Cosmic’s Rust-powered debut is here! Dive into the revamped Pop!_OS 24.04 beta and get your first look at the modern desktop that’s rewriting Linux history.
The beta of Pop!_OS 24.04 got released tonight and it’s ready for download now. Perhaps more exciting, that means the new Rust- and scratch-built Cosmic desktop environment — typically spelled all uppercase — was also released as a beta since it’s Pop’s default DE. Anyway, the developers at System76 would like you to take a look at both, and do what you can to try to make either one crash and burn.
A press release given to the press ahead of the release said: “They are calling upon the open source community to put the beta through the ringer and help
Cosmic shine in its pivotal first release.”
If that sounds strange, it shouldn’t. What they want is for you to make the software go down in flames, then tell them what hardware you were running and what you did to make that happen. That way, they can make sure it never happens in the stable releases that’ll follow a few release candidates several months from now.
In other words, before you use it, know that it’s beta and not intended for anything mission critical. Then do your best to destroy it, if that’s your bent. Or, you could do like me and run it to see how nice it is. Either way will make the folks at System76 happy.
Cosmic Is the Big News
From where I sit as a newspaper person, as important as Pop!_OS has come to be to the System76 ecosystem, this almost-ready-for-prime-time release of Cosmic is what’s going to sell papers.
It’s been four years since System76 first released Cosmic as a Gnome-based desktop. It was initially released and developed in 2021 as yet another way to distinguish the company’s Pop!_OS from other Ubuntu-based distributions, even though it didn’t need much differentiating. The distro was a surprise hit when it was first released in 2017, just as Cosmic was an immediate surprise hit when it was released four years later.
The original Cosmic was based on Gnome, making it something of a quiet launch at the time, but users took a cotton to it — and not only on Pop!_OS. Users on all sorts of Linux distros started running it, in much the same way that a lot of users had started to adopt Solus’s Budgie a few years earlier.
“System76 has been building COSMIC to propel the Linux desktop to new heights of user empowerment,” the folks at System76 said in a statement they released earlier today. They say it will replace their custom version of the Gnome DE on Pop!_OS — that would be the old Cosmic that’s already a hit with users — to reimagine the desktop environment and the value it provides.
They’ve been working on this for a while. It started a couple of years back, as the dev team at System76 started thinking outside-the-box to come up with new ways to make Cosmic… well, more cosmic. They quickly ran into something of a kerfuffle with the folks at Gnome, who didn’t particularly fancy the notion of changing their whole way of doing things just so Cosmic devs could build on their work to make a competing desktop.
That was fine with the folks at System76, who decided on the spot — on Twitter and in front of everybody — to let Gnome continue to be Gnome, because what they really needed was a scratch build distro anyway, and one written in the Rust programming language, since Rust has become something akin to the programming language of the 2020s, due to its reputation for readability, stability, maintainability, and memory safety. DevOps and SecOps types like it for those features.
Everyday Linux users have been looking forward to this Rust-built version too, because they already know that Rust is fast and furiously cool enough for Torvalds and the gang at Linux. Even better, they’re looking forward to what the System76 dudes and dudettes are promising it will bring to a DE that’s already so cool that it’s chill.
Core Apps
If you wanna know how cool and how packed this DE is, just a quick glance at the apps hanging off this beta should give you a clue: Cosmic Settings, Cosmic Files, Cosmic Store, Cosmic Terminal, Cosmic Edit, COSMIC Player, and even more Cosmic apps that can be found in the Cosmic Store’s Explore page in the Made For Cosmic section. There are also applets galore, which are embedded in panels and made for keeping an eye on and configuring everything from battery, wifi, bluetooth, sound, tiling, notifications, accessibility, and… well, there are even more applets to be found on the Cosmic Store Applets page.
And if you’re looking for a link to the Cosmic Store, you’ll need to wait until you have Cosmic up and running, because it’s a feature you’ll be able to reach from within the DE.
Cosmic Consciousness on Other Distros
“One of System76’s goals with the COSMIC Alpha was to encourage distro maintainers to experiment with COSMIC and see how it might integrate with their distros,” System76 explained. “The result is a sizable list of distros including Cosmic in their repositories — before the beta, let alone the first release.”
In fact, it’s not just distros letting Cosmic inside. Fedora has even come out with a couple of Cosmic spins. As Marshall McLuhan might say about the latter: The Desktop Is the Distro.
Here’s the list so far:
- Fedora COSMIC Spin
- Fedora COSMIC Atomic
- NixOS
- Arch
- Aeryn OS
- Redox OS
- CachyOS
Pop!_OS users can upgrade to 24.04 LTS via the usual upgrade path, no fresh install needed. Cosmic Alpha users only need to fully update their system on the 25th to upgrade to Beta. A release candidate will follow the beta period and then final release. Visit the Cosmic website for more details, or visit the Pop!_OS website for Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta download and upgrade instructions.
Download COSMIC Beta now
Download Pop!_OS Beta
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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