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Review – Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7

by Adam Hunt

It has been more than three years since Denver, Colorado-based computer builder System76 embarked on the ambitious project of building a whole new Linux desktop from scratch and, with their seventh alpha release out on 24 April, 2025, I thought it was time for a detailed look at their progress.

I previously used the last release, Pop!_OS, 22.04 LTS and reviewed it in FCM#198, so I was keen to see how this new alpha compared.
 
Background

Pop!_OS had its first 17.10 release on 27 October, 2017. Prior to that, the company had shipped its computers with Ubuntu and were quite happy with that distribution and its GNOME 2, and later Unity, interface. But Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus marked the end of Unity and Ubuntu’s move to the modified GNOME 3 interface still in use today. System76 was not pleased with that move and decided to create their own modified GNOME interface which grew into COSMIC by the seventh release, version 20.10. COSMIC is a backronym for Computer Operating System Main Interface Components.

Being based on Ubuntu, Pop!_OS followed Ubuntu’s release cycle, with fresh versions every six months, in April and October, and long term support (LTS) releases every two years in April of the even-numbered years.

As a desktop, the original COSMIC worked well and was aimed at users working in science, aerospace, medicine and robotics, rather than general enterprise use, like Ubuntu. New features were introduced with each release, with almost all of the development being done in-house.

The last release of that series was Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, out on 25 April, 2022. There have been no further releases to free-up developer time for the new, planned desktop, but Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS has remained supported and, in fact, has incorporated a lot of updates over time, almost like a rolling release. While it works well enough, and the interface design had good user acceptance, it required quite a bit of developer maintenance work, had some stability and RAM consumption issues, and was a bit of a “kludge”, running on the legacy X11 display server. A decision was made to take the basic COSMIC design concept and write a whole new fresh version from scratch in the Rust programming language, using the new Iced toolkit and a modern Wayland display server.

The developer team at System76 set to work, including creating new core applications for the new desktop with a new file manager, media player, text editor, screenshot tool, settings manager, terminal emulator, and software center. Many other desktop components were also built, all using Rust, including a new panel and dock. It was called COSMIC DE (DE = “desktop environment”) and based on April 2024’s Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release.

After having been announced in April 2022, the first alpha version arrived on 26 August, 2024. New alpha versions have been released almost every month for user testing, bug reports and feedback. There were also company blog posts, conference updates and press releases to keep up the momentum. The Linux press has kept notice, too.

Because the whole project is all open development and free software, several other Linux distributions adopted the COSMIC DE desktop which brought more outside feedback and contributions, illustrating the real strength of free software! There is now a Fedora COSMIC Spin, plus Fedora COSMIC Atomic. Other distributions offering it include NixOS, Arch, openSUSE, Aeryn OS and CachyOS, plus Redox OS uses some COSMIC components.

People ask if there will be an Ubuntu version? There already is, Pop!_OS itself is the COSMIC DE on top of Ubuntu as a base!

At the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit on 27 June, 2025, System76 announced that a beta release of Pop!_OS 24.04 is coming “soon” and the stable version will be out “later this year”.

It is currently unclear whether there will be any further alpha versions or more than one beta before the stable release. It is likely that there will be a new Pop!_OS 26.04 LTS release in the spring of 2026, too.

Getting Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7

For now, each alpha version in succession has been available on the System76 website at https://system76.com/cosmic/.

Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7 can be run on almost any Intel or AMD computer, not just System76 hardware.

There are two downloads provided, both only by https, as no BitTorrents are available. One is for Intel or AMD processors and the second for NVIDIA graphics-equipped computers. SHA256 sums are provided, though, and I did a command-line check to make sure the download I got was good.

Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7 is a relatively lightweight download at just 2.9 GB. This compares to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (upon which it is based) which was 6.1 GB. That makes Pop!_OS only 48% the size of Ubuntu. There are some reasons for that, including the number of applications included, as I detail below.

Installing

I dropped the ISO file onto a USB stick equipped with Ventoy 1.1.05 and booted it up for testing. Pop!_OS is officially listed as supported by Ventoy and it worked just fine.

System requirements

There are no listed system requirements for Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7, but I can note that it is not light on RAM usage.

One of my previous complaints when I ran Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS was that its idle RAM with a fresh boot was 3.9 GB. Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7's idle RAM is 4.3 GB, which is a bit higher yet! In comparison, I noted Ubuntu 25.04 and Ubuntu Cinnamon 25.04 both idling at 2.3 GB, while also running on Ventoy.

In my testing with a number of applications open, I reached 10.6 GB of RAM in use so 16 GB would be the minimum recommended RAM and 32 GB would be better. A similar set of applications on Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04 LTS uses about the same 10 GB, so POP!_OS may not actually suffer much from excess RAM consumption in operational use, despite its higher idle.

Trying out Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7

There is so much new in 24.04 Alpha 7 compared to Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS that it is hard to catalog it all. The new COSMIC DE actually looks and works much like the old interface did, but with many refinements added.

The launcher (Super key) is a small, centered pop-up window where you can search for installed applications or any documents, plus it shows all the applications which are currently open. The applications menu (Super+A) allows browsing for installed applications while the workspaces menu (Super+W) shows everything that is open on a spread out grid, plus the workspaces in use. By default, two workspaces are shown with more added as needed, always one more than in use. Workspaces can also be fixed in number in the settings.

One of my previous issues using 22.04 LTS was that with text scaling increased, some of the application menus, particularly Firefox spellchecking, often overlapped the top panel, so you could not select the top menu item. The old panel could not be moved or hidden, either. The new Rust-based COSMIC Panel solves this neatly. First off, the menus no longer overlap the panel on this desktop, but also it can be set to any screen edge or to hide when not in use. Problem solved.

Presently the panel's clock still needs some work. It keeps time fine, but its date display is quite odd ("M08 03" for August 3rd for instance) and so needs some additional formatting options.

Another fixed item is that the "alt-tab" application switcher that every Linux distribution has, has been completely re-written. In 22.04, it did not work well, bringing up multiple layers to select from and requiring two hands to use it, but this new iteration is much more functional. It looks and works much more like the launcher.

Also new is that 24.04 runs on a Wayland display server. Most modern Linux applications already run on Wayland and Ubuntu has used it for a number of releases already. Older X11-only applications can still be run using the included XWayland compatibility layer and it works fine. The settings give scaling options for any X11 applications.

Window tiling is handled completely differently on 24.04 than in 22.04, and is by default "off". Tiling can be enabled from the display control on the panel. In testing, as in the past, I found that while tiling may be useful on a large screen or a multi-monitor setup, it is not really helpful on your average small laptop screen if you have more than two applications open at a time.

There is a new desktop scaling feature designed around Wayland that works really well. You can choose any incremental scaling level you like and even adjust it to the nearest percentage. This illustrates the advantage of embracing the newest Linux technology available. Pop!_OS is definitely future-oriented.

In my testing, the overall system stability was good, with only a couple of minor feature crashes, which is not entirely unexpected in an alpha release. Hopefully these will be taken care of by the time the stable release comes out.

Settings

From its inception, Pop!_OS has always been about maximizing user choices and the new COSMIC desktop takes that to a higher level than almost any other Linux desktop, with the possible exception of KDE Plasma.

In Pop!_OS 24.04, most of the settings are now contained in the new COSMIC Settings manager. That makes them neatly organized and easy to find. A few items are hidden away in the panel icon right-click menus, but are easy enough to find there.

The settings provided allow a huge range of customization for almost anything imaginable on the desktop including turning off the dock and removing any item on the panel, all which are provided as individual applets. The dock can also be reconfigured, including placing it on any screen edge, changing its color, opacity, height, and shrinking or expanding it to the screen edge.

There are only two window themes provided, light and dark, but that should be enough to keep most users happy. There are also nine highlight color schemes for each of the light and dark themes. These not only provide selection highlighting in application windows, but also frame the active window (the so-called "active hint"), which is helpful to identify it. This feature does give the desktop a sort of neo-futurist "spacey" feel too. Custom themes can also be created, saved, exported, and shared.

I think most users will be impressed with the wide range of user settings provided and there are still more to come before the stable version is released. They really do make it easy to customize Pop!_OS and make the COSMIC desktop truly your own.

Applications

Some of the applications included with Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7 are:
Archive Manager (file-roller) 44.3 file archiver
COSMIC Files 0.1.0 file manager
COSMIC Media Player 0.1.0 media player
COSMIC Screenshot 0.1.0 screenshot utility
COSMIC Store 0.1.0 package management system
COSMIC Terminal 0.1.0 terminal emulator
COSMIC Text Editor 0.1.0 text editor
CUPS 2.4.7 printing system
Firefox 137.0.2 web browser
GNOME Disks 46.0 disk manager
GNOME Disks Usage Analyzer (baobab) 46.0 disk manager
GNOME Document Scanner (simple-scan) 46.0 optical scanner
GNOME Document Viewer (evince) 46.3 PDF viewer
GNOME Image Viewer (Eye of Gnome) 45.3 image viewer
GNOME System Monitor 46.0 system monitor
Gparted 1.5.0 partition editor
LibreOffice 24.2.7.2 office suite, less LibreOffice Base
PipeWire 1.2.7 audio controller
Popsicle 1.3.3 USB writer
Systemd 255.4 init system
Thunderbird 128.9.2 ESR email client
Wget 1.21.4 command line webpage downloader

Package management, including application installation and removal, can be done from the COSMIC Store which is simple to use. It can also be done with APT from the command-line. Pop!_OS has its own set of repositories, which mirror those of Ubuntu.

Support for Snap packages is available, but not installed by default. Both the included Firefox and Thunderbird are from Mozilla’s binaries rather than Snaps as used on Ubuntu. Flatpak is enabled by default, using flathub.org, although no Flatpak applications are included with the ISO file.

As can be seen from the above list, the suite of provided default applications is fairly light. The basics are all there but, compared to Ubuntu, it is not really a typical beginner desktop suite. Obviously missing are a bittorrent client, calendar, file backup utility, webcam, image editor, music player, photo organizer, remote desktop client, and there are also no games included, although any of these can be added from the repositories if needed. I personally like the short list of applications included, as it reduces the number of unneeded applications I would want to remove and leaves only a few things I would need to add.

The biggest shortcoming in Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7 is in the core COSMIC applications’ features. They all work to some extent but are pretty basic, missing features and needing more work before they are really ready for a stable release. For example:
COSMIC Files 0.1.0 file manager does not display disk space, has no bulk file renaming and does not even give a count of files when selected.
COSMIC Media Player 0.1.0 is lacking codecs for .mov files although it will play .webm ones. It also plays .mp3 and .ogg music files, although it did not recognize an open format .ogg file as associated (Pop!_OS wanted to play that on Firefox!).
COSMIC Screenshot 0.1.0 lacks a timing-delay feature.
COSMIC Text Editor 0.1.0 has syntax highlighting but lacks spellchecking.

All of these could be good applications, they just need a bit more development work. Hopefully they will be completed by the time the stable version is out.

I will point out that, until these applications are more feature-complete, there are lots of alternatives in the repositories to use instead. I installed and tested the Nemo 6.0.2 file manager and the gedit 46.2 text editor and they worked well on Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7.

Conclusions

An alpha release is not the same thing as a final, stable release, but overall Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7 is on track as a developmental release. Most of the desktop itself works quite well in Alpha 7 and it is just the core COSMIC applications that need more work to be as good as their equivalents in other Linux desktops. The development team at System76 has put in almost three and a half years on this new desktop and they are on the home stretch now. There is no reason to think that they won't get to the finish line and complete it before the end of 2025.

I am planning to review the Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS stable version when it is released, so we will see how all this development comes to fruition.

External links

Official website: https://system76.com/cosmic/

Biography:

Adam Hunt started using Ubuntu in 2007. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in a house with no Windows.