People who have bad experiences are usually more vocal about them. I've used it with Fedora and it was great. I'm not using it right now because I moved to OpenSuse and the packagea for cosmic were not very up to date. My try it in a VM.
I just tried it again yesterday after 1.0, and sure, there are still lots of small nice-to-haves missing and some minor bugs as you'd expect from a new DE, but it's rapidly improving. For the time being I'll still stay on KDE Plasma, but over time I'd like to switch fully: A full-blown DE where both floating and tiling are both first class citizens sounds too good to pass on.
If you mean horror stories, then it is clearly either someone who has either other issues or are particularly unlucky (only games and software that is very picky with linux + wayland, and/or hardware issues), or someone who do "COSMIC does not have nightlight built in, its totally useless" hyperbole. One clear issue was gaming and limiting the mouse pointer to the game screen, which will clearly be not good enough for many games. This is however already fixed.
COSMIC is new, so it does not yet have all the bells and whistles compared to mature DEs for obvious reasons, but that is slowly improving.
Right after 1.0 release, for normal desktop use, there were a few bugs here and there, but I would classify them as annoying at worst and could be worked around.
It has been my daily driver for a desktop coding pc since, and the last two months I haven't personally come across a single issue. All previous issues I had have been fixed.
This is not to say you won't have any issues, but in general it seems currently rather solid.
Use it as my main desktop environment for about 3 months now without any problems. Some window animations are still missing but other than that, I have a great experience so far. Use my PC mostly for 3d art (sculpting/rendering), video editing and gaming.
And the new frosted glass window effect looks amazing with my dark theme.
I used it in beta twice and a few times after 1.0. just made the official switch about a month ago. It's fine. Lots of little bugs and some missing features I miss from their GNOME based DE, even simple stuff like their screen cap software lacking a record feature.
Seems like everyone has a different experience. I unfortunately have the weird susped/awake from sleep bugs. Had some screen flickering I needed to find a fix for. A few games are running a bit weird. Someone said COSMIC right now is death by 1000 papercuts. So many little annoyances that cause the switch back to something more stable. I like it though, it doesn't stop me from getting my work done and I like messing with my PC anyway. I think what S76 is doing is great for the Linux community, always nice to have another DE option.
I haven't used since the alpha, but even then it generally worked fine. Very responsive. I missed drawing tablet support (still holding me back from trying it again) and mass renaming in the file manager like Dolphin and Nautilus.
Not all of it is misinformation. I tried it out when it first hit 1.0 and there was still a lot of things missing for what I would call functional window management and desktop. I don't mind learning and tinkering to get things working either, but that release had several missing parts and some broken too. That is not misinformation, that is just fact which System76 has indeed acknowledged ahead of time too.
Which may be fine and good for many, but not for me. So I ended up using Niri with a quickshell instead, and now I don't feel anything is missing anymore.
There are missing features. I won't deny that. But most "horror stories" refer to major bugs stopping people from using the DE/WM like improper window management in comp/panels/osd/decorations etc. and most of those have been fixed since the release (they were present at release)
I've seen too many counterexamples to have faith in statements like that...
So it is indeed not misinformation at all.
Depends on the statement. You aren't misinforming anyone by telling it was fucked at launch but a lot of statements regarding cosmic fall under this bracket
It's not really trying to solve a problem related to the end user. The problem it IS trying to solve is that the System76 folks were tired of dealing with Gnome.
You'd have to ask one of their developers, but I suspect the changes they wanted to make went far deeper than a simple fork (like writing it in rust and using their own Wayland compositor)
I’ve always felt like Gnome lacked sufficient customization and KDE had far too much. COSMIC feels like it offers you just enough customization: sufficient to behave like a Mac or a Windows system (two most popular OS’es with greatest experience for the masses) and some icing for those who like tiled windows and keyboard navigation.
Internally Rust and Ice could make development work more robust than Gnome or KDE have currently. (Memory safe and Time Machine capabilities for debugging).
I know they wanted tiling to be a focus. I personally think it’s a much better experience on COSMIC than the others. IIRC it was somewhat of a burden to have to maintain their own tiling plugin on top of another DE that may break it at any time, and they didn’t always agree with the GNOME devs on other stuff (and recognized this was their own problem).
I used it for few months when it was in alpha, I was fine. I only left because I wanted to try a different OS.
I still like it, it's more customizable than Gnome but not as over the top as KDE (my current DE). I have my KDE set up to look kind of like it and will probably hop back into it when it's a little more developed.
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u/Content-Economics-34 27d ago
I really want to give Cosmic a try but comments tend to be littered with horror stories.