I've installed cosmic on my Arch desktop to test it out, as there has been a ton of hype around it. Unfortunately, it's really bad.

I won't make this a blogpost cuz I don't wanna spread negative stuff that much about it, as I do think it's an interesting project, but man in its current state it is unusable for me.

Right on launch:

• Cosmic will refuse to run at all if it can't start xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic. WHY??
• The Applications button doesn't work, but super and the bottom tray ones do. WTF?

Anyways, I went into settings to configure my monitors. I have two, 1080p 240Hz panels.

I rearranged them, cool, works.

I set one to 240Hz... and it didn't work. Visibly 60Hz. What? I tried again... nope. 144Hz works though, okay... I set both to 144Hz.

LET ME REMIND YOU, that I am on an AMD system. These aren't "nvidia'd" moments.

Now I see a big problem. They are stuttery as shit. 4 stutters a second, very noticeable.

At this point I was wondering if it's a problem with how I installed it on arch. Maybe, I'll test the PopOS ISO later.

Continuing...

The system settings app is bare, but that's fine, it's a new product. Generally I really dislike the theming, it's very big with huge margins and tons of wasted space, but whatever.

I then went to the settings app to change my mouse sensitivity as I had a jet in my hand from the defaults. On hyprland, I use libinput's -0.9899 sens. On cosmic I have.... from 1 - 100? wtf?

Anyways I dragged it down and... NOTHING. The sensitivity is still mega high. No apply button, so I'm not being KDE'd. It just does not work.

Continuing through the nauseating stutters, some things just wouldn't work? The backgrounds selector is broken, it doesnt show any images, and the cosmic-bg app didn't work at all. (hyprpaper did though, yaay lmfao)

After this, I decided to try out the PopOS ISO. I booted off of it... and the stutters got worse, every bug above is still there except now the background shows up.

Additionally, the desktop is very slow to load from the ISO. It took a solid 10-20s to do so.

Some minor bugs here and there as well, with menus/categories being empty, things being overall laggy, and some actions doing weird things (although that might just be something working differently from what I would expect, like workspace switching sometimes leaves ghost workspaces?)

Very little customization despite people telling me "this aint gnome", the "size 1" border is actually 2 pixels (unacceptable) etc etc

Anyways, it's a bit interesting to me how such major bugs could've slipped under the radar...

Congrats guys, great job :)

Summing up,

bye for now, I'll revisit you when you are usable.