Pop!_OS 21.04 has a Beta out now with their new COSMIC desktop
System76 have recently released the first Beta of their Linux distribution Pop!_OS 21.04, which comes with their brand new COSMIC desktop environment. To be clear, this is not some full desktop like GNOME itself or KDE. Instead, it's pretty much an enhancement to GNOME 3.38 with lots of new tweaks. The layout is quite different, with it being suitable for people who heavily rely on either mouse or keyboard for interactions. As a reminder from when COSMIC was announced, System76 said the "new designs are developed from extensive testing and user feedback since the Pop!_OS 20.04 release". If you don't mind some placeholders and bugs, give it a whirl. From my brief time test it, I genuinely like it a lot. The flow of everything does seem to work quite well. For me, it does seem to solve some of the most annoying points of GNOME Shell with the dock and minimizing out of the box but that's a very subjective feature, I just like the more traditional feel of having both. Really, this is System76 ensuring the tailor as much as possible to their ecosystem. System76 build laptops, desktops, a keyboard now too and the operating system all together. Going their own way with the desktop styling makes sense for them. You can try the Beta and learn more on GitHub. Release notes are not up at time of publishing. The full release should hopefully be later this month or early next month.Article from GamingOnLinux.com - do not reproduce this article without permission. This RSS feed is intended for readers, not scrapers.
![Pop!_OS 21.04 has a Beta out now with their new COSMIC desktop](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/uploads/articles/tagline_images/1949127944id19157gol.png)
System76 have recently released the first Beta of their Linux distribution Pop!_OS 21.04, which comes with their brand new COSMIC desktop environment.
To be clear, this is not some full desktop like GNOME itself or KDE. Instead, it's pretty much an enhancement to GNOME 3.38 with lots of new tweaks. The layout is quite different, with it being suitable for people who heavily rely on either mouse or keyboard for interactions. As a reminder from when COSMIC was announced, System76 said the "new designs are developed from extensive testing and user feedback since the Pop!_OS 20.04 release".
If you don't mind some placeholders and bugs, give it a whirl. From my brief time test it, I genuinely like it a lot. The flow of everything does seem to work quite well. For me, it does seem to solve some of the most annoying points of GNOME Shell with the dock and minimizing out of the box but that's a very subjective feature, I just like the more traditional feel of having both.
Really, this is System76 ensuring the tailor as much as possible to their ecosystem. System76 build laptops, desktops, a keyboard now too and the operating system all together. Going their own way with the desktop styling makes sense for them.
You can try the Beta and learn more on GitHub. Release notes are not up at time of publishing. The full release should hopefully be later this month or early next month.