Pop!_OS deejays prepare to release holiday remix along with Cosmic v 1.0

System76's POP!_OS is one of the more substantially modified Ubuntu based distros out there, and so it was something of a surprise to see the company's substantial presence at the Ubuntu Summit. And its stable release along with version 1.0 of its custom desktop, COSMIC, is imminent. The big day for Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and …

[Steve Graham]

So you need special code in (effectively) your window manager to "night-light" Wayland? In Xorg, it's a single xrandr command.

[blu3b3rry]

Threw one of the beta versions of POP! 24.04 onto one of my little fleet of NUC's a few weeks ago. Despite it only being a low-end Pentium N3700 I found COSMIC ran very well indeed, remained nice and responsive in a way the GNOME desktops don't tend to on weaker hardware.

The only quibble I had was a few odd graphical issues with icons not appearing correctly in the panel when running some software via Flatpak.

Hopefully that will be fixed by the time the release comes around - I've seen it reported a few times on the forums.

Tempted to give it a whirl for a week or two and see how well I get used to its workflow - always nice to try something different now and again.

[Rahbut]

I'm genuinely looking forward to Cosmic v1 - and what that might do for other DE's.

I'm also looking forward to reading Liam's opinion upon the release... :)

[the settings sync service sounds like a useful addition I wasn't expecting]

[Liam Proven]

> I'm genuinely looking forward to Cosmic v1 - and what that might do for other DE's.

Yes, me too.

> I'm also looking forward to reading Liam's opinion upon the release... :)

Yikes! I have already written a bit about what I like -- and what I didn't -- of the beta, and I may not have much more to add.

Within about 2 days of the beta release, I found reliability and stability on my edge-case testbed (Thinkpad W520 with long-unsupported nVidia co-GPU) sharply improved.

But I attempted to write this story on it, and it consistently crashed hard (hold down the power switch level) opening a bunch of demanding Firefox tabs. I disabled ZRAM, disabled the encrypted swapfile and switched to a dedicated swap partition, then tried ZSWAP compression on that... no change.

So, mixed blessing. But a nearly 15YO Thinkpad is an outlier for this.

> [the settings sync service sounds like a useful addition I wasn't expecting]

Yes, me too.

[Proton_badger]

I was vaguely expecting something like sync because during one demo Jeremy Soller wanted to demonstrate themes and desktop layouts, to do so quickly he used git in .config/cosmic/ so a simple "git checkout ubuntu" and the DE immediately changed to look like standard Ubuntu, or something along those lines.

A lot of things like better keyboard navigation, blur, more and configurable (speed/disable) animations, etc etc are dependent upon Iced and are planned, the DE is young yet but they've done lots of usability/accessibility/UI studies so a lot will happen over time, even if the first version is a bit basic.

[Neil Barnes]

slightly different variants

MATE, Budgie, Cinnamon, Xfce, LXDE, and even GNOME Flashback are all just slightly different variants of the Windows 95 Explorer, built using Gtk and other GNOME tools.

You say that as if it were a bad thing... much as one might dislike MS, for whatever reasons, the W95 desktop worked well enough to be worth copying.

[Jim Mitchell]

Re: slightly different variants

the W95 desktop worked well enough to be worth copying.

Was it copied because it was worth copying or because it was the market leader and seen as necessary to acquire users?

[John_3_16]

Re: slightly different variants

Why not for both reasons. I developed the same satisfaction for Win 7 & continue to use it today. Security updates for mine end after Jan 2026 & I will convert to my secondary OS; Zorin 18. Has been stable for me last 3 years & an easy conversion for Win 7 & Win 10 users. I have zero desire to play M$ update tag or spy games with Win 11. Linux has so much innovation constantly being coded that I feel eventually one or more distros will dominate various markets now held by M$, Google & Apple.

[Liam Proven]

Re: slightly different variants

> You say that as if it were a bad thing...

I think it is.

None of them has the Start menu on-disk storage as a simple directory tree, one of the great bits of the original design.

All of them waste code on letting you rearrange ~deckchairs on the Titanic~ taskbar items, which frankly is not needed.

Most of them waste code on multiple panels, which MS realised was a waste of time after Win98.

Xfce is the *only one* with a more-or-less fully working vertical panel. LXDE can do it but inefficiently and you can't adjust it.

None of them approach the simplicity and clarity of their own inspiration. Win 95 fit onto _13 floppies_.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34513

Exlorer was 200 kB of code and it has not been bettered yet.

https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/shell/explorer/history/index.htm

Not a single one of these desktops alone -- and W95 was a whole OS -- not one could fit into 10x that, and yet, they are functionally inferior.

Look, I do not like Vi and have disliked it for 37 years or something, but I acknowledge that Vim is a great editor, loved by tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. I wrote an obit for Bram Moolenaar.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/07/bram_moolenaar_obituary/

Vim is a great bit of code.

But who remembers Elvis or Stevie? The _other_ Vi clones from the early days.

https://elvis.the-little-red-haired-girl.org/

https://timthompson.com/tjt/stevie/

Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 15 different Vi clones, and every distro included most of them, and the fans battled over which was better. But none were compatible with one another's config files or macros, all used different keystrokes, none did syntax highlighting, etc.

It would be a mess.

The Win95 Explorer was a masterwork and re-defined computer UI. And I speak as a lover of EPOC, EPOC32, RISC OS, Classic MacOS and BeOS.

Instead of _one good copy_ we have a dozen crappy ones. Only Xfce is usable for me personally and it's clunky in places.

What a titanic waste of programmer effort, skill, time, and effort. Hundreds of people working hard for decades, but on all these different projects, so none are very good. Only the oldest, the only one that's older than Windows 98 when it all started to go wrong, is worth using. _EVERYTHING_ since is worse.

That is a disaster.

Microsoft has been laughing all the way to the bank for 26 years. I bet they wet themselves in mirth when KDE came out.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did try Pop! as a first try Linux on a desktop that wouldn't support W11. I picked Pop! as this was supposely the most compatible OS with Steam Proton and NVidia support baked in.

But it completely shit the bed over the NVidia drivers; repeately corrupting user profiles whenever the drivers were attempted.Didn't recognise the Gfx card (which is listed), struggled to download the right driver version even when prompted, struggled to use the right driver when installed and many other NVidia related probs.

I gave up and put on Mint which did work.

Pop did look nice, seemed functional apart from the Nvidia issues but with the gaming and Nvidia support being its USP and that then being the thing that let it down it was disappointing.

[JLV]

It's nice to know this, thank you. However, may I suggest adding when you did this? This isn't a final product yet and if you tried say a year ago, that is quite different from doing it 6 weeks before GA, i.e. very recently.

[0laf]

A few months ago, not this release.

I didn't pick up it was a beta, everthing I saw indicated it was a full product and even sold preinstalled in Pop hardware.

I did like it but it didn't work on my hardware. The software centre / store was particularly good.

[Liam Proven]

> I didn't pick up it was a beta, everthing I saw indicated it was a full product and even sold preinstalled in Pop hardware.

You have not specified a version, but Pop OS 22.04 _is_ a full release. It is _not_ a beta.

The problem here isn't Pop. You're blaming the wrong outfit.

It's nVidia.

Did you not see this?

https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/18/torvalds_curses_nvidia/

Do you think there's no special reason why probably the single most famous programmer in the world got so angry?

[conceisao]

Yes okay, there will still be some problems on graphics cards like nvidia, but little by little they will be resolved as happens in other distros.

I agree with Liam when he points out the presence of system76 at the ubuntu summit more than in evidence...

I have the impression that the CEO of Canonical is waiting for the POP-OS + System76 pair to consolidate and then hand over the entire desktop branch of ubuntu to them. This operation would have two major direct and I believe desirable consequences on the part of the two actors (System 76 and Canonical) in play. The former would also give very strong credibility on the hardware market of notebooks and personal computers (therefore a more than good and progressive potential expansion on the hw PC market). Canonical and its CEO would finally have the best opportunity to exit the desktop market.

And we all know that they have been tempted to do so several times both after the unity experience and also currently due to the substantial and progressive loss of leadership of the ubuntu + gnome couple, but above all because ubuntu desktop (as it is...) appears to be a ball and chain for the CEO of Canonical in the perspective of growing corporate profits.

The sale of the ubuntu desktop branch to system76 popos would certainly not be as traumatic as that of the transition to unity/gnome 3, on the contrary, I would say that it would be even more advantageous than then, both because users would arrive at an extremely flexible desktop and for this reason aesthetically more than acceptable but above all because they would obtain a desktop that has advanced basic and (rust) development technology, modern and safe, adding the result of a fair amount of independence from gnome (supported by Redhat). Last but not least, a more aesthetically acceptable desktop than all other Linux desktops around, and which would lead ubuntu once again to take on that role of pioneer and master of Linux technology which led it to be, at the time of gnome2, the most famous and widespread.

In my opinion, system76 + popos they could represent for Canonical the best opportunity to pass the "relay" to for that race which would take ubuntu on a new path full of future prospects.

[JLV]

The following is not a popular opinion, I am sure...

I'd love to see some consolidation of the Linux DE space. Having 2 or 3 really solid ones with distinct use cases and good theming/customization capabilities would surely be better than this hodgepodge.

For one thing, whenever you are trying to configure Linux, more often than not, the answers to what you are looking for are desktop and version dependent, even when it concerns generic stuff like mounting a disk or configuring a touchpad.

(It's rather odd, on the consumer Linux user side of things, there is very little emphasis on using the terminal for configuration in answers and posts).

A long time ago, Python was all aglow with the warm glow of multiple, multiple, web frameworks. If, as a noob, you asked "Which framework should I use?" you usually got something unhelpful like "You need to look at your use cases and compare (all 20 of) them". (Some of them being real shit btw and still having a dedicated fan base, cough, TurboGears, cough). Along with the general opinion that diversity and multiplicity of choices was a strength.

Whereas, with Ruby, the answer would be: "use Rails".

Guess what a noob wanting to code a webapp and deciding on Python vs Ruby would pick?

Eventually most of that went away and consolidated into Django, Flask and FastAPI. And you know what? That is a much friendlier situation to newcomers. For power users, it also ensures that the frameworks have sufficient traction that they get a lot of spit and polish.

Now I am not saying Cosmic should be anointed here. If anything it's more like https://xkcd.com/927/ In the case of Cosmic, as outlined in the above post, it would also give some extra advantages to one particular laptop vendor, which may not be a desirable situation.

[John_3_16]

Win 7 User months away from total conversion to Linux...

I am very satisfied with Win 7 & continue to use it today. Security updates for mine end after Jan 2026 & I will convert to my secondary OS; Zorin 18. Has been stable for me last 3 years & an easy conversion for Win 7 & Win 10 users. I have zero desire to play M$ update tag or spy games with Win 11. Linux has so much innovation constantly being coded that I feel eventually one or more distros will dominate various markets now held by M$, Google & Apple. Thanks for Register articles that keep us abreast of these constant new developments as they appear on the Linux horizons.

[PRR]

> a little unstable on both our test machines: we saw a number of crashes. Some large updates ...became visibly more stable: one of our testbed machines ran for a week without a hitch.

A week? Hold my beer. This Win7 hasn't given trouble in months, and that was crappy "free" software and I un-jammed it with TaskMan not reboot. The WinXP machine upstairs hasn't glitched this year, only reboots on extended power failure.

[blu3b3rry]

Win7 and WinXP are rather mature software.

This is very much the beta version of an OS.