Pop! System76's 24.04 beta is here – complete with a beta of polarizing COSMIC
Twice the betas and twice the crashes means twice the fun, right?
It's September 2025 and the beta of the April 2024 release of Pop!_OS is here. It's fast, fluid – and fallible.
Pop!_OS 24.04 still has sharp edges – such as text overflowing boxes here in the Settings app
To judge by by word of mouth, System76's Pop!_OS seems to be one of the more popular Ubuntu remixes among tech-savvy Linux enthusiasts. That may mean that the bolder of them are about to break their computers, because finally, the beta of version 24.04 is here, along with the beta version of the company's COSMIC desktop.
The version number is because this release is based on Ubuntu 24.04, aka "Noble Numbat," which was emitted by Canonical at the end of April 2024. This Pop release arrives so far behind that of its underlying OS because it has a whole new desktop environment.
System76 used to offer versions based on interim releases of Ubuntu. (Nearly four years ago, we looked at Pop!_OS 21.10 and it seriously messed up our test laptop.) Since then, System76 has stuck to LTS versions of Ubuntu. The last one was Pop!_OS 22.04, which like its progenitor Ubuntu 22.04 used GNOME 42 – but with some custom extensions.
This means the base OS is stable and well-tested. It's the GUI that's brand new only just out of alpha testing. The new Pop comes with an all-new and largely legacy-free desktop environment called COSMIC, which the company has been developing in-house since 2021. Don't confuse the new COSMIC with System76's previous desktop, which was GNOME customized with several extensions – but also called COSMIC.
The new COSMIC has been built in Rust, using the Iced graphical toolkit. The Rusty COSMIC only supports Wayland: there's no X11 session, although it does include XWayland, so you can run X11 apps under COSMIC. The new desktop comes with several of its own, equally new accessories, including a new file manager, text editor, terminal emulator, media player, settings app, and app store. Many of the slightly less essential accessories, such as the system monitor, document and image viewers, archive manager, and so on are still taken from GNOME.
The hybrid nature is not very apparent, because the default COSMIC appearance, with a top panel and a dock at the bottom, quite strongly resembles GNOME Shell. Most apps do not have have separate title bars, or menu bars or toolbars, although some have text buttons that open menus at the top. Much like in GNOME itself, classic Windows-style keyboard navigation mostly doesn't work. We found it very mouse-centric: if there are text fields to fill in, we had to click on them first. In some programs, sub-panels open up on the right, and these must be manually closed before you can go back to the main window. The appearance is very flat, with little visual indication of buttons, panels, and other GUI features. Where there are graphical hints, they're quite bold and unsubtle, such as a jarring blue outline around the active window.
COSMIC isn't perfect yet, but having a single panel on the left is one click, which GNOME can't match - click to enlarge
We suspect COSMIC will polarize people. If you like the more traditional, Windows-style Linux desktops such as MATE or Xfce, with menu bars and lots of keyboard navigation, our guess is that you won't like this much. The same may apply if you're very sensitive to graphic-design issues, such as color palettes and font choice. This vulture usually barely notices such things, but even so, COSMIC felt inconsistent to us, with fonts jarringly large in some places and too small and spidery in others; the curvature of the corners of the dock was ugly and brought the corners much too close to the icons on the end.
On the other hand, there's a lot to like. The whole OS feels fast. COSMIC is extremely snappy: there's almost no perceptible delay anywhere. It installs so quickly that the first time we installed it on bare metal, we looked away for a minute, and looking back at the completion screen, we thought it must have failed. Not so: all done, successfully. It boots fast, logs in fast, and runs fast.
The core of GNOME Shell is implemented on Javascript, and customizing the layout requires Javascript extensions. You can do a lot, and this is how, for instance, Zorin OS is built: it uses multiple extensions to reshape GNOME Shell into something superficially like Windows, but this can't add back UI elements that GNOME removes such as keyboard-driven navigation and menu bars. The success of Zorin OS, as demonstrated by donating to Ukraine War charities and sponsoring Dash-to-Panel, implies this is is enough for many users.
The other snag of heavy GNOME customization is that it tends to fall apart when you upgrade to a new version of your OS and of GNOME itself. The more extensions you have, the greater the chance it will fall apart on an upgrade. (If your OS vendor built in these customizations, then you should be all right.) COSMIC probably won't suffer from this, because it has a lot of these options built in. You can't reshape COSMIC into macOS, but if you want a single unified taskbar instead of two panels, there's an option on the first-run welcome screen. If you didn't choose that, then later on, you can add, reorder, and remove panel controls, install new ones, and so on. It's nowhere near as tweakable as KDE Plasma or Xfce, but it's much more so than GNOME Shell – or GNOME Flashback, or Elementary OS's Pantheon. This may well be enough for many people.
As such, we suspect that when COSMIC is a little more mature, it may win users across from GNOME. If you like that clean, simple, legacy-free sort of desktop, then in COSMIC, you get that, but faster, in fully-compiled native code.
As we have written before, System76 is a hardware vendor, and this shows through in its Linux distribution. For example, during bootup, it loads a new terminal font, and this is designed for HiDPI screens – meaning that on an older standard-definition display, the text suddenly becomes very large and you can't see much. Presumably, System76 only sells hardware with HiDPI screens, so this doesn't matter to the org. Instead of GRUB, Pop uses systemd-boot, which keeps your kernel and initramfs on the EFI system partition. This means that the beta needs a big ESP and an SSD partitioned with GPT, and right now, Secure Boot is not supported, so you must disable this in your firmware.
On our testbed Dell XPS 13-9370, we needed to give it an ESP of its own – we recommend you do not attempt to resize the ESP with Gparted, which isn't happy working with small FAT32 volumes – but then it ran superbly. To our surprise, it even installed on our previous testbed, a geriatric Thinkpad W520 with an Nvidia Quadro 1000M GPU. Both internal and external DisplayPort LCDs worked, and we specify which GPU apps should use. It did crash repeatedly in testing. Sometimes, the mouse got stuck on one display, or one screen's apps froze, or the whole desktop, or the whole machine locked up – but it's impressive that it worked at all. A special ISO is available with version 580 of the NVIDIA driver pre-installed, which requires a Turing-generation or later GPU: GeForce GTX 16 or newer. Nothing older than 2019, while our Thinkpad is from 2011.
COSMIC still feels unfinished, but that's perfectly reasonable: it is unfinished. This is the first beta. However, it has come a very long way in just four years of development. It's fast enough that it might tempt users of simpler environments, such as tiling window managers, over to a full desktop.
Regular readers may have gleaned that the Reg FOSS desk is not a big fan of GNOME and the GNOME way of working. GNOME tends to deprecate rich window management in favor of a simpler workflow, but offers little in its place. It just takes away window minimization, desktop icons, title bars and so on. The GNOME-based COSMIC offered a sweeter deal: it went even more radical, replacing manual window management with pretty good tiling. The new COSMIC offers all that and more: for instance, now, on a dual-head system, you can put the panel on one screen and the dock on the other, which GNOME can't readily handle.
Despite a nearly 18-month-old LTS OS underneath, Pop!_OS 24.04 is still a beta, and it's not ready for prime time yet. COSMIC still has rough edges and occasional holes. However, it's quite close, and System76 may be ready with a stable version in time to follow soon behind the next Ubuntu LTS, 26.04, due in April next year. It's an impressive beta, and COSMIC makes most other desktop environments' recent releases look tame and conservative. COSMIC's development is faster, and so is its performance. ®
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