Look. I’ve been a Pop!_OS user for years. I defended it. I recommended it. I even put up with the long, painful wait for COSMIC because the promise was real: a modern, Rust-based, Wayland-native desktop that System76 actually owned and could ship on their own hardware without waiting on GNOME’s whims.
And then December 2025 happened. Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS dropped with COSMIC Epoch 1 as the “stable” release.
Seven months later, and I’m just… disappointed.
Not rage-quit disappointed. Not “I’m switching to Bazzite tomorrow” disappointed (though the thought has crossed my mind more than once). Just the quiet, grinding kind of disappointment that builds up every time something basic fails in a way that feels like it should have been solved months ago.
Let’s start with the simple stuff.
Alt+Tab is a coin flip.
I press Alt+Tab expecting the last window I was in. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it picks something completely random. Sometimes it decides the terminal I have open must stay on top of the stack no matter what I do, so every time I try to switch away and back it just… stays there. Unpredictable window switching in 2026 on a desktop environment that’s supposed to be the future. Cool.
The COSMIC Store updater is a resource vampire.
I’ll be minding my own business and suddenly the entire system starts lagging. Fans spin up. Everything feels heavy. I open the system monitor and there it is — the store updater chewing through CPU like it’s trying to mine crypto in the background. On a machine with 64 gigs of RAM and 11 processor cores. This isn’t a low-end laptop. This shouldn’t happen.
Two-second lag on open.
COSMIC Store. COSMIC Files. Both of them. Click the icon… wait… wait… there it is. Every single time. On hardware that should make these apps feel instant. It’s not a one-off hitch. It’s consistent. It’s annoying. And it makes the whole desktop feel slower than it has any right to be.
File copying is broken.
I cannot reliably copy files from one directory to another in COSMIC Files. It just fails. Sometimes silently. Sometimes with a vague error. I’ve taken to just opening a terminal and using `cp` or `rsync` because I got tired of the GUI lying to me. That’s not a great look for a desktop environment that ships its own file manager as a core app.
Wayland has been a seven-month nightmare for gaming.
I knew the jump to Wayland was going to be rough. I did not expect it to still feel this bad almost seven months after the “stable” release. Gaming on Pop!_OS right now ranges from “frustrating” to “literally impossible if you don’t already know what knobs to twist.” Proton + Wayland + COSMIC still has sharp edges everywhere. If you’re not deep in the GitHub issues and Discord troubleshooting threads, good luck. And even if you are, half the time the solution is “just wait for the next update.”
Screenshot tool is unreliable.
I’ll set it to save the file. It’ll decide to only put it on the clipboard instead. Or it’ll do both. Or it’ll do neither and just… vanish. The snip feature feels like it was implemented by someone who doesn’t actually take screenshots for a living. Which is wild, because I take a lot of screenshots.
Keyboard dies after sleep.
Wake the PC from sleep and my keyboard just… doesn’t work. Have to unplug it and plug it back in, or reboot. Every single time. This one feels especially insulting because sleep/wake is one of those things that should Just Work™ on a polished desktop.
I could keep going. There are more. Little papercuts that add up. Animations that hitch. Focus issues. The occasional full desktop freeze that requires a trip to a TTY. Stuff that makes daily driving it feel like living in a perpetual beta, even though they called it stable back in December.
And here’s the part that really stings:
Despite how unfinished 24.04 still feels, System76 is already moving on to the next LTS.
They’re already looking at 26.04. The foundation isn’t even solid yet and the roadmap has already shifted focus toward the next big version. I get it — development doesn’t stop. You can’t freeze everything just because the current release has issues. But when the current “stable” LTS still has basic window management, file operations, sleep/wake, and gaming in this state after seven months, it starts to feel like the users who actually live on this desktop every day are being left to deal with the rough edges while the company chases the next shiny milestone.
I wanted COSMIC to be the one. I really did. A desktop environment built by people who actually ship Linux hardware, written in Rust, free from the GNOME politics, with real ownership over the full stack. That vision is still exciting.
But right now? It just feels half-baked. And the longer the rough edges stick around while the next LTS looms on the horizon, the harder it gets to stay optimistic.
I’m not leaving yet. I’m stubborn, and I’ve got years invested in this setup. But the disappointment is real. And it’s starting to stack higher than my terminal windows.
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Original post: https://mkultra.monster/linux/2026/07/21/cosmic-is-a-mess/