Just over a year ago, System76 released the first alpha of COSMIC desktop, with the intention of including it as the default desktop environment for Pop!_OS 24.04. With the beta release, they’ve succeeded that and more.
Now available for general testing, Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta is an LTS release (as it is based on Ubuntu 24.04), and COSMIC was built from the ground up, using the Rust language and the iced graphics toolkit.
You won’t find X11 included in the new release, as it is strictly Wayland. If you have apps that do not support Wayland yet, COSMIC does include XWayland for compatibility. COSMIC also includes new apps for the file manager, text editor, terminal emulator, media player, settings app, and the app store. Each app opens quickly and runs very well. Other apps (such as system monitor, document and image viewers, and archive manager) have been borrowed from Gnome.
When you first log in, Pop!_OS/COSMIC looks very much like Gnome (with a bottom panel included). The good news is that COSMIC is far more customizable than Gnome, without requiring extensions for customization.
Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta can be downloaded from the official System76 page.
Source: Linux Magazine News (path: lmi_news).
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