Published Mar 17, 2026, 2:30 PM EDT
Roine Bertelson is a Stockholm-based tech writer, translator, and digital strategist with more than twenty years of hands-on experience in AI tools, Linux, consumer tech, cybersecurity, and SEO-driven content. He's known for turning complex topics into clear and practical guidance that helps readers solve real problems. People trust his work because he actually uses and tests the tools he writes about, breaks things on purpose, and translates the chaos of modern technology into advice that feels human, honest, and useful.
GNOME has been my default Ubuntu desktop for years. It’s stable, polished, and widely supported. If you install Ubuntu, GNOME is simply part of the deal. It works well enough that most people never feel the need to replace it. But lately, I keep hearing whispers about something new: the COSMIC desktop. Originally developed by System76 for Pop!_OS, COSMIC has evolved into a completely new desktop environment built from scratch. Not a theme, not a fork, but an entirely new stack, largely written in Rust and designed around modern Linux workflows. Naturally, my curiosity won.
So I did what any reasonable Linux user would do. I replaced GNOME with COSMIC on my Ubuntu machine just to see what would happen. What I expected was a fun experiment. What I found instead was something that genuinely feels like the next generation of Linux desktops.
Installing COSMIC on Ubuntu was surprisingly painless
Swapping desktops without breaking everything
Let's make something clear before we dive in: On my Ubuntu machine, I run 24.04 (LTS). I hear that users running later editions may run into some issues installing COSMIC.
Switching Linux desktop environments always comes with a small dose of anxiety. Anyone who has experimented with desktop hopping knows the risks. Dependency conflicts, broken login managers, and random graphical glitches that leave you staring at a blinking cursor, wondering where your life went wrong. Thankfully, COSMIC behaved itself.
Installing it on Ubuntu is fairly straightforward. Once the packages are installed, COSMIC simply appears as a new session option on the login screen. After logging out and selecting the COSMIC session, the desktop loaded immediately. No drama, no graphics meltdown, and no emergency reboot ritual. Just a clean new desktop waiting to be explored. That alone was already a promising start.
Add the Cosmic PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hepp3n/cosmic-epochUsually, Ubuntu auto-updates after adding a PPA, but to make sure it's done:
sudo apt updateInstall:
sudo apt install cosmic-sessionLog out and switch to COSMIC before punching in that password, and your new Cosmic desktop should load just fine.
The first thing you notice is how fast everything feels
COSMIC feels lightweight without feeling unfinished
The first few minutes inside COSMIC were oddly satisfying. Not because it looks radically different. In fact, the design is clean and modern, but familiar enough that you do not feel lost. If you have used GNOME or Pop!_OS before, the general layout makes sense.
What stood out immediately was the responsiveness. Applications opened instantly. Workspace switching felt smooth. Window animations happened without the small micro-stutters that sometimes creep into heavier desktops. The system simply felt … quick. Part of that comes from COSMIC being designed as a Wayland-first desktop environment, which helps with smoother rendering and modern graphics handling.
System76
Cosmic is a desktop environment written in RUST. It's the desktop that ships with Pop_OS, from System76.
But another major factor is its architecture. COSMIC is written largely in Rust, a programming language known for performance and safety. That choice alone already makes it different from most existing Linux desktop environments. The result is a desktop that feels lightweight without looking stripped down, making everything feel intentional.
COSMIC’s architecture is very different from traditional desktops
A modular design instead of one giant desktop environment
This is where COSMIC becomes genuinely interesting. Most Linux desktop environments are massive, tightly integrated systems. GNOME and KDE are essentially huge collections of components that depend heavily on each other. COSMIC takes a different approach.
Instead of one giant environment, it’s built as a modular stack of independent components. For example:
- The window compositor is a separate project called cosmic-comp.
- The panel is its own component.
- The launcher is separate.
- Individual desktop features run as independent applications.
In other words, COSMIC behaves more like a collection of coordinated tools than a single monolithic environment. This makes the system easier to evolve over time. Components can be updated or replaced without rewriting the entire desktop. It’s a surprisingly modern design philosophy for a Linux desktop environment, and it’s one of the reasons many developers are watching COSMIC closely.
Built-in tiling makes multitasking feel effortless
COSMIC treats productivity as a first-class feature
Another thing COSMIC does differently is how it handles windows. Tiling window management is built directly into the desktop. You do not need extensions, and you do not need to install a tiling window manager. You do not need to learn complicated keyboard gymnastics. You simply enable tiling.
Once activated, windows automatically organize themselves across the screen. Open a new app, and the layout adjusts. Move a window, and the grid reshapes itself. It sounds simple, but it completely changes how the desktop feels. My typical workflow involves a browser, a writing editor, a terminal, and usually a documentation window somewhere on the screen.
On GNOME, that setup usually requires some manual resizing. On COSMIC, the layout happens automatically. Everything finds its place without the desktop turning into a pile of overlapping windows. After a few hours of using it, the workflow starts to feel strangely natural.
COSMIC is still young, and that shows occasionally
A few rough edges are inevitable
To be clear, COSMIC is still very new. And new desktop environments rarely arrive fully polished. During my testing, I noticed a few areas that clearly still need work. Some settings panels feel incomplete. Certain configuration options are still missing. The ecosystem of extensions and add-ons is basically nonexistent for now. That last point matters because GNOME has had years to build an enormous extension ecosystem.
COSMIC is starting from scratch. But the important thing is that the core desktop experience already feels solid. The rough edges mostly appear around optional features rather than the fundamental desktop workflow. Nothing I encountered made the system feel unstable or unusable. It simply feels like a desktop environment that is still growing into itself.
COSMIC might become one of Linux’s most important desktops
When System76 first announced COSMIC as a new desktop environment, it sounded like a niche project designed specifically for Pop!_OS. After actually using it, that assumption feels outdated. COSMIC has the potential to become something much larger.
It combines several trends that are becoming increasingly important in the Linux ecosystem:
- Wayland-first design.
- Rust-based architecture.
- Built-in tiling workflows.
- Modular components.
That combination makes it appealing not only to Pop!_OS users but to anyone interested in modern Linux desktop design. Will COSMIC replace GNOME or KDE? Probably not, as those environments are massive projects with huge user bases. But COSMIC does not need to replace them to become influential. If development continues at the current pace, it could easily become one of the most interesting desktop environments in the Linux ecosystem.
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And after replacing GNOME with COSMIC on my Ubuntu machine, I can say one thing with confidence. This started as a quick experiment. But I am definitely not rushing back to GNOME anytime soon.