Pop!_OS 24.04 and new COSMIC desktop reach alpha

The latest version of System76's Ubuntu remix is available, but it's not finished by any means. The new Rust-based desktop is somewhat usable, though. US shifter of Linux boxes System76 has released alpha 1 of Pop!_OS 24.04. It's the company's remix of Ubuntu Noble Numbat, with its own in-house ground-up desktop environment, …

[F. Frederick Skitty]

The next laptop I buy will be from System 76. I like what they're doing both with their spin on Ubuntu, and the Rust based operating system Redox that's lead by one of their employees. Keen to try Redox on real hardware, but until the new version of Pop matures, I'll stick to tried and trusted Devuan for a Linux partition.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

> The next laptop I buy will be from System 76.

Fair enough.

I believe S76 resells Clevo kit, maybe custom versions.

https://clevo-computer.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clevo

Some 15 years ago I was the software director at a Linux startup company and we resold Clevo kit too. The quality is decent and the Linux compatibility is excellent.

I don't know what country you are in but if you're in the UK or Europe there are several more local Clevo resellers who would be able to help you.

Devuan is all right but if you want a fast easy systemd-free desktop distro, I find MX Linux easier to work with.

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC System76 laptops come with Coreboot pre-installed, if that’s your thing

[mmstick]

Clevo is sourced only for Intel laptops—all of which are flashed with custom open source firmware developed by System76.

[Missing Semicolon]

System76 seem to be a World USA company

Despite shipping to the UK, they don't have any non-US layouts for any keyboard product (laptop or standalone).

Arrogance? Or just ignorance?

[Liam Proven]

Re: System76 seem to be a World USA company

See my comment to Mr Skitty above.

Some people prefer US layout, even elsewhere in the world. I can use it and have several US-layout machines but I prefer UK layout if it's an option.

[Vincent van Gopher]

Re: System76 seem to be a World USA company

A Linux customer of mine* I recently bought a laptop from https://laptopwithlinux.com - tons of options for what version of Linux, etc.

Clevo and TongFang (who they?) laptops available.

I have no connection to these guys apart from setting up the laptop.

* They're almost all Linux users now, just a couple of farmers who have to use Windows programs for their farming operations, and one uses Linux for everything else and hates having to use . . .

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Yeah, nah.... I'll stick with Mint.

[Sudosu]

Had issues with dual boot

I tried Pop_OS! quite a few years back over a couple versions as a dual boot to see how it would work for gaming (it was ok at the time)

I cannot remember the details as it was quite a while ago, but every time I installed a new version it would break my Windows boot requiring a reinstall of Windows.

I think I eventually pulled my Windows drive during the install and would just select the OS from the BIOS at boot instead.

Did it not offer a Grub install previously?

Probably a "me" issue, just wondering if anyone else had\has a similar problem.

I ended up going to Ubuntu with Grub which I still use today...after a small fix post MS patch.

Maybe I will give it another spin as it did strike me as a decent OS.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Had issues with dual boot

> Did it not offer a Grub install previously?

If you install on a system with "legacy" BIOS boot instead of UEFI, you get GRUB.

But yes, with the typical small Windows-only ESP, it may fall over -- and you can't resize FAT32 volumes under 256MB or so with Gparted.

[nematoad]

Not for me, I'm afraid.

I know I am getting old and reactionary but the thought of a 1GB system partition makes me yearn for the days of KISS.

Looking at the default desktop made me think of the Fisher-Price toys I used to get for my children many years ago.Doesn't anyone use skeuomorphic desktops any more? And anything with systemd is a complete turn off.

Luckily there are still alternatives available but the direction of travel in Linux environments does prompt me to consider one of the BSDs.

[mmstick]

EFI partition size

Consider that there are 30~40 million lines of code in the Linux kernel for every hardware driver under the sun. Linux kernels and their initramfs images are too large to fit on a 100 MB EFI boot partition. You need multiple kernels to use as fallbacks in case of a bad kernel update, and another kernel for the recovery partition. If you intend to dual boot with Windows, you need an additional 100 MB for Window's boot loader.

[Liam Proven]

Re: EFI partition size

[Author here]

> Linux kernels and their initramfs images are too large to fit on a 100 MB EFI boot partition.

That was a large part of the point of this:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/09/onefilelinux_esp_distro/

It's not _quite_ as bad as you depict, and part of the reasoning is to leave a lot of free space. My work Dell recently needed a few hundred MB free on the ESP to run a firmware update, and the previous one's failure to clean up after itself hadn't left enough room. I had to do it manually, also removing the GRUB bootloader of 2 or 3 distros I no longer run.

The point being that it's not that the Windows bootloader is 100 MB in size, or that the Linux ones take many hundreds. They aren't that big... but you do need enough space for a possibly 2nd or 3rd copy, or an entire other OS in there temporarily.

Summary:

In C21, 100MB is not much, and you need to keep it 75% empty for it to be safely usable.

Summary of the summary:

It's not that the contents are so big, but that you need a lot of free space, for entirely valid reasons.

[mmstick]

Re: EFI partition size

I'm confused at what you're trying to argue. 100MB is not enough for even a single kernel.

```

# du -h /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7/*

4.0K /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7/cmdline

77M /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7/initrd.img

79M /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7/initrd.img-previous

15M /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7/vmlinuz.efi

15M /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7/vmlinuz-previous.efi

```

Two kernels: the current and a backup. This is already 184M, and that doesn't include the 132M required by the recovery partition's kernel.

[Liam Proven]

Re: EFI partition size

> I'm confused at what you're trying to argue.

You seem to solely be considering the use case of systemd-boot.

I am not, because most distros do _not_ use systemd-boot. Most use Grub. With Grub the `vmlinuz` and `initramfs` are kept in `\boot` and only some small infrequently-changing files live in the ESP.

For most UEFI-aware Linux distros, a far smaller ESP is not ideal but is functional. Dual boot one conventional distro with a single installation of Windows and yes, 100MB may be doable.

A distro that needs a ½GB or 1GB ESP is fine if you only supply distros on new kit that do not dual boot with other distros, but in the real world, many do. I have a test machine with Windows 10, GhostBSD, and 7 different distros on it. And all the Linuxes share a single swap partition, and a single `/home` as well.

This is not merely possible but quite easy with most Linux distros, and while some vendors do not like this at all, as a distro reviewer my _job_ is to find fault and ID distros which are less flexible than others. It's my job to break things. It's when you break things that you learn how they work.

openSUSE, Spiral Linux, Fedora, Garuda, and Deepin are all notably poor at this, for instance. Fedora 'cos its installer is not very good, Deepin because it's weird, and the others because they rely on Btrfs and snapshots. (I could argue that Btrfs is also not very good but that is immaterial here.)

I submit that if a vendor supplies a distro for the open market then it needs to be able to do what the others do.

If, say, it needs a ½GB ESP and most PCs don't have one, then it needs to be able to do one of:

* resize the existing ESP

* _or_ create a new one, and migrate existing OS entries into that

* _or_ gracefully handle it, decide there is inadequate space, and automatically switch to use Grub instead.

If that means fixing external tooling (say, GNU Parted) well tough.

This is not simply or merely a Pop OS problem. It is arguably one of systemd-boot, and the UKI initiative, and so on. Good luck, however, getting the systemd team to notice that they've caused a problem with another tool and to help fix it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: EFI partition size

> distros which are less flexible than others. ...

> openSUSE, Spiral Linux, Fedora, Garuda, and Deepin are all notably poor at this, for instance. Fedora 'cos its installer is not very good, Deepin because it's weird, and the others because they rely on Btrfs and snapshots

Huh? The Calamares installer as it's configured in SpiralLinux offers a dropdown menu to choose from Btrfs, XFS, F2FS, or EXT4. Or you can pick the custom partitioning layout mode and do whatever the heck you want. Btrfs is just the default option if you don't choose something else, it doesn't "rely on" it in any way. And the same thing goes for openSUSE.

[JLV]

Anyone tried it with good results on a Framework laptop?

I love the hardware but can't say I am overjoyed with Ubuntu Cinnamon, though it is better than stock Ubuntu.

Things like trackpad sensitivity are still unnecessarily complicated, for example and online recommendations for tweaks are wildly uneven in nature. For example, one - highly upvoted - suggestion gave instructions on now to turn the trackpad off when you have a mouse plugged in: "run this command to turn off device #13" they say. Well, of course that device number is NOT fixed. It took me five minutes to use grep and cut to determine the device ID dynamically and turn that off instead. But how many noobs get caught out?

Linux shell and the actual system is great, the desktop(s)(s)(s) not so much. I only console myself by knowing how aggravating Windows 11 would be instead.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

> Anyone tried it with good results on a Framework laptop?

Yes, a personal friend of mine who bought a Framework and let me try it out runs Pop OS on it. He likes it and speaks highly of it.

Indeed it was trying to fix his machine's thrashing that taught me how difficult it is to add kernel parameters in the usual way, and is why I mentioned the steps for enabling Zswap.

He runs a few big Electron apps and the machine's 16GB of RAM is not enough, and the machine swaps _hard_.

[mmstick]

It's actually quite simple. We include a tool called `kernelstub`. `sudo kernelstub -a KERNEL_OPTION` to add a kernel option, and `sudo kernelstub -d OPTION` to remove an option.

[Liam Proven]

> We include a tool called `kernelstub`.

"We"?

I mentioned that in the article.

The problem is this:

1. Mate who is not a Linux techie has problem. He doesn't know it's a problem but it's nuking performance.

2. Hotel roommate at a non-Linux event knows how to fix that problem.

3. Roommate -- me -- knows Linux and knows Ubuntu (and Debian, Fedora etc.) but dislikes GNOME and so avoids anything GNOME based. Including Pop OS. But Pop OS is an Ubuntu remix and the fix is an Ubuntu fix so this should be a 2min fix, right? It means adding 3 words to one line of one config file.

4. I persuade my mate to let me try it.

5. Stop. Critical error. There is no `/etc/default/grub`. There is no GRUB menu to try it. There is no GRUB.

The rest of the steps do not matter; said friend went away at the end of the long weeked with unfixed laptop because Pop OS changes basic standard Linux stuff in unpredictable ways that a 30-year Linux veteran does not expect, and there wasn't time for commencing a cycle of Google problem -> Refer to Stack Overflow -> Try fix -> Reboot -> Test -> Google again.

And yes, I am perfectly aware this is an instance of XKCD 1172.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

But that's not the point.

It went unfixed, because this change brings no real functional benefit but breaks typical Linux practices.

I also noted in earlier Pop OS reviews that it changes other things that break my systems.

* The installer (like Fedora's years ago) can't understand the notion of a pre-existing `/home` partition. Reason: the devs don't dual-boot. That is fixed now, but the lesson here is: test in situations others use. Don't know? Tough. Find out.

* systemd-boot needs a big ESP. Gparted can't resize small ESPs. Fix: you want a big ESP, provide a tool to enlarge them. But the devs don't dual-boot and don't know. See above.

* Removing an existing tool and config file? Maybe leave a dummy file containing "do this instead" instructions?

[HoraceTheUnicorn]

mmstick = https://github.com/mmstick

[mmstick]

GRUB being the default for legacy BIOS installations of Linux distributions is irrelevant. Most systems in use today have UEFI firmware, which renders much of GRUB's feature set redundant. With the advent of UEFI, the freedesktop org created The Boot Loader Specification, which is now maintained by The Linux Userspace API Group. systemd-boot implements that specification, which you can read about below:

https://uapi-group.org/specifications/specs/boot_loader_specification/

Regardless, none of this negates the fact that it's trivial to add or remove kernel options for systemd-boot installations. Even if the `kernelstub` utility did not exist, it's as simple as editing a single plain text config in `/boot/efi/loader/entries/`. You can also press e on the boot entry in the systemd-boot boot menu to make temporary changes to the options before booting. Unlike in GRUB, there's no custom scripting language, and therefore no need to generate boot config scripts. Besides performance advantages and the simpler configuration file format, the various memory safety vulnerabilities found in GRUB's scripting language is enough of a reason to use systemd-boot over GRUB.

Here's an example config file:

```

# cat /boot/efi/loader/entries/Pop_OS-oldkern.conf

title Pop!_OS

linux /EFI/Pop_OS-a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7/vmlinuz-previous.efi

initrd /EFI/Pop_OS-a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7/initrd.img-previous

options root=UUID=a1a189be-35ba-4fe6-b850-951cf6860cd7 ro quiet loglevel=0 systemd.show_status=false splash threadirqs

```

In Pop!_OS, these entries are currently managed by kernelstub, which has been the case since the very beginning.

Also, it's not necessary to enlarge ESP partitions. The standard permits having more than one ESP partition.

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

< "The standard permits having more than one ESP partition."

Indeed it does, I've done this myself with success. For those who dual boot Windows though, this can be an issue. Windows does not seem to like having multiple ESP partitions on a single drive and sometimes breaks things on installation or updates. I've come to learn that mixing Windows and Linux on one machine is an "at your own risk" kind of situation, and it's usually Microsoft who breaks things, but not always.

[Proton_badger]

System76 have a decent number of support articles.

[Proton_badger]

Using it

I had some time last month before my kid went back to school, so I installed it on my laptop. I also installed gnome-session so I can switch DE in case COSMIC had trouble. But due to fixes trickeling in I am now using COSMIC DE full time. To try it out I threw together applet for the panel, the Elm UI model is very pleasant to work with and the COSMIC/Iced API is a lot prettier than Gtk.

They also do nice extra stuff like the custom system76-scheduler which handles power management and process priorities for the desktop. My laptop behaves very well with it both for work and gaming.

They still have a long list of things to implement on the Alpha 2 to-do list though.

[bananape4l]

Re: Using it

The scheduler is great and looks to me to be more responsive than other distros.

I got touch input out of the box and also screen flipping worked on my laptop.

But also s76-power is very well done and provides great power settings for laptops. On my Asus model I also got a battery stop option in the cosmic GUI!-- as in to stop at 80percent for battery saving. And this isn't s76 laptop.

The combination of power and scheduler allows for long battery life!

On laptops that run open firmware compatible BIOS, the older pop would allow you to update firmware from within the OS!

[Proton_badger]

Re: Using it

Nice, mine is an Asus also. There's a bug open on their github for the battery limit as it isn't always persisted over boots.

If you play around with COSMIC my applet might be useful to you.

[mmstick]

System76 Power

Pull requests are welcome to system76-power to add hardware-specific support for battery thresholds, fan curves, and power profiles. I recently merged a third party contribution that added battery threshold support for some Huawei laptop models. We have an open hardware policy at the company to accept PRs for any hardware.

[HoraceTheUnicorn]

Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, Mate, Budgie, LXQT, Pantheon, Unity, and now WillyWonkaUI

This latest one was a consequence of mardy bums and bun fights within Gnome. Meanwhile, Satya Microsoft and Tim Apple laugh yet more pretty tears of joy.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

> Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, Mate, Budgie, LXQT, Pantheon, Unity, and now WillyWonkaUI

Well yes, up to a point.

The real situation, though, is both simpler and more difficult.

* There are 30 or 40 Linux desktops

* However, in real life, these are:

- 25 poor clones of Win95

- 1 quite good clone of macOS

- 2 poor but pretty clones of iPadOS

- a handful of assorted clones of 1980s desktops nobody cares about

The real solution?

#1

* Take the Win9x teams in a room and bang their heads together until they work together, can be seamlessly intermixed, and subject to constraints of programming languages, you get 2 good Win9x clones instead of 25.

For the rest:

#2

* Teach users to use the keyboard so they don't get confused when something moves 10cm and they can't find it.

Note, both require changing human nature.

[squizzler]

First we have the COSMIC desktop...

Now we await with bated breath for when System76 announce they will replace the rest of Pop! underneath this desktop with Mr Soller's own Redox operating system. Fanciful? Maybe. But don't count it out whilst Redox continues going from strength to strength.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: First we have the COSMIC desktop...

They'd have to maintain ABI compatibility with Linux. Possible? Yes. Likely? No.

You also have the rather significant issue of driver support. The AMDGPU driver *could* be ported by a few/a lot of smart people, but a lot of System76 hardware uses NVIDIA GPU's.

[mmstick]

Re: First we have the COSMIC desktop...

It may be possible to create a virtual GPU driver for Redox that internally is a Linux micro VM using Linux GPU drivers.

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

Thanks for being a guinea pig for the rest of us Liam!

I am very excited to try COSMIC one day (maybe when it's finally in beta), but this article confirms what I suspected, that there is no reason for me to try PopOS itself, the desktop is the only part of it that intrigues me. I'll run it on Debian (work) and Arch (play), assuming it fits my needs/wants.

The reason why I am excited is the built in tiling. I hope there is going to be an option to make the desktop more like Cinnamon or stock KDE, meaning no top panel, with everything combined into a single bottom panel. Being forced to have a top panel is a dealbreaker for me, tiling or no tiling. Currently, I use GNOME with a handful of extensions and tweaks to get as close as possible to what I want, but I'd love to be able switch to COSMIC if it has better tiling than the Forge extension (which it sounds like it does).

[Anonymous Coward]

You can move the top panel to the bottom if that's what you mean, and I'm pretty sure making it more like a Windows-esque taskbar is already possible.

[Proton_badger]

Yeah, you're right; disable Dock, move Panel to bottom, add app tray/minimized icons to panel, perhaps make it a bit bigger.

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

Fantastic! Thank you both for the info! Maybe I won't wait for the beta to try it after all, though the idea of running an alpha as a daily driver seems unwise, and to see how it's coming along, all I need to do is follow Liam and others who test these things and write about and/or make videos about the experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

It’s surprisingly robust for an Alpha, to be honest

[ianbetteridge]

The tiling in PopOS is pretty great if you fall into the same category as me: someone who wants occasional, keyboard-drivable tiling but a more conventional window manager most of the time.

I've test driven the alpha on both the PopOS release and using Fedora and while it's not ready for me to use all the time, it's promising. It also felt VERY responsive, much more so than either GNOME or KDE. Lots of rough edges, of course, but almost at the point where I could use it 90% of the time.

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

I made some comments above on the posts of others, and said I was excited to try COSMIC, but I'd probably wait until it was more ready. I also said that I didn't feel any need to try Pop!_OS.

Thanks partly to the fact that a few people confirmed that I could get a more Cinnamon/Windows feel than the default top panel and bottom dock gives, and partly thanks to the fact that a Pop!_OS and COSMIC developer is lurking in this comment section taking feedback, I decided to give it a trial, not just COSMIC, but the whole new alpha release of Pop!_OS.

I had 180 or so GB of unpartitioned space on one of the drives in my main home workstation, so I threw the alpha ISO on a Ventoy and booted it up. I went into the installer, and chose the custom setup. There seemed to be no way to have it smartly use the unpartitioned space, so I clicked the button (I forget it's label) that brings up gparted. I tried to create the needed ESP and root partitions, but it seemed to hang and didn't actually create any partitions. I rebooted back into the ISO and tried again with the same result, then booted into a live gparted ISO and created the partitions that way. After this, the installer let me choose my new partitions under the advanced install. Installation went smoothly, and on post install reboot the PC launched straight into the new Pop!_OS installation. Automaticaly detecting other installed operating systems and setting up a way to boot into them as alternatives to Pop!_OS would have been nice, as this machine has Windows 11 and Arch on my main drive and on a secondary drive, besides some storage partitions, there are 2 different other Arch installations (used for playing with different DEs and things) and now this new Pop!_OS installation. For now I am having to select a bootloader from the boot menu of the PCs firmware to hop between Pop!_OS and my main grub which has all the other operating systems available. I imagine I can find a way to have my main grub list an option for this Pop!_OS installation, but maybe not? I don't really have any experience with systemd-boot.

So far I have only messed around with it for an hour or so. I'm writing this comment using the alpha right now. One thing I noticed right away is that firefox doesn't have minimize and maximize buttons but the distro specific apps do. I was indeed able to get the panel moved to the bottom, remove the dock, and add an app tray to the panel on the bottom. This is great. The panel can be shown on all displays simultaneously, another win for me. Having an auto-hide for the panel is also a must have for me, and luckily, it's an option. My only complaint is that it hides whenever any window is open on a display, not just when one is maximized or otherwise trying to use the screen area that the panel is in. This will probably be only a minor annoyance for me though, as the tiling is why I'm really here, and with that turned on, I'll rarely have a floating window anyway. The tiling seems great so far, and is definitely an improvement over using the Forge extension in GNOME as I am currently in both Arch at home and Debian at work. I love being able to stack windows while tiling, as well as being able to toggle whether a certain window is floating or tiling, and the whole experience of managing the tiled windows just feels better somehow than it does with Forge on GNOME.

Kudos to the COSMIC team for the great work so far, and thanks again to Liam for this article and those in these comments who convinced me to give the alpha a try. I plan to mess with it more in the near future, and I really think COSMIC can eventually replace the "GNOME with a hodgepodge of extensions" which I am using now, perhaps even before it leaves alpha.

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

Oh, and another minor* issue. If there was a time-zone selection in the install process I somehow missed it, and when I go into the settings to change it, it doesn't actually change. I can select my correct timezone (America/Chicago, as I am in the Central Timezone of the U.S.) in the drop down list, but it doesn't stick. I even tried other timezones to be sure it wasn't just the one I wanted that didn't work. No matter how many times I try to change it, the Time Zone in the Date & Time settings is set to Etc/UTC.

* I called it a minor issue only because this is an alpha. It's a major issue for a daily driver.

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

Update: After being so impressed by the COSMIC alpha in my new Pop!_OS installation earlier, I used clonezilla to make a backup image of my main drive, where my daily driver Arch installation with GNOME plus a handful of extensions lives alongside the Windows 11 install that I try not to boot into unless it's absolutely necessary or it's been a few months since I updated it. I then installed the COSMIC alpha on my daily driver Arch installation, alongside GNOME so I can switch at login. It went without a hiccup, using the cosmic-session package from the Arch Extra repo, and I am using it now. I'm going to see how long I can last daily driving COSMIC on Arch where I already have all my needed apps installed, but keep the Pop!_OS installation as well to fiddle with occasionally. After a few more hours of COSMIC experience, I am even more impressed than I was before. It's hard to believe it's an alpha.

It's very late now, and I must sleep. More later...

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

Further update: I have now also installed the COSMIC alpha on my personal laptop. Another existing Arch installation, and on this one, I have been using Cinnamon, instead of going through customizing GNOME. Cinnamon will not as far as I can tell let you have the same bottom panel on all screens. You can put a new panel on each screen and try to make it look the same, but it's a pain in the ass and doesn't function the way I want anyway. This rules it out for a multi-display DE for me, but on my laptop, I am almost never using anything but the single built in 15.5" display, so Cinnamon is acceptable. Tiling isn't as much of a killer feature in the laptop either, as I am maximizing most applications most of the time, but I occasionally use window snapping to get a browser side by side with a terminal window, or something like that so I will likely enjoy COSMIC on the laptop as well.

I have installed it alongside Cinnamon, the way I installed it alongside my existing GNOME+extensions on my other machine. When I then chose COSMIC from the lightdm login screen, all I got was a blinking cursor on a black screen. I rebooted to the same result. Next I disabled lightdm and installed and enabled GDM. From GDM I could indeed log in and use COSMIC, but I also noticed something strange. GNOME was now listed as an option, along with Cinnamon and COSMIC. I don't think I ever had GNOME installed previous to Cinnamon on this machine, and it was never an option from lightdm. I can indeed now launch into a totally stock GNOME desktop if I choose to do so (yuck).

COSMIC seems to be working ok on the laptop so far also. One oddity is an extra network applet in the system tray that looks totally different than the COSMIC network applet. I think it is likely nm-applet, and I have tried changing the line in it's desktop entry from "NotShowIn=KDE;GNOME;" to "NotShowIn=KDE;GNOME;COSMIC;" but this didn't work.