Search/create issues: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-settings/issues

I run 24.05 Alpha, I just did “sudo apt install gnome-session”, I can choose between COSMIC and GNOME in the COSMIC greeter every time I login. You can probably do the same with Plasma.

Haven’t needed to login to GNOME since last year though.

It’s way more configurable/flexible than the very rigid GNOME while still being less complex than Plasma, so it falls in a sweet spot between those two extremes.

I’ve been using Linux since the nineties and I’ve been through the rolling distros and agree with you that usually it’s not a big hassle, just keep an eye on the process and .pacsave/.pacnew (or .rpm-ditto) - but I just don’t bother at all anymore, I only game and code some Rust and I prefer a LTS distro that keeps the kernel up to date, for me that’s the best of both worlds.

I’d also say that running a major upgrade on my stable distros (both on servers and laptop) takes less than an hour, not a weekend and I never have issues with it. Issues when upgrading either rolling (every update) or LTS releases usually comes from the admin having made incompat/bad changes to the system on their own.

I don’t believe there are plans for a start menu, it’s not how they envision the desktop. However anyone is welcome to cook their own, like this project.

I believe the team is focused on Flatpak. There’s a community project adding some AppImage functionality.

For feature requests you can search/raise issues on the COSMIC GitHub repositories.

Somewhere, I think it was here Carl mentions it might be early next year as he doesn’t want to pressure devs over Christmas.

I think they’ll release an Alpha update monthly until Beta.

Yeah, the author normally rarely misses an opportunity to complain about KDE being too complex in his articles - and COSMIC aims to fall in that sweet spot between the extremes that are GNOME and KDE, while adding features like optional but native tiling.

The applet concept where applets live in their own process and communicate via Wayland protocols (behind a COSMIC API) is also less likely to break than GNOME plugins that are horribly injected into its bowels.

Given the toolkit, organized development and UX decisions being up-front designed with figma sketches, etc. that are reviewed before implemented, and having both paid developers and community contributors it has a lot of potential.

I installed it on my gaming laptop. The OS is solid, probably one of the best distros for laptops out-of-the-box and COSMIC is pretty good but have some rough edges like problems with tray icons and games, so I also did a quick “apt install gnome-session”. I’ll switch over to Plasma 6 in a little while when it’s ready, never was a GNOME fan but it’s ok for a couple of months.

When playing with COSMIC I use Nautilus as COSMIC Files is still missing features like adding smb shares and file compress/extract. I’ll probably be able to use the DE full time later this year.

It’s very exciting. It fixes a number of bugs that exist on Intel and AMD as well and has a lot of polishing and features. It’ll be the defining Wayland experience for DEs and gaming.