I think there’s some tools in development that will help people create apps in Rust for COSMIC. Maybe a little patience is all you’ll need.

I love the full overview as well. On every Pop installation I restore it to super key only. The Launcher then goes to it’s original keys of super + /. You end up with the full activity view with the exception of the Gnome search bar. And we’re talking about the COSMIC extension on Gnome right now, but the COSMIC desktop environment will be much more configurable from what I’ve been led to believe.

Yes, it’s good enough to do many normal things with. And like you said, if you get stuck you can log out and into another DE. Logging out can be done from the top panel menu, the Launcher or using loginctl from a TTY if necessary.

I’ve never wanted to “rice” my Pop!_OS, but I think I’ve been disappointed that Gnome couldn’t add some simple changes like the following from COSMIC without installing third party software.

Beyond changing from Dark to Light mode and choosing an accent color you can change the application background, interface text palette tint and neutral palette tint. You’ll also be able to choose one of the three styles for the corner radii used throughout the interface and set an interface density.

Finally! Notifications can happen where you want, and they’re not connected to the calendar. This is a massive win for me. Gnome’s is really annoying being top center and dropping down into your work. I’ve always turned off 95% of notifications. If I can have them bottom left or right I will love that.

The notifications applet has been integrated into COSMIC DE! Unlike in Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, notifications exist in their own applet, separate from your calendar.

Here’s an update from System76 about theming. https://blog.system76.com/post/customizing-cosmic-theming-and-applications.

I don’t care about Karma. And the link from here has three other links with which you can vote and pay tribute. My only motivation and concern with this post was to bring awareness of this event to the Pop community specifically. Your request for instance-correctness and minutia of post obligations in this situation seems a little off putting, but whatever. My whole point being: Bram was a genuine decent human.

OK, point taken/learned, but I’m not changing this now.

I don’t think anyone could answer this reliably except a Pop COSMIC dev right now. They’ve been hinting at much better user enabled theming than GNOME, but the repos I thought were part of are archived. I see some development in libcosmic, but I don’t know how to compare their intentions with Plasma. Wait for a DEV.

I noticed in the link to Intel drm that the GT2 version has issues. I’m not sure what the difference is, but I’m having no issues with 12th Gen Intel i7-12700 AlderLake-S GT1. All good here.

Yeah, a couple people mentioned that they had apps reinstalled. I had Geary reinstall itself, but no big deal. Just purge it again and put it on sudo apt-mark hold.

The reason this happened was a reorganization of the metapackage. https://github.com/pop-os/desktop/pull/113. One of Pop’s devs had this to say;

one of the bigger changes that prompted it was the Ubuntu Pro ESM adds; now we can just drop packages like the one providing those instead of having to replace them with dummy packages to fulfill the dependencies or hack around them with additional packages. It also enables Pop!_OS server and decouples things that will make rolling out COSMIC Epoch easier, so it was really a win all around.

These guys are always going above and beyond to maintain the open source freedom we appreciate so much.

Nice! This is handy. Good job.

It’s a decent suggestion. Using multiple windows in a tile stack would be the way I’d do it, but it sounds like that probably won’t be a valid suggestion. I don’t think it’s a such a great feature that I’d comply with DRM based web page tracking and ads for. For clarity, any site with Google’s DRM will need to be seen with Chrome or you won’t be able to use the site, period. You will be 100% tracked and served ads. They will know exactly who you are on any site. They will clutter your pages, tab stacked or otherwise. I don’t believe Google when they say this for your safety and will stop ads. It will give them exclusive power to push ads and companies will pay them a premium to force ads in your pages. This isn’t Google’s engineers who are pushing this. It’s Google corporate making it’s engineers break the web for profit and ad dominance.

Losing the ability to block ads completely or have tab stacking - I know which way I’d go. But hey, you can’t force people to do anything, and unlike Google I wouldn’t, so I’ll just leave it there.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stack-for-firefox/

Bring Vivaldi Tab Stack to Firefox. Source code: https://github.com/Riajyuu/Tab-Stack

I most certainly am getting there. Trying to avoid corporate enshitification is near impossible in the web space most people know.

I especially like the option to auto move full screen windows to their own workspace

That is a useful option. Some time ago I played with another extension which handled that and I liked the work flow. You could name the app in the Extensions app settings for it, and allocate a workspace number. Too bad it often broke and I got tired of that. If this were an option in COSMIC I’d use it for sure.

OK, glad you got a result. It is odd, but some dependency issues have been observed lately. I don’t know why full-upgrade didn’t handle that after running that sequence. Here’s a little context;

dist-upgrade
   dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade,
   also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions
   of packages; apt-get has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and
   it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the
   expense of less important ones if necessary. So, dist-upgrade
   command may remove some packages. The /etc/apt/sources.list file
   contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package
   files. See also apt_preferences(5) for a mechanism for overriding
   the general settings for individual packages.

full-upgrade
   full-upgrade performs the function of upgrade but may also remove
   installed packages if that is required in order to resolve a
   package conflict.

The technical answer is that COSMIC is a desktop environment, and like any other desktop environment you can install it on top any Linux distribution that supports it. Meaning it should be technically possible to install on an existing 22.04, or maybe 24.04 Pop!_OS. But here’s the tricky bit, and nothing is concrete yet. COSMIC DE might be getting released on a new Pop-core which will not be what already exists. In that scenario a fresh installation would likely be necessary. So to answer your question - I’m not sure how that will roll out just now.

I will say this. After using and watching Pop!_OS development for five years now, whatever System76 release will be awesome. It simply has to be as they’re a hardware sales company and need a stable, secure and functional OEM operating system.

If it is phased updates two weeks is not uncommon. In the meantime you can try to fix the packet manager and use full-upgrade which focuses on dependencies.

sudo apt clean
sudo apt update
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt install -f
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove --purge 

All good. I’ll try and do a fresh one whenever significant improvements can be shown.

There’s been at least six blog posts from System76 on COSMIC DE. You can keep an eye out here