Just over a year ago, System76 released the first alpha of COSMIC desktop, with the intention of including it as the default desktop environment for Pop!_OS 24.04. With the beta release, they’ve succeeded in that and more.
Now available for general testing, Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta is an LTS release (as it is based on Ubuntu 24.04), and COSMIC was built from the ground up, using the Rust language and the iced graphics toolkit.
You won’t find X11 included in the new release, because it is strictly Wayland. If you have apps that do not support Wayland yet, COSMIC does include XWayland for compatibility. COSMIC also includes new apps for the file manager, text editor, terminal emulator, media player, settings app, and the app store. Each app opens quickly and runs…