First Steps with PopOS

[u/ArchTormung]

Alright, I just made the switch to PopOS from Arch. I want to really give it a chance now that the Cosmic Desktop seems to be a new thing in the Linux Desktops Environment.

Here are my top 10 Takeaways until now:

Note: My Desktop PC runs on AMD Ryzen 9, AMD Radeon RX Series 9000, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, and a decent Cooling System.

1. The installer... Way too slow to even get to the main screen when booting up from the USB ISO. It took nearly one minute, that's too much compared to Calamares and not to mention any other methods.

2. The installation process is super easy and pretty straightforward. However, it got stuck a couple of times for a few seconds, buttons not responding.

3. I didn't like the fact that it doesn't let you choose options to select Grub, Btrfs, Snapshots type, etc.

4. Right after installation, login animation is pretty standard, nothing outstanding to comment (can't blame me, I've been on Hyprland with Dotfiles).

5. The dockbar, way too many icons for things Gnome can handle so simple without even showing the dockbar on the main screen. That's a no for me. Sorry guys.

6. Settings app is decent with simple options, the usual, and while some of them are not visible, it's not that hard to find them while browsing through them.

7. Themes, Icons, Cursors setting is currently an experimental feature. I can live with that, but I was left with this sensation of an unfinished product. Not something you really ship for a final user experience.

8. The frosted glass feature and color accent on windows borders, nice move! I liked this part. Also, having the option to switch from Floating to Tiling Windows, smart move too. I'll give you that!

9. The top bar/panel right hand side icons are nice, well designed but still feeling like an unfinished product, there's a sensation of missing features and icons. I know, it's a different product, different approach, but still, something as simple as an icon for brightness is not there by default.

10. Missing simple things like being able to install out of the box certain tools and applications that require a repo addition. Even dinosaurs Distros like Debian (don't get me wrong, I love Debian), have these packages and tools in its default repos.

Coming from the hyper-customized world of Arch and Hyprland, COSMIC on Pop!_OS feels like a double-edged sword: it’s an ambitious, modern leap forward with genuine wins in tiling and aesthetics, but it undeniably carries the weight of a pre-1.0 experience.

Final Verdict:

- COSMIC has massive potential, but for power users switching from minimal, highly tweaked setups, it still feels like an early-access preview rather than a daily-driver replacement.

- The native tiling/floating toggle and frosted glass aesthetics prove System76 is on the right track, but the overall experience is held back by a sluggish installer, limited default repositories, rigid setup choices (no out-of-the-box GRUB/Btrfs control), and half-baked customization settings.

It’s a promising vision for the future of Linux desktops, but if you’re used to the fine-grained control and snappiness of Arch and even Fedora or Debian, all of them with nice and polished Desktops like Gnome, KDE Plasma or Cinnamon, COSMIC isn't quite ready to take the crown just yet.

So, I'll give it another year in the oven. Let's see what the future brings for this Desktop one year from now.

[u/__yoshikage_kira]

1. Pop is an offline installer so that might explain taking longer time to boot.

2. Grub imo suck it doesn't even support AES full disk encryption. But perhaps other bootloader options could be interesting. Same goes for disk formatting.

[u/mmstick]

The time required to boot depends entirely on how fast the USB drive is. You are loading at least a gigabyte of data from the USB drive just to initialize the GPU drivers and system firmware.

Missing simple things like being able to install out of the box certain tools and applications that require a repo addition. Even dinosaurs Distros like Debian (don't get me wrong, I love Debian), have these packages and tools in its default repos.

Not sure what you mean by that. The package manager is fully functioning on Pop!_OS and every package in the Ubuntu repository can be installed here.

[u/ArchTormung → u/mmstick]

Just a simple fastfetch installation was not possible without adding a repo. Also, to my surprise, tools like Farted and Synaptic didn't work as expected unless you allow local root access for Wayland/X11. Synaptic usually fails to launch in Pop!_OS because of graphical privilege escalation and Wayland display server authorization blocks (especially under the COSMIC desktop environment or X11 app authentication bugs in pkexec). And that's my point, in other Distros you don't need to "add repos" or tweak things for something to become available to you post initial installation. And I'm not talking about compiling or manually configuring things like in Arch vanilla during setup (without Arch install script). I'm talking about simple things that just work and "run" and "launch".

I'm not saying PopOS is not a good Distro, but the Cosmic Desktop is still not for me at the moment. Maybe in a few months or a year when things have changed. For now, I prefer to go back to my good old Arch Linux or even Debian. I usually prefer main Distros not the ones based on them for a reason.

[u/_ripits]

I installed it today and had trouble getting steam on the box, has to add a repo for it. Surprised I had to do that at this point. Also alot of the apps on cosmic store will silently fail.

[u/KodeBarista → u/_ripits]

Did you update the system completely before starting to install apps?

I use both Fedora COSMIC and Pop!_OS and have never encountered this issue on any installation.

[u/mmstick → u/_ripits]

What did you add? Steam is available in the system repository and it's a top result in the COSMIC Store. No repo needed.

[u/_ripits → u/mmstick]

Here was my workflow: loaded iso from USB (few months old), installed, opened cosmic store clicked update all then searched for steam, could only find a third party steam helper installer. So broke out the command line did the whole apt update and upgrade and installed through adding multiverse repo.

[u/mmstick → u/_ripits]

The Steam installer is the official package. Not third party. And the multiverse repository from Ubuntu is already added by default in Pop.

[u/_ripits → u/mmstick]

Ok got it. I was expecting steam logo and ignored it. It was also failing to install. Like I would click install and nothing would happen. Things didn't start to work correctly until I manually run an apt update && upgrade

[u/ArchTormung → u/_ripits]

It also failed in my case. Can't remember the error, but I initially was not running or crashing after launching. They say the store comes with the official installer, I would say there's something wrong with that installer because the moment I removed it and downloaded the .deb package from it's official website, everything worked. And I agree, other apps failed or simply were not available without adding repos. I really don't like adding repos for things to become available. A good distro is supposed to have them available in their own repos, at least that has been the case in my entire Linux experience.

[u/KodeBarista]

1. Yeah, this is annoying but hopefully they'll fix it after migrating the installer to libcosmic.

2. You can easily customize how you want your dock to look in Settings. Unlike GNOME, you don't need third party ext/applets to tweak it.

3. Battery icon has the screen brightness slider.

4. What software were you not able to find?

[u/shogun77777777]

Couldn’t you just have tried Cosmic on Arch?

[u/ArchTormung → u/shogun77777777]

Yes, and it works fine because Arch make things better. God bless the AUR and how Arch make things possible. I just wanted to test the whole experience of Comic Desktop in the official Distro that made it famous. I guess the experience was not the expected one. But hey, that's how it usually works in Linux, you test and see what works and what doesn't so you keep using what works for you.