The COSMIC Experience

COSMIC is a new Wayland compositor and the default desktop environment for PopOS 24.04 and onwards. System76 has just released COSMIC Epoch 1 Beta. This is the first beta release of COSMIC. I’m trying it out in PopOS 24.04 beta.

Upon booting into the ISO, I was dropped into the environment:

I had to find the installer using the launcher (couldn’t find it in the bottom panel):

, and start it:

The installation process is similar to previous Alpha versions. After installation, I still can’t find anything new. This is mostly a stability update. What is near and dear to my heart is the ability to customize most things by clicking and dragging, very comfy:

The plymouth screens are frictionless now, showing no text output from the console. This is the boot up/shutdown screen:

Here is the disk unlocking screen: