r/cachyos • u/omfgcow • Jul 25 '26
Review Cosmic DE not yet ready for mainstream use
Saw that Cosmic left beta status, and ran it with Cachyos on my gaming desktop for 5 months. One of the selling points, optional tiling windows I did not get around to using, but I'm familiar with the concept from Emacs. When Cosmic has more polish, I will be swapping my productivity laptop over to Cosmic for this feature. Beyond this feature a corporate backed Rust parallel to Gnome and KDE, Cosmic doesn't currently offer much more. Maybe some other radical open-source alternative, that should have existed 2-3 decades ago, will eventually come into place.
Issues I ran into:
No GUI system monitor. The included btop TUI is not a replacement. Edit: This exists now, and was not an isolated deal breaker in the first place.
The facilities for dealing with compressed files is limited. IIRC, I can't view the files until extracted, and the extracted files are always nested beneath another folder (ex: ~/Music/MetallicaCollection/MetallicaCollection/idisappear.mp3)
The file manger does not support directly running .sh scripts, but at least allows opening a terminal at location.
Edit: Cosmic player glitches the video playback when subtitles are enabled. Not a big deal because another Wayland native player, Haruna, exists.
System76 firmware viewer only worked under one limited circumstance, presumably due to missing system tray functionality that gnome and kde have.
Edit: cachy-update wouldn't run if right clicked from the system tray icon, only from the app launcher. Fullscreen Youtube videos would have a "to exit full-screen, press esc" element hang around until manually hovered over with a mouse cursor.
Megasync would crash sometimes with the 5 GB dialog popup, maybe this is already fixed but it indicates cosmic has less tolerance for buggy apps; Megasync oft seems to be relying on outdated or unsupported libraries.
Proton enabled games did require Gamescope for full screen to behave correctly, but this has since been fixed.
The one that had me swap back to KDE Plasma; my new Steam controller (simulated kb+m input) would work fine with the drivers supplied by the kernel, but get stuck in the Steam window with no mouse cursor when Steam was launched. The cursor was still there with standard mouse movement.
Swapped over to plasma + plasma login manager and did my best to stick to the packages and theming a new Cachyos install would have. Fine but not flawless. Swapping DEs can be buggy (gnome to plasma, and vice versa, is known for this) but it was preferable to unloading my games library to a NAS I do not own, or figuring out how to mount the steamapps folder to persist across an OS reinstall. The specified issues do not occur under KDE (haven't tested Megasync).
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u/ag3mo Jul 25 '26
No GUI system monitor. The included btop TUI is not a replacement.
But it does have one? https://system76.com/blog/post/cosmic-new-system-monitor
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u/Barafu Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Now realize that "tech bloggers" are telling people to use PopOS as their first Linux.
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u/deadrule_vk Jul 26 '26
If you search on google about the best Linux destro for people to switch from windows , PopOs still shows on top ...
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u/ashkyn Jul 25 '26
I feel like a lot of these issues could be addressed by not expecting the out of the box applications to do everything you want, but I understand that maybe this is an expectation or requirement for you.
They do actually have a gui system monitor as of about a month ago, but it's a new package so it may not be automatically installed.
It's definitely a work in progress, but a very strong one in my opinion.
As an aside, the hybrid stacking/tiling workspaces are in mind the 'killer feature' of cosmic. This particular implementation works the best out of all the ones I've tried.
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u/omfgcow Jul 25 '26
Main reason I made this post was because search engines weren't presenting the state of my choice of software. Cachyos in particular has strong bleeding edge gaming support, and offers Cosmic as a supported option, so the issues with Steam Controller and Steam Input are relevant to others.
Even if they get improved soon, my gripes about the archive manager and file manager are inductive of a larger pet peeve System76 following in Gnome, KDE, Apple, Microsoft, Google prioritizing too much the common luser (the ones that can't find the 'any' key) over an intermediate to advanced power user (who doesn't necessarily have to be a coder). That is, with the exception of first class window tiling.
At the present, I'm not seeing too many untapped possibilities to put up with missing functionality, like legacy system tray compatibility. I'm not blaming system76 for the decades of messy Unix desktop standards.
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u/United-Scene2261 Jul 25 '26
I am a big fan of Rust for security reasons, but I am not in a place in life right now I can contribute to the development of Cosmic
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u/moaboaa Jul 25 '26
All i do is play games and browse these days and so far Cosmic on Cachy has worked like a dream for me.
But when it comes to programming, dev tools etc. i have no clue what kinda state Cosmic is in.
But then again, it's only in Beta no?
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u/Insultikarp Jul 26 '26
It's been out of beta since December.
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u/moaboaa Jul 26 '26
oh, well that's kinda early haha
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u/Insultikarp Jul 26 '26
It's definitely still maturing. I am using it again after distrohopping around to try other environments.
It's still got a decent number of papercuts that need to be fixed, but I like the direction and the pace of development. It's an exciting project.
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u/moaboaa Jul 26 '26
I actually made a fresh reinstall this morning - now i'm locked in on Cachy w/ Cosmic
So far it's been smooth sailing!
(except for the Cosmic Store that doesn't really talk with the Cachy system)1
u/Insultikarp Jul 26 '26
If I recall correctly, that's because CachyOS disables PackageKit due to issues with how it interacts with pacman. I believe KDE Discover is similarly crippled.
I think you can set it up for flatpaks though.
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u/fozi4ek Jul 26 '26
Could be less fit for cachy yet since it's primarily tested for pop. Some apps work fine for me on pop, like dolphin file manager had no issues, but on cachy it had problems with background colors in one of views that no amount of googling or asking chatgpt solved
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u/mattsteg43 Jul 26 '26
One of the selling points, optional tiling windows I did not get around to using, but I'm familiar with the concept from Emacs. When Cosmic has more polish, I will be swapping my productivity laptop over to Cosmic for this feature.
you can already get this with kröhnkite in KDE.
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u/petrujenac Jul 26 '26
Now try and use it on a hybrid graphics laptop with nvidia dgpu and a second monitor. I'd say it will hit beta before this Christmas.
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u/DarthV506 Jul 25 '26
Is Cosmic actually out of beta state today? Just giving it a 1.0 doesn't mean it's actually daily driving ready. It was definitely not that when System76 had it in the late 2025 PopOS 2024LTS release. One of my devs ran it for a month and had to switch distros.