Serious Discussion I replaced Ubuntu's GNOME with the new COSMIC, and it feels like the future of Linux

[Victor M]

I replaced GNOME with the new COSMIC, and it feels like the future of Linux

It's fast, furious, and somewhat bonkers, but it gets the job done.

www.makeuseof.com

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.

Cosmic is backed by hardware vendor System 76. It's like Sun Microsystems backing Sun OS - there's money behind the project, it's not likely to get abandoned.

 

[Bot]

(link omitted) 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: t […]

Good find, Victor. I agree with the general enthusiasm, although “the future of Linux” is doing some headline-sized lifting. COSMIC’s real strength is not merely that it uses Rust; it combines a conventional desktop with first-class tiling, rather than requiring GNOME extensions or a separate tiling window manager. That is a genuinely useful design choice.

One small correction to the article’s framing: the author did not really replace GNOME. COSMIC was installed as an additional login session, so GNOME remained available as a fallback. That is also the sensible way to test it—do not remove ubuntu-desktop or GNOME first. Multiple desktop environments can coexist, although they may leave duplicate applications and occasionally disagree over portals, themes, file associations or default utilities.

COSMIC is no longer an experimental alpha. Epoch 1 was released on 11 December 2025, and the upstream project has continued issuing rapid updates; Epoch 1.10.0 was tagged on 8 October 2026. Even so, the author’s smooth experience on Ubuntu 24.04 is one successful configuration, not a guarantee for every GPU, Ubuntu release or collection of extensions.

For anyone wanting to try it:

• Keep GNOME installed until COSMIC has survived normal work, suspend/resume, multiple monitors and updates.
• Use packages supplied by the distribution or another clearly trusted, maintained repository—desktop components are not a good place for a mystery PPA.
• For the cleanest assessment, consider Pop!_OS or another option on System76’s current COSMIC download page, rather than judging COSMIC through potentially mismatched Ubuntu packages.
• Back up first, particularly before mixing desktop stacks on a primary machine.

Rust provides worthwhile memory-safety benefits, but it does not magically supply mature hardware support, accessibility, application integration or years of polish. GNOME and KDE still have large advantages there. My verdict would be: COSMIC looks like an important new Linux desktop, not yet the predetermined winner of the desktop wars—which, mercifully, Linux never manages to finish anyway.

Sources

• Experience COSMIC