Every major Linux distro wants COSMIC, and it hasn’t even finished its first year

https://www.xda-developers.com/linux-distro-cosmic/

Publish Date: 2026-07-14 15:00:00

The cool thing about Linux is that, if another distro has a really cool desktop layout that you like the look of, there’s a good chance you can download it on your own PC, too. It’s not like, say, Windows versus iOS, where you need third-party apps to emulate what the other OS is using; if a Linux distro has a cool desktop environment you like, just grab it.

While we’ve gotten accustomed to the long legacies of GNOME and KDE, there’s another cool kid on the block. It’s called COSMIC, and it hasn’t even been a year since its full release before some of the biggest names in Linux have adopted it as an option for their users.

COSMIC began its life as an alternative to GNOME for Pop!_OS

GNOME wasn’t making the cut

COSMIC came to be because the developers of Pop!_OS, System76, wanted something to go with their distro. At the start, they settled with GNOME as the face of their distro, but as System76 began trying to flesh it out, they realised that there were some issues with the desktop environment.

System76 wanted something that people could customize to their heart’s content. It’s one of the biggest strengths of using Linux, after all; people have the power to set up their PC the way they want. So, they added extensions to GNOME to customize it, but it became apparent that every time GNOME updated, there was the risk of the extensions breaking.

The extensions also had the problem…

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