System76 has quietly crossed a long-awaited finish line: the company’s Rust‑based COSMIC desktop environment has exited beta and now ships as the default on Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS. What started as an experiment to break free of GNOME’s constraints has become a full desktop stack — and it’s available for anyone to download or try on new System76 machines.
What landed
Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS rides atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS foundation and brings COSMIC as the default user interface. System76 rebuilt key pieces of the desktop in Rust and swapped out a number of GNOME components for its own apps: COSMIC Files replaces Nautilus, COSMIC Terminal takes over from GNOME Terminal, COSMIC Text Editor stands in for GNOME Text Editor, and COSMIC Media Player replaces Totem. The graphical package storefront has also been renamed and reworked as the COSMIC Store.
Under the hood Pop!_OS 24.04 uses Linux 6.17.9 and, at release, remains on the Mesa 25.1 series for open‑source graphics — with an option to install the NVIDIA 580 driver for folks running proprietary drivers. System76 says the release is stable enough for general use and will ship on new hardware, while images are available for download from System76’s site.
Why this matters (and why opinions are mixed)
For System76, COSMIC is about control and polish. The company has shipped Linux laptops and desktops for two decades, and leaders argued they’d reached the limits of what they could do by layering on GNOME. Building a DE from scratch gives them tighter integration with firmware, drivers and their curated app set — which could matter to power users, workstation buyers and gamers.
Not everyone greeted the launch with open arms. Community commentary ranges from excitement about a fresh, snappy Rust desktop to skepticism about yet another environment fragmenting the Linux UI landscape. That tension shows why some users prefer contributing to existing projects, while others want a packaged, opinionated experience out of the box.
Real‑world feel and quirks
Hands‑on reviews from earlier Pop!_OS editions hint at what to expect: installation remains straightforward and onboarding is polished, with useful features like built‑in tiling that many users find productivity‑boosting. Reviewers also note a few rough edges — gesture customization is limited compared with KDE Plasma, and store or category rendering can feel sluggish on some hardware.
For gamers and heavy‑graphics users the distribution’s driver story is important. System76 offers both open and proprietary paths, but if you’re chasing the bleeding edge of GPU support you may notice the Mesa stack is conservative at release. Still, Pop!_OS remains a popular pick among Linux gamers, especially for those who want a system that’s ready for Steam and GPU drivers without much tinkering — a convenience echoed by recent improvements in handheld Linux ecosystems like the Steam Deck’s low‑power download mode.
This release also arrives amid a noticeably active Linux desktop year: other distributions are reshuffling defaults and polishing their experiences, and desktop compositors and apps across the ecosystem keep evolving. If you rely on streaming or cloud‑adjacent gaming workflows you might appreciate parallel advances such as the ways players can now stream libraries from dedicated devices like the PlayStation Portal.
Who should try it now
- Curious Linux users who like a modern, opinionated desktop with tiling built in.
- System76 hardware owners looking for the out‑of‑the‑box experience tuned to their machines.
- Enthusiasts and developers who want to follow a Rust‑first UI project.
If you’re cautious about stability on production machines, Pop!_OS 24.04 is an LTS release — but the COSMIC stack is new enough that waiting for a few incremental updates is reasonable. Want to test without committing? Create a live USB or try it on secondary hardware (you can even experiment on a MacBook if you’ve been curious about switching MacBook hardware to Linux).
System76’s gamble — trading a well‑known GNOME base for a bespoke, Rust‑driven desktop — will be judged by users over months, not days. For now, COSMIC gives Pop!_OS a distinct personality and tighter control; whether that translates to wide adoption or a niche, beloved fork of the desktop remains the story to watch.