KDE contributor and developer Niccolò Venerandi has published an article about COSMIC, System76’s brand new desktop environment.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself: should I switch to COSMIC? The answer obviously is no, but that’s just because I got addicted to KDE Plasma, so let’s try to be more objective here.

↫ Niccolò Venerandi

Honestly, this is one of the best “reviews” I’ve seen of COSMIC, and paints System76’s hard work in a really positive light. Venerandi spots countless really nice touches he’d love to see adopted by KDE, while also hitting on what I agree is COSMIC’s biggest shortcoming at this point: there’s basically no ecosystem around it. COSMIC uses its own Rust-based toolkit instead of GTK or Qt, but of course, there’s very few other applications that actually use said toolkit.

The end result is that if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application, none of which will inherit all the nice features, touches, and graphics from COSMIC. This isn’t really a complaint about COSMIC itself or the work its developers are putting into it, but more a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit. This may very well change in the future, but for now, if you choose to run COSMIC, you’re going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop.

This won’t matter to everyone, but it sure does matter to me, and it’s the one reason why at this point I have zero interest in running COSMIC. I really hope this changes in the future – competition is good – but it’s going to be a long road.

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has put up a new maintenance release, version 4.1.0. It’s got a small number of fixes, two very minor new features, as well a few updated translations. That’s it.

Honestly, it feels like only yesterday that System76, Linux OEM and the company behind pop!_OS, announced it was going to develop its own desktop environment, COSMIC. We’re about seven months into the more general availability of COSMIC, and the company has put up a nice overview of the various improvements that have already made their way into the code since then.

Of course, there’s a ton of visual improvements have been made to COSMIC, as well as a slew of new features: improved search, a brand new system monitor, drag and drop for tabs throughout COSMIC, and much more. COSMIC’s file manager and terminal have also seen a lot of work, with a ton of new small features and additions to bring them up to par with what people expect form a modern file manager and terminal emulator.

There’s a ton more listed in the article, so it serves as a nice “while you were away” if you’ve not been following development.