My Cosmic Experience
Note
Contents of this post reflect my own opinion and mine alone. Do not take anything written here as set in stone. It's my own bare-metal experience with the hardware I own. I cannot and will not speak for others. Maybe you had a better experience, and I am glad you did. Just keep that in mind.
Installation¶
The Cosmic DE hype is real. I saw many reviews of it and was immediately pulled in and got the urge to install it n try it out for myself to see if it was being over-hyped/sensationalized or not. Simply because new things tend to be, it's the norm by now.
Since I am an avid ArchLinux user, that's how I installed it. I did not use the Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS alpha ISO from >> Cosmic Downloads. So my views come from there. So I cannot compare.
Anyway, before I talk about my experience using the DE, I would like to mention that, I did not use the ArchInstall profile to install it. Why you ask ? Simply because due to past experience, I learned the hard way not to fully trust them, they tend to be way too basic, missing a lot of essential packages. Don't get me wrong here, I am not saying that you shouldn't use them, far from it, if you just want basics doing everything else yourselves, feel free, but from a new user perspective who expect things to be more complete, please use Distros who do all that for you.
Now on to the more detailed things I have done to install Cosmic. I first installed Arch Minimal using the ArchInstall script, meaning that I avoided the profiles, & drivers sections completely, I always choose Grub as my bootloader, no swap since I have 32GB RAM, no Encryption either. And once in chroot I installed the DE the following way, knowing that, we can skip the use of sudo since we are still logged in as root...
pacman -Syy && pacman -S cosmic linux-headers pacman-contrib xdg-user-dirs power-profiles-daemon wayland-protocols wayland-utils
Now, that needs a bit of explaining. In case you were wondering why so few packages, well, it's because cosmic is not a single one, it's a Group of packages or a meta-package as it is known as. That said, the reason I installed linux-headers is because for whatever reason, they were only included if and when you select drivers, same goes for the rest. Especially xdg-user-dirs without which no Documents, Pictures, Videos... folders will be created. Strange I know.
What I also found weird, is the fact that cosmic-greeter service was not being enabled after install which was netting me a boot to TTY session. So I had to enable it while at the same time generating the user-dirs via...
Keep in mind that I am doing all this while still in chroot post-install. Once I was done with this I exited the live environment and rebooted crossing my fingers and hoping that all went well.
Experience¶
Now on to what y'all came here for. All was good, well sorta, system rebooted into Grub, selected the OS and waitied... That's when I started to sweat a little, coz I was greeted with some TTY dmsg errors, flickering on and off. But after a few seconds I finally saw the Cosmic Greeter login screen, relief finally.
I type my super secure password in n wait to see the Desktop. So far so good, or so I thought. More anxiety, as when I opened the Cosmic file manager, what I saw wasn't so great; icons were blacked out, and performance was shit. Being an nVidia user, I thought could be a driver issue since on first boot it uses the not so great nouveau ones. That's why my first reflex was to install them, so I did.
After driver install was done, I rebooted and that's when my heart sank so deep I couldn't feel it anymore. Why ? How about a screen with so many errors in many colors complaining about EGL drm crap ? Yep wasn't showing the login screen anymore. OH NO! Failed already ?!?!?!?!?
As it turns out I had forgotten to include the nVidia drm kernel modules lol. What am I talking about ? How to do that you ask ? Well, for me that's what I did, could be different for you I dunno.
sudo sed -i '/^MODULES=(/ s/)$/nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)/' /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-suspend.service nvidia-hibernate.service nvidia-resume.service nvidia-powerd.service
echo -e 'options nvidia NVreg_UsePageAttributeTable=1 NVreg_InitializeSystemMemoryAllocations=0 NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x02' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf
echo -e 'options nvidia_drm modeset=1 fbdev=1' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf && sudo mkinitcpio -P
After doing that, I rebooted again, heart in hand, fingers n toes crossed lol. Once rebooted, a sigh of relief, I could see the login screen again. So I login, and this time everything was great. Performance was so smooth n fast, sorta felt like XFCE. Fired up top to see memory usage, and to my surprise, it was only using 800mb RAM on fresh boot, that's almost 500MB less than KDE Plasma ! Nice !
Now came the time to configure the DE. Since I had watched so many videos regarding it, I had a general idea of what to do. Since I have 2 Nics (1 for each ISP), first order of business was to disable one keeping the other active. So I hover mouse over the tray icon, click it then attempt to click to disable the one I do not need, only to see that I couldn't do shit. They seem to just be static indicators, at least for now. So arming myself with all that knowledge I fire up terminal and run nmtui and deactivate it from there making sure it doesn't automatically reconnect on login.
Now on to the System Settings. I will not bore you with the details, suffice it to say, that's where the biggest Alpha cracks started to show up big time. User profile modification missing, Default Apps too. I mean I could barely do anything besides modify top panel, color scheme, applets, keyboard shortcuts (keybinds) and power profiles. There isn't even a way to enable autologin..
That's when I began to get frustrated. I mean, how were users online saying they had a great experience when some of the most important things were missing ? I don't understand.
Anyway, I then took my attention to the included apps. I open the launcher from the bottom dock and click a random one, didn't open, I thought was a mouse issue, so I click again, and again, only after a few clicks did app decide to finally run. WTF!! Angry, I open File Manager again n try to open a document, nothing... OMG!!! I mean not even default app to handle simple text document ? I mean Cosmic-Notes was there, just not handling documents...
I try to right-click > open with, only to see that part was missing as well, I mean it shows the open-with panel to the right, only nothing's there, it's empty. I kept repeating to myself "It's Alpha Software, calm down Steve".
To relax a bit n make things easier, I installed my toolkit. Then when I tried launching it from the app menu thingy, no matter how many times I clicked it wouldn't launch. So I tried adding a keyboard shortcut for it, still nothing. I guess it's because it's a CLI and no default app set ? I dunno.
Finally I decided to try out the thing that almost everyone's raving about, Tiling/Stacking. And yes, that part was amazing, worked out great no major deal breaking issues to speak of, just minor nit-picks. Nothing that wasn't mentioned in all them videos on the Tubes. Oh Great ! I thought to myself, sarcastically, coz the only thing that works best is the thing I will never use since I do not like that Tiling stuff. Meh...
That's where I gave up and decided to go back home to KDE Plasma.
Final words¶
Now I know this wasn't a complete experience, but when the most essential features are either missing or incomplete, there's no point in going any further, simply because, the more I used it the more frustrated I got.
It's barely usable in its current state. I will be keeping it installed, revisiting it once every month to see progress. I will not, however attempt using it on a daily, or put in too much work into it, since it's not yet ready.
I can't be too mean to the devs, they are doing a great job. It was all a false expectation on my part. Cosmic has come a long way in such a short time. I mean, writing a DE from scratch using Rust a sorta new programming language is no easy feat.
I will end the post by congratulating the System76 dev team on work well done. I cannot wait to see what the future holds. I wish them the best of luck. Oh and also, who knows if it wins me over, I might add a XeroCosmic to the family.. Just don't hold your breath on that, it ain't set in stone.