Pop OS Cosmic: Not Ready For Prime Time!
20260110
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I ran PopOS Cosmic for a few weeks, and as someone who had used Linux in some capacity since 2004. It was absolute crap.
Glitches and issues I don’t see on this machine in any other distro. I complained about my issues in the comments section of a sponsored video about POPos cosmic, and someone from the project replied. Basically they are aware of all the issues I pointed out and it should be fixed by sometime in mid 2026, and chalked it up to growing pains building their own new desktop environment. But that’s my issue, if your custom environment is not ready for prime time, make it a second flavor or beta until it is. Don’t completely replace a stable OS with in your new experiment.
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The “App store” flatpack versions of Steam, Discord, Chrome, Gimp, OpenRGB, all have the same graphical abnormality. 50% of the time when I open them, they open to solid black window. Closing an reopening fixes it temporarily. However the .deb installers/versions of those programs all installed fine and have zero glitches or graphical hiccups. Except for Discord, Discord would open on all 3 screens in a weird mirrored app mode, until I closed it and reopened it.
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I run multiple sound cards and it would not use the card I specified in settings, if I did, as soon as I adjusted volume it wanted to use the optical out of the Creative labs card. Even if I disabled it, not good if your recoding in OBS and streaming. Sad thing is it worked out of the box and broke when I updated the OS. It fixed other Issues but broke audio…
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Then most the time games would open windowed and off centered and refuse to go full screen.
This Machine is a Ryzen and Radeon so its not a NVIDIA thing.
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I went back to Ubuntu Studio and everything just works, I forget I am even running Linux, my workflow is smoother than windows. Pre-configured with restricted codecs and optimizations so OBS works with HW encoding and Virtual camera out of the box. I just wanted to try something different and POp cosmic looked promising.
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I really liked the Cosmic UI, but it feels like a beta, and the fact they are pushing it as a stand alone desktop environment other distros can use, is concerning when they have more issues than a Alpha build of windows.