Ubuntu Summit 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 COSMIC Epoch 1 should be December 11 – which for those outside of the Christian tradition is a fortnight before December 25th, or Newtonmas as we call it around these parts.
All the way back in 2021, US Linux box-shifter System76 took on an ambitious new project: building an entirely new Linux desktop environment from the ground up, in the also quite new Rust programming language. Now, in 2025, the company’s CEO Carl Richell, along with developer Victoria Brekenfeld, presented Elevating The Linux Desktop with COSMIC DE at the recent summit.
The big reveal in the talk was the December 11 release date for version 1.0. It has been a long road: we reported on the alpha version in September 2024 and the beta release in September 2025.
First, Richell spoke about the project in general terms. He highlighted that it’s built from composable components. For example, this means the user can choose whether they want a panel and a dock, or just a panel, and pick the contents and their order and position. He described COSMIC as “a platform as much as a desktop.” It has support for branding, so vendors can stamp their corporate identity on it. It can be quite maximalist, for instance mimicking existing OS layouts such as Windows, GNOME or macOS, or it can be stripped down to a very minimal layout with a single small, auto-hiding panel.
Brekenfeld spoke about her work on the Wayland compositor, and we found it refreshing that she talked about features that won’t be in the first full release. For instance, HDR (high-dynamic-range display) support isn’t ready yet, and it won’t make it into 1.0. This also means that features like “night light” (which desaturates the color range in the hours of darkness) won’t be there yet, either. This will apparently mean reworking some of the color rendering pipeline, but it is coming. She said that workspace handling is approaching parity with the old GNOME-based COSMIC shell, and allows things like pinning the workspace layout, for those who don’t like GNOME’s dynamic virtual desktops, and the ability to save and restore a workspace layout. Tiling, however, is not yet a complete match for the desktop’s forerunner, and it needs work on things like adding and managing windows that must not be tiled. We were also very pleased to learn that attention is being given to accessibility issues, such as a screen magnifier, color management, reduction of the range of colors used, and so on – but as of version 1.0, reducing the use of animation effects remains on the to-do list.
Richell then returned to introduce a major new feature coming in the first complete release, following a customer survey: COSMIC Sync, which will automatically synchronize system settings between separate computers. All the synched data is fully end-to-end encrypted: for System,76, this is a “zero knowledge” service. The company won’t know what you’re synching, even though this does impose some restrictions – for instance, it won’t include web-accessible cloud storage. It won’t require System76 hardware or even POP!_OS – the new COSMIC desktop is already available in multiple distributions, including Fedora and Arch, and COSMIC sync will in time work there, too. And the sync is selective: it can sync your desktop settings, keyboard shortcuts, and so on, your data files (optionally including config files, or “dot files” as Richell called them), Git repositories – even installed applications. And the sync process is atomic: anything not completely synched will be rolled back to its pre-sync state.
Our own impressions of COSMIC are favorable, as we wrote last month when testing the beta. It was noticeable that on the day of release, we found it a little unstable on both our test machines: we saw a number of crashes. Some large updates followed within the first couple of days after the beta release, and it became visibly more stable: one of our testbed machines ran for a week without a hitch. It’s impressively fast and snappy, although to be fair, as we described back in March, GNOME 48 felt snappier than before. We tried a clean install of Ubuntu 25.10 with GNOME 49 on the same elderly Thinkpad T420 on which we’re testing POP!_OS and COSMIC, and a clean install of GNOME 49 is nicely responsive too. COSMIC has the edge in some areas, though: for instance, with a portrait external monitor, it’s easy to have the COSMIC panel horizontal on one display and the dock vertical on the other. GNOME struggles with multi-head layouts such as this: all its main UI elements must remain where the designers put them, on the primary screen. If you want anything else, you need to install extensions – and run a very high risk that when you upgrade to a newer version of GNOME, your desktop won’t start.
At this stage of its development, COSMIC puts this vulture faintly in mind of the original Windows 95 as it’s a fairly radical new desktop, and while it can be set up to look vaguely like older environments, this is just cosmetic. It is its own thing, and while it still feels a little incomplete in places, it works well, does not feel limiting, and it’s fast and uncluttered. For a completely new greenfield project, it’s extremely impressive. The first beta version is admirably complete, and capable too, especially used in tiling mode.
Some of the other 21st century desktop environments, such as Budgie or Cinnamon, suffer by comparison. Even after a decade or more of work, they remain just re-implementations of existing designs which bring nothing very new to the table. 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. There is room for considerable consolidation here.
In the three-and-a-half years since System76 released POP!_OS 22.04, the Reg FOSS desk has seen quite a few people adopting it and then praising it. It’s a good tool for more tech-skilled users who are willing to learn some new stuff, while Linux Mint remains better suited to those who prefer a familiar, longer-established style of desktop. Over a few decades in the industry, we’ve grown wary of Version 1.0 of anything, but we think Cosmic may win quite a few new admirers in 2026. We also certainly wouldn’t bet against an official Ubuntu flavor with COSMIC, perhaps by the 26.10 release cycle. ®
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System76 also had hardware on display at the Summit, including impressively engineered desktop workstations. We were struck by magnetically attached case covers for easy maintenance. (Although pondering that this is safe because a modern PC typically completely lacks any form of magnetic media did make this vulture feel unspeakably ancient.)
Structural panels, though, are screwed in, to prevent units performing rapid unscheduled disassembly when you try to move them to another desk. Also notable was the lack of any removable media – who needs spinning disks any more? – and the physically imposing size of modern triple-slot PCIe graphics cards.