It's been almost a year since I've last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself:
I tried Cosmic 1.9 on NixOS the other day. it’s fine. The tiling toggle is very nice (always has been in all honesty) and is probably the key motivation to use it. sure you can tile in KDE or GNOME but it’s janky on both regardless of which method you use. And setting up predesignated tiling spaces on KDE for each workspace is annoying but it’s understandable.
Cosmic does have a lack of theme options similar to GNOME but in a way that makes sense due to GTK/QT applications. There’s really no point in trying to go ham on customizing the look of Cosmic as it’s going to look like a mess regardless.
It has the typical Wayland quirks/bugs. Keyboard focus is still a mess on wayland so it’s not really the fault of System76 (even though KDE has managed to pretty much solve that issue). the cosmic file manager is decent, the terminal is crap, the text editor there’s no point. their app store works fine.
If you want a very simple DE that is fairly stable and has by far the best tiling option on any DE currently available then you can’t go wrong with Cosmic. it works. it’s simple. it pretty much stays out of your way. it’s not flashy it just gets the job done. If you’re someone who loves Vim style navigation then you’ll adore cosmic as all the keybind defaults are essentially Vim. when I used it I didn’t have to change any keybinds which is VERY nice. I like it.
I tried Cosmic 1.9 on NixOS the other day. it’s fine. The tiling toggle is very nice (always has been in all honesty) and is probably the key motivation to use it. sure you can tile in KDE or GNOME but it’s janky on both regardless of which method you use. And setting up predesignated tiling spaces on KDE for each workspace is annoying but it’s understandable.
Cosmic does have a lack of theme options similar to GNOME but in a way that makes sense due to GTK/QT applications. There’s really no point in trying to go ham on customizing the look of Cosmic as it’s going to look like a mess regardless.
It has the typical Wayland quirks/bugs. Keyboard focus is still a mess on wayland so it’s not really the fault of System76 (even though KDE has managed to pretty much solve that issue). the cosmic file manager is decent, the terminal is crap, the text editor there’s no point. their app store works fine.
If you want a very simple DE that is fairly stable and has by far the best tiling option on any DE currently available then you can’t go wrong with Cosmic. it works. it’s simple. it pretty much stays out of your way. it’s not flashy it just gets the job done. If you’re someone who loves Vim style navigation then you’ll adore cosmic as all the keybind defaults are essentially Vim. when I used it I didn’t have to change any keybinds which is VERY nice. I like it.