System76 reveals Cosmic DE release date with Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha

System76 recently announced the new branding for its upcoming Cosmic desktop environment and gave us a rough "end of July" release timeframe. Now, the company has confirmed a firm August 8 release date for the Cosmic DE, according to a recent post on X by System76 CEO Carl Richell. 

The first release of the Cosmic desktop environment will ship with the first Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha build, meaning it certainly won't be on the same level as something like KDE Plasma 6 when it comes to features. That said, in a recent System76 Transmission Log — the company's semiregular podcast (listen below on YouTube) — Cosmic's principal engineer, Jeremy Soller, mentions that the team aims to have a desktop and Linux build that is ready to use as a daily driver. 

Generally, System76 seems to want Cosmic to rely almost entirely on the Cosmic applets for most of their daily needs — options like adjusting brightness, changing Bluetooth settings, and changing audio devices and volume — instead of having to delve into the settings for those features. That said, System76 plans to release a document outlining what is and isn't available in the alpha build of Pop!_OS 24.04 and the Cosmic DE. 

Cosmic will be a Wayland-only desktop environment, and System76 has already implemented a number of features and GPU driver fixes for improved Nvidia GPU performance and compatibility. The release of the Cosmic desktop and Pop!_OS 24.04 was previously planned for a March release, but it was delayed so that the user experience could be more feature-complete when it released. 

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