KDE Linux and FreeBSD hit alpha and – surprise – fan fave Pop_OS nearly at beta

It's the season of FOSS fruitfulness as juicy goodness falls from the branch

The Northern hemisphere is moving into autumn and FOSS vendors are falling over themselves in their efforts to get new versions out for the season.

The thumbnail summary of COSMIC is that it's very much like recent versions of GNOME shell, but with more options and customizability built in

Various open source OS projects are putting out the first previews of future major releases, or at least telling the world when these will appear in the near future. New versions of FreeBSD, Pop!_OS, and the new KDE Linux are all coming our way.

Getting Cosmic vibes

To start with arguably the longest awaited, US Linux box-shifter System76 posted on X to announce that Pop!_OS 24.04 and the team's in-house desktop COSMIC are both going into beta in a couple of weeks.

A few years of work and thousands of GitHub issues later, and the @COSMIC_desktop and @pop_os_official betas are almost here! Save the date: Thursday, September 25th. pic.twitter.com/WtSjDJXwb1

— System76 (@system76) September 5, 2025

The version number isn't a typo: Pop!_OS is a third-party Ubuntu remix, and this is the Noble Numbat-based version – the Ubuntu release from April last year. The reason for the delay is that this release has a whole new desktop environment, COSMIC, that the company is building from scratch in Rust.

We reported that this version went alpha last September and since then COSMIC has made its way into multiple other distros, but despite that, it's still in alpha testing – the last release was Alpha 7 in April. At the end of August the company shared a screenshot gallery of the initial setup procedure.

One of the slides from System 76's screenshot gallery of the initial setup procedure, shared in August – click to enlarge

The thumbnail summary of COSMIC is that it's very much like recent versions of GNOME shell, but with more options and customizability built in. The layout is very like that of GNOME shell, defaulting to a top panel and a dock at bottom centre, with hamburger menus rather than menu bars. In the alpha versions the Reg FOSS desk has tried on CachyOS and Fedora, it feels very snappy and responsive indeed, and it offers more freedom to rearrange things than GNOME itself – both of which are welcome. GNOME definitely has the edge in graphic design, while COSMIC still does look a little unpolished in places. For instance, the default dock has very round corners which come very close to the end icons – which is the sort of detailing that will drive some people crazy and others won't notice.

This ultra-modern and very minimal sort of desktop isn't really the sort of environment this grumpy old vulture favors, but COSMIC's customization options give us a feeling that we're more in control than in GNOME, and it's certainly fast. We also like the integrated tiling window management. We feel that when a final version of COSMIC appears – who knows, perhaps in time for Pop!_OS 26.04 next year – GNOME will face serious competition right on its home territory for the first time.

Or something more Unixy in a suit and tie

Meanwhile, in the more staid and traditional side of town, FreeBSD 15 has reached the alpha-build stage of its release schedule and there are downloads of Alpha 1 for the intrepid. The release version should be available in late November and a formal announcement early in December.

There are already work-in-progress 15.0 release notes. If you scroll past the long list of fixed errata, the new features follow. FreeBSD enjoys an enviable level of integration with ZFS, and in this release, adding a new user will automatically create a new dataset for their home directory, which can optionally also be encrypted. Another tool the OS got from OpenSolaris is DTrace and in the new version this offers a wider range of output formats.

This version gets better driver support for Wi-Fi and graphics controllers, including Intel's Tiger Lake and Meteor Lake chips. There's better sound controller handling too, including hot-swapability. That matters because of a distinction we suspect most people ignore: when you plug headphones into a headphone socket, they use your computer's built-in sound chip, but when you plug in USB headphones, what you're really doing is connecting a new USB-based sound controller. FreeBSD 15 will be able to handle these events on the fly.

There are many other improvements coming, including better power management, more flexible bootup and shutdown controls including in various hypervisors, better bootloader handling including on Arm64, and more.

Sober and radical at once: KDE Linux

Another new alpha is the official alpha of KDE Linux. KDE developer Nate Graham's blog post has a detailed run-down of what's new, and there's an overview on the KDE homepage. The big screenshot there represents the development codename of Project Banana.

KDE Linux is very different from the desktop project's older showcase distro, KDE Neon. We took a look at the differences in August. If you're aware of Steam OS, Valve Corporation's custom distro for its Steam Deck handheld games console, then KDE Linux has some resemblance to a desktop version.

The design of KDE Linux puts us in mind of the original Microsoft Surface tablets. Although this may seem like a strange comparison, bear with us a moment. Microsoft had ambitions to make Windows into a contender in the tablet market, but its hardware partners seemed reluctant to take a chance with hardware in that form-factor, so the software company did it itself and made PC-compatible tablets running Windows – and like the Xbox range before it, they did very well.

GNOME is the preferred Linux desktop of most of the big Linux vendors: Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, all offer GNOME by default. The more technologically mature and sophisticated KDE was left on the sidelines. In terms of the underlying tech, KDE Neon was relatively tame: the latest KDE Plasma preinstalled on the latest Ubuntu LTS.

KDE Linux feels like an effort to show KDE as the visible face of a more robust rival to Windows or macOS: the cutting-edge, non-commercial basis of Arch Linux, dual failover root partitions with Btrfs snapshots and rollback, made more robust by being immutable. Only cross-platform apps in Flatpak format, handled by KDE's own Discover app store. (Snap apps are available in the shell and are coming to the GUI soon.)

KDE Linux takes existing bits of tech that are already in use in multiple other distros and puts together an interesting new combination. EndlessOS and several Fedora Atomic spins offer immutability, but based on ext4 and Red Hat's very complex OStree tech, while SUSE does it with the fragile and hard-to-repair Btrfs. Steam OS combines the best of both: a pair of immutable, read-only Btrfs partitions, giving Btrfs' simpler, cleaner snapshot handling, but with the added robustness that comes from being immutable, plus the fault-tolerance of ChromeOS-style dual-failover root partitions. The freshness of the rolling-release Arch Linux, but with transactional updates and rollback.

It's bold, it's innovative, and it's unlike anything the more established Linux vendors are doing. This project could, potentially, do great things. We are watching with interest. ®