It happened! System76 has announced the beta release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS, giving users an early look at what will become the next long-term supported version of the distribution. Plus, the star of the show—of course, I’m talking about the beta version of the COSMIC Desktop. But let’s first start with the distro itself.
At the system level, Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta ships with Linux kernel 6.16, Mesa 25.1.5, and NVIDIA driver 580, ensuring compatibility with modern hardware. Updates to libwayland and libdrm improve Wayland support, while the usual round of fixes and refinements aim to make the release more stable.
Somewhat expected, System76’s own alternatives have replaced several key GNOME applications. Nautilus has been replaced with COSMIC Files, GNOME Terminal with COSMIC Terminal, and Totem with COSMIC Player. Even text editing is now handled by COSMIC Edit.
Another core component, the Pop!_Shop, a staple in previous releases, has also been replaced by the COSMIC Store, which will serve as the central hub for apps, add-ons, and applets built around the new desktop environment.
Upgrading from Pop!_OS 22.04 is supported, but it comes with caveats. According to devs, favorites in the dock won’t carry over, and users will need to re-pin applications in the new COSMIC app tray. PPAs are disabled during the upgrade to avoid conflicts, but can be re-enabled afterward. Okay, now, let’s move on to the star of the show.
COSMIC Desktop Beta
With this beta release, the COSMIC desktop marks the first time users outside the alpha testing group can experience it in a feature-complete state. Built entirely in Rust from scratch, it provides a modern, customizable, and memory-safe desktop environment.
This included fundamentals such as a compositor, text rendering, drag-and-drop, clipboard handling, and a brand-new widget toolkit called libcosmic, with a philosophy centered on workflow flexibility.
Users can configure single- or dual-panel layouts, choose between vertical or horizontal workspaces, and switch between tiled or floating windows. The environment supports both dynamic and static workspaces, custom keyboard shortcuts, and theme options that include fonts, icons, and even shared user-created themes.
Core COSMIC applications are already in place. These include Settings, Files, Store, Terminal, Edit, and Player. Applets embedded in panels provide quick access to essential features like networking, sound, notifications, and accessibility. Additional applets can be installed from the COSMIC Store.
However, being a beta release, COSMIC isn’t free of rough edges. Drag-and-drop functionality between Wayland and X11 apps is not yet functional, display toggle hotkeys are missing, and some games can start off-screen and only become visible when forced to full-screen with the F11 key. Accessibility also remains a work in progress, as the screen reader does not accurately handle all widgets.
Moreover, the COSMIC Store currently doesn’t display Flatpak addon suggestions, though this is planned for the release candidate. Printing support in COSMIC Edit is also on the roadmap. Despite these gaps, gaming performance is reportedly solid, with xwayland improvements planned before final release.
And although COSMIC is the flagship desktop of Pop!_OS, it’s not staying exclusive. Fedora has already announced both a COSMIC Spin and a COSMIC Atomic edition. Other distributions, such as Arch, NixOS, and CachyOS, also provide COSMIC in their repos.
Needless to say, for a desktop still in beta, such early adoption across multiple distributions is rare and clearly signaled the significant momentum COSMIC has already gathered. So, what’s next?
According to System76, the next phase is about stability and polish. With the environment now feature complete, development is shifting to bug fixing and quality assurance. The release candidate will follow the current beta cycle, leading up to the final release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC. Currently, there’s no specific timeline for when we can expect the RC and stable release.
COSMIC Alpha users only need to fully update their system on the 25th to upgrade to Beta.
For more information, see System76’s announcement.
Contrary to you, my first reaction was that it’s snappier than the alphas.
They seem to have improve the compositor too and it’s smoother. Although it’s not entirely smooth yet. Maybe wobbly windows (some day?) would improve that feeling as it softens the monolithic blocks motion.
I’ve been daily driving it for several months and I have no more stability issue than in Gnome (which takes the cake with regard to instability, way before KDE despite KDE having the non-factual ill-repute of being less stable than Gnome).
For me, it’s already replaced Gnome, in workflow versatility and rapidity of task fulfilling, it’s much much better and more intuitive of use. It’s the correct implementation of the paradigm Gnome failed at, and with extra cream (tiling system for the few times I actually need it).
I wouldn’t mind controls on the left as well. But I’m fine with it coming after they focus on delivering their first official release.
That was a reply to Davo comment.
Tested this myself on bare metal. I installed it over the beta of Zorin 18. While it felt speedier, it was wonky. Often times maximized windows’ title bars would disappear until the task bar at the top, making it a hassle to bring them back to where they should be. I was actually surprised – Zorin’s beta is a lot more polished. This lasted about 12 hours on my laptop, and then Zorin 18 beta went back on. LOL There were one or two other oddities I don’t recall off-hand either, but I agree with Davo – NOT ready for prime time, and yes, it seems like in a way it went backwards from the alpha releases…
I have no such issues where I’m using it (on Manjaro) and I’ve been using it even more unstable, since alpha 5 or so. I suspect it doesn’t happen on Pop!_OS either.
This is most likely a Zorin specific issue or a conflict between DEs.
Ubuntu 24.04 was released on April 25,2024. It is now Sept. 26, 2025, more than 17 months later. Pop’s release is way out of date! I don’t need to be using an out of date distro which is out of date even before it is released! There are many other better up to date distro choices.
The reason has been known for a while. They skipped 24.04 to avoid unnecessary work, with upcoming Cosmic.
Imagine you’re a car manufacturer and about to release version 7 of a specific model in a few months. Then a new car dealer comes and ask to sell that model version 6. Is it even worth selling the old one for a couple months (with all the burden that will come once you drop the model) or wait it out and start selling the new one when it goes out over a long period?
So, it’s just temporarily out of date, and for good reasons. No need to make a fuss over it.
After preliminary testing … yes, this is a beta, and it has quite a few loose ends. I wouldn’t use it for actual work just yet.
I tested it on a USB stick. Unlike the alphas, which found my network and Bluetooth flawlessly, the beta couldn’t find either. Oddly, toggling networking and Bluetooth in Settings, or on the top panel, was not recognized in the other interface. So, one could be on, the other off — but even with both toggled on, no networks — WiFi or Bluetooth — were seen. But maybe this is just a “me” thing?
The beta feels slower than the alphas. It certainly loads much more slowly than the alphas. Maybe the beta is loading more services, now that it’s more feature complete?
The biggest quality of life improvement (for me) would be to let me switch window controls to the left, a la macOS. Workarounds using gsettings at the command line don’t work for that, in my case at least. I know it’s on the roadmap to add this option, but for now it’s a real productivity killer (for me) to keep moving the cursor to the “wrong” corner of the window to close/minimize/maximize it.
That’s just a quick glance. I’m still optimistic about COSMIC, still interested in how it ultimately turns out. The more different desktops, the better. But, for now, it’s back to stock Gnome on stock Debian 13, which (for me) just works.