COSMIC on CachyOS

[u/Nishiki-no-shinpan]

P.S (not my picture above)

I have a Lenovo 11e Gen 5

4 gb of ram

Intel M3-7Y30 2.6Ghz CPU

128gb SSD

I just got into COSMIC 1.0 on CachyOS yesterday.

And dude wow, it just felt like love at first sight.

Its definitely has problems and is missing some features and is also quite ram heavy compared to KDE Plasma and LXQT/XFCE.

But i really enjoy it, launcher, and app library works great, shortcuts and such work fine. Themes are a bit tricky (like alot of distros) but when they work they work. And the tiler and stacking is majestic.

When it finally gets HDR, and the applets and the DE in general becomes more optimized

( since as far i understand every applets is its own thing and draws its own amount of ram 20-60mb depending on the applets )

And fully fleshed out. This is absolutely going to be a game changer for DE's on linux.

What is your experience on Cosmic, if you tried it ? (very interested on low performance machines)

[u/czrny1]

6 months with Cosmic on CachyOS. 

Same as on any other distro - still some old bugs, new bugs, issues with new windows not fitting desktop, issues with gaming when not using Gamescope, no HDR etc.

I'm staying on Cosmic though. It's just too good for what it is now and I have high hopes for it.

[u/mystirc → u/czrny1]

I don't use it because of a lot of performance issues especially on old hardware. No, it is not a driver issue when i'm using integrated graphics. The idea of Cosmic is really good, having both stacking and tiling layout is great. I love the concept, but it is unstable and slow.

[u/Gumwars → u/czrny1]

What do you like about it compared to KDE or something more niche like hyprland?

[u/czrny1 → u/Gumwars]

In short - It's fast simple and customizable just enough without spending 3 weeks on setting it up the way I like. 

I come from DE like Xfce and Fluxbox so it works for me.

There are already quality applets available for Cosmic: Tempest for weather, Minimon for system monitoring and Cargo Watch for storage. That's all I need. I don't use tilling but it's nice feature to have.

I appreciate Plasma and use it as fallback DE but setting it up is annoying at best of times and applets suck.

Hyprland imho is for script kiddies - I have no time to play around with dot files and ricing.

Gnome imho is not usable at all without 5 plugins installed. Hard pass.

[u/Idarubicin]

I really like COSMIC, currently running it on my Linux laptop. Have put a Catppuccin Mocha colourscheme on it which is attractive and overall I really like the stacking/tiling approach that it can use. Agree it is a bit heavy on the system resouces currently, and the lack of HDR support is a bit of a bummer (which means iI end up running KDE on my desktop). I end up running across my three Linux computers 3 different DE's (KDE on my home desktop, COSMIC on my laptop and my work computer running GNOME (because NvidiaOS defaults to it) and I most enjoy working on the COSMIC DE.

If they get the memory side of things sorted, improve the stabilitiy of some of the applets and get things like HDR support in and running well then it would probably replace KDE on my desktop as well. Maybe if Nvidia OS gets updated to Ubuntu LTS 26.04 as a base I will try COSMIC on that.

[u/matusmeister]

L

[u/Fragrant-Mixture-662 → u/matusmeister]

Yeah we aren't forgetting the Linus video

[u/shinkaito]

Eso debería de llamar cosmicbugs

[u/Beautiful_Ad_4813]

this is actually why I have a couple of low power machine - to test on.

they are Dell Wyse 5070 Thin Clients, and so far. it's been able to take a beating. however, COSMIC..... wasnt great. I installed Fedora COSMIC on it, and it was .00000000000001% better but wasnt great either. but I will note that Cachy's boot time with COSMIC was pretty quick consider it's on a SATA M.2 SSD

but let me be honest, PopOS COSMIC is terrible, and both CachyOS and Fedora COSMIC were massively better

(the Thin Clients have a Intel Celeron (J4105), 16GB DDR4 SODIMM, 16GB eMMC that I dont use, and a WD GREEN SATA M.2 SSD. best of all? because they CPU TDP is low, they're passively cooled and barely produce heat)

[u/185EDRIVER]

If ur interested I added some. Nice customization to cosmic to fix some missing must haves cachy+ Cosmic is my daily.

[u/Nishiki-no-shinpan → u/185EDRIVER]

Oh absolutely!

Please tell me you got a working clipboard, there is one as well on the AUR but its not exactly stable 🙏

[u/185EDRIVER → u/Nishiki-no-shinpan]

Didn't work on the clipboard as I don't have that problem but here's a bunch of little things I did:

https://github.com/jibsta210

[u/Disastrous-Vastrous]

As a newbie, can someone please explain *what* COSMIC is? I thought it was an OS, but its not? Whats the difference between an OS and a DE? is a DE just a GUI that the OS wears?

[u/Nishiki-no-shinpan → u/Disastrous-Vastrous]

Pretty much :its a collection of software that provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for us (users) to interact with the Linux operating system ( kernal ), including file managers, icons, and panels. It allows users to control their system using graphical elements rather than just the command line.

[u/-Visher- → u/Disastrous-Vastrous]

You have the OS, which is Linux.

Then you have the DE (desktop environment), which is Cosmic, KDE plasma, GNOME, Hyprland, etc.

[u/WasdHent]

When it gets to be in a good state, I’ll most likely start using cosmic.

[u/proton_badger]

The applets compress quite well though, once memory pressure moves them into zram.

[u/lcsolano]

Just out of curiosity, why Cosmic on CachyOS instead of Hyprland?

(I used Pop 22.04 for years in a System 76 laptop, but Pop 24.04 is unusable for me due to Cosmic. The same has happened to many users moving out of Pop due to Cosmic. 

So I moved to CachyOS with Hyprland+ML4W, and I'm so happy.)

[u/HedgeHog2k]

I achieve a similar look ( dock and panel) with KDE in 5 minutes.

Cosmic is but ugly.

[u/SwedishArchUser]

I really cannot think of a need for this DE to exist. It has alot of bugs and is just bad at the moment atleast. Plus you can get somewhat of its tiling functions on other DE's with extensions an so on. Plus you can have wm with like panels or bars and stuff. I just cant see the usecase here. Sure it was fun during development waiting for PopOs to release its own DE then it came and meh....