TL;DR: System76's COSMIC first alpha is going to be in late May with new COSMIC desktop apps. The planned stable release will still be in late summer with POP!_OS 24.04.
I've been following this since it started like 2 years ago so it's unbelievable that an alpha is going to be upon us so soon. This is largely the most ambitious undertaking that any libre software group has taken in a long while (apart from Asahi Linux and graphics work).
Not quite, there are some big notables
- The entire software stack is built using Rust leveraging powerful Rust crates like smithay and iced, it's all one language rather than a mix of borrowed tooling decided by upstream.
- Moreover, this means that System76 has full control over the desktop, this is a huge improvement compared to COSMIC being just GNOME 42 + Extensions.
- S76 also is a hardware manufacturer, so they want to be 100% responsible for the software that comes with their machines for their clients (they deal with very new hardware)
- GNOME upstream moved away/moved too slowly for System76, GNOME has its own identity that didn't line up with what S76 wanted.
- More free software! Everything S76 develops is open source and contributes back to the community (see cosmic-text becoming the de-facto standard of font rendering in Rust).
If you're not convinced, see the COSMIC store (cosmic version of GNOME software and KDE Discover)
It uses very little memory compared to the Pop Shop. Searches can be performed live as they are done in parallel. Searching for "e" takes 5.5 ms on my desktop and returns 4601 results.
Personally I think the window titlebars look a bit jank and the light theme needs some work but it seems like development is speeding up greatly.
