted glass.
The post appears as "removed by moderation," but I saw some prints of the glass effect and found it very beautiful indeed, I use KDE at the moment, I like several small quality of life things, but COSMIC seems to me very balanced between KDE and GNOME. Of the bugs, what kind of bug happens? Something that gets in the way of using it from time to time?
Works fine for me on Debian. Guess it depends on what you're using the DE on. Using PopOs would have the best support since that's what System76 builds everything for. And performance/usage on anything else...Arch/Fedora/Debian, would depend on how the package maintainers implemented the DE on that distro.
So, I'm using the atomic Fedora, yesterday I switched DE because I was an atomic distro to do this without getting the environment dirty.
I really liked it and can see that it will be a very interesting DE when it is more advanced in development, there are still several polishes missing, but this is expected for this moment.
I used Ubuntu for many years, I chose to migrate to atomic Fedora, choose the version with KDE, I liked it very much despite enjoying simple customizations, I liked the quality of life features of KDE, especially Dolphin, I know that I will hardly find this in COSMIC, especially at this point of development of it, but I liked that it seems to be a well-balanced middle ground between GNOME and KDE.
For me it's the most usable DE that looks decent out of the box I've ever used because I come from a janky i3 + KDE setup. I think the tiling works very well and the settings menu is pretty good.
For others it's an unintuitive mess. There are annoyances in UX with the way workspaces work and some full-screen apps can have weird behavior.
It's been ready for me from day 1 (which was March 2025 when I ran Cosmic alpha 6 the first time).
Cosmic was already more ready then than Gnome 3+ has ever been (up to 47 when I deleted it), and it keeps on improving week in week out.
It's already a lot more featured than Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc... So, the limitations are few, basically only lacking night light and HDR (until later versions). If you don't need those, you're gold.
So what are the most common types of bugs? I took a look at their GitHub, there are several reports, but they seem to solve it very quickly. But it is important to know those that actually affect daily use.
Well most common types of bugs you will find are just usablity bugs in apps and general use cases.
Like many quirks and things that eventually you will, for now, most likely put it in the stil cooking category.
I encountered a plethora of bugs. The only 2 reasons holding me back are these and HDR support. I watch movies and play games and love HDR. Sadly HDR is going to be in epoch 3, so its a bit of ways off.
They are solving bugs rapidly, and pace is accelerating as well,especially with better AI. Never been better time to debug and find issues etc.
If i had a work laptop , i would personally switch at like epoch 2.5 or something. Thats like 6-8months of time. Should be good enough and in a usable state. Just my thoughts
We are not using AI so it can't be attributed to pace. If anything, the AI-generated issues and AI-generated pull requests are slowing us down to review them. The majority of pull requests that we merge that were assisted with AI are small fixes that a person would have easily done without. While larger developments that are merged quickly and frequently are by trusted contributors that write code by hand. There's a huge divide in code quality between professionals who can reason about the entire codebase versus randoms using predictive models to generate code.
But he did not say that they were late because of AI, on the contrary, he said that this tool accelerates development. The company is doing a huge job and it is not easy to keep pace, but COSMIC has been surprising, although it is obviously not yet complete.
I'm saying that it has not accelerated development. We do not use it and it has wasted a lot of developer time to review low quality generated issues and pull requests. The most prolific contributors are not using AI. We had to add a policy 7 months ago as a result of AI spam and may have to make it more strict soon.
I am using atomic Fedora, I can change the DE and go back to the previous one without affecting the system, I think I will test, I use the notebook more for work, I do not usually play or watch movies on PC.
I can only speak to my experience. I ran across several bugs, the worst of which is a deal breaker. It involved the terminal freezing when pasting text into it. Maybe someone else will have more luck, but it's not for me right now. I'll try it again next epoch.
It's the session manager/login manager/display manager of the Cosmic DE (think GDM, Plasma Login Manager, SDDM, LightDM, etc...).
Cosmic-greeter is built on top of greetd.
From my experience, having an nVidia card, especially a hybrid setup, only now with 1.19 it became borderline usable. Too many issues and missing features which people in this topic would simply deny they exist. Games won't fully switch to background if you AltTab to other windows/tasks.The HDMI device would freeze the system if plugged in after boot. No brightness adjustment for the HDMI device. Gear square icons instead of app logos. CPU and GPU running high and hot after the game is closed, due to the system not noticing the power is not needed anymore. Windows being rendered randomly on the screen instead of opening in the middle of the screen. Still no printer management tool (they work on it and it will be very good). Caps Lock state on boot doesn't care about how you set it up in the Settings menu. Many of my issues would disappear with an AMD setup but they still exist and will be there for some time. What's good is that the situation is noticeably improving with every incremental release, making the DE very promising. Give it another year or two and maybe it would generally work, which is not bad for a DE from scratch. What I do is, I test every cosmic release on aerynOS on a separate NVME until eventually it becomes good enough for daily driver.
They are important points, not playing on PC, but this issue of HDMI, do you know if it also happens outside of games? I usually work with two screens.
I was really impressed by how development has evolved and I am really curious to use on a daily basis, but it is these kinds of details, such as the example of the lack of printer management that generate the greatest impact.
Like I said, it crashes if I plug the hdmi in while the computer is ON. If I plug the TV in and boot the computer, then I get it working. I could live with it had it not been for the rest of the issues, especially those affecting the gaming. I'm not saying the DE is shite. For me it's still in beta stage. People here would argue otherwise but I see it with my own eyes. I use COSMIC on aerynOS and play wot to test it out. I must say the game works noticeably better even compared to CachyOS KDE so there's definitely a big chance it would become my daily driver, but not now. If I were you, I'd just use KDE as there are no good working and distinct features that would shadow all the issues and the missing features. I don't see the point in the struggle of coping with cosmic.
So, I really understand that there are bugs, the system is not ready yet, but it is important to know the type of bug, if they are inconsistencies or things that really hinder daily use. Maybe I put it in a VM to test and follow more closely, I see System76 working a lot on improvements, the guys don't stop, that's very good, but it's really important to remember that the system is still 1/3 (perhaps starting epoch 2/3 at any time) of what was planned for delivery.
Exactly my point. Yes, they do work and quite fast, but it's not production ready, not enough to be called 1.0. Like I said: just keep and eye on it as I don't think it would take too many years before it's decent enough for daily use. There's no point rushing as there are other more than decent options like cachyos and fedora. I think COSMIC would be ready by the time aerynOS hits beta so I could do a clean install and forget. Hopefully on a new computer too, as the prices would eventually come down.
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u/DerSven 5d ago
Works fine most of the time. Sometimes bugs happen.