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After a gap of five months since the last alpha release, Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta arrived on 25 September, 2025.

With seven alpha releases over a period of ten months in 2024 and 2025, there has been a lot of user anticipation as to what would turn up in this new beta release. That last release, Alpha 7, was reviewed in FCM#220.

Work on the new COSMIC DE (“desktop environment”) using the Rust programming language, iced toolkit, and Wayland display server, has now been in process by System76 for three and a half years, with the final stable version promised before the end of 2025. The developers have also indicated that we can expect at least one “release candidate” version in between the beta and the stable.

On 5 September 2025, an official Bluesky post set the date for this beta release as 25 September. The beta almost didn’t arrive on that announced day though, as some last minute ISO issues resulted in System76’s development team putting in a long day and finally getting it done around midnight, Boulder, Colorado time.

Background

System76 is an American computer manufacturer specializing in Linux computers. They originally supplied their products with Ubuntu but, after that distribution moved on from the Unity interface, System76 built their own modified interface for Ubuntu which slowly grew into the COSMIC interface (a backronym for Computer Operating System Main Interface Components).

Announced in 2022, as a project to replace that previous COSMIC modified GNOME interface, the current work will result in the newly-written COSMIC DE desktop, combined with the tested and true Ubuntu back-end, to create the final, stable version of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS.

Not only is COSMIC DE an all-new Linux desktop, but it comes with a suite of new core applications including COSMIC Files, COSMIC Media Player, COSMIC Screenshot, COSMIC Store, COSMIC Terminal, and COSMIC Text Editor.

Getting Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta

It is worth noting that Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta can be downloaded and run on almost any Intel or AMD computer and not just System76 hardware.

There are several ways of getting Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta. If you were already running Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7, then you will already have Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta through the update process. If you are running the last stable release, Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, then you can upgrade to Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta from your terminal with:

pop-upgrade release upgrade -f

Or you can just download the ISO file, write it to a USB stick and do a fresh installation.

Installing

I downloaded Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta from the official source, the System76 website. There is no BitTorrent option, just https for download. As usual I carried out an SHA 256 sum check to ensure file integrity.

The ISO file is 3.0 GB, which is only 100 MB larger than Alpha 7's 2.9 GB. By contemporary standards these are relatively small ISO files, less than half the size of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS which was 6.1 GB. One reason why Pop!_OS is smaller is that it includes fewer applications.

I dropped the ISO file onto a USB stick equipped with Ventoy 1.1.07 and booted it up for testing. Pop!_OS is officially supported by Ventoy and it booted up fine after an initial USB writing error which resulted in consistent kernel panics until I fixed it with a second write.

System requirements

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

One of my previous complaints about Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS was that, after a fresh boot, its idle RAM was 3.9 GB. Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7 increased that to 4.3 GB and the Beta is 4.7 GB, so this is not a lightweight distribution! In comparison, also running on Ventoy Ubuntu 25.04 and Ubuntu Cinnamon 25.04 both idle at 2.3 GB.

In my testing of Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta with a collection of common applications open, I easily reached 9 GB of RAM in use so I would recommend 16 GB as the minimum, with 32 GB being better. A similar set of applications on Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04 LTS uses about the same amount of RAM, so POP!_OS may not actually suffer from excess RAM consumption in daily use, despite the higher idle RAM.

Trying out Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta

In running Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta, the new desktop worked well with only a couple of minor menu crashes, which is not totally unexpected for beta-level software. Hopefully these will be corrected for the stable version.

There is actually very little new in Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta over Alpha 7 that users will notice. From reading the System76 Bluesky posts, much of the work done since April seems to have been on the desktop tiling and workspace drag and drop functionality but not the application feature shortcomings. I can report that the panel clock is now working right and presents dates much more conventionally.

A desktop setting from the panel menu allows selecting “floating” or “tiling” windows with a simple switch. Despite all the development emphasis on tiling, in my testing I found that Pop!_OS's tiling is not really of much value on smaller screens. Trying it out on a standard 1920 × 1080 pixel laptop screen, it works fine with two application windows open, but the results are not good with six! Tiling two applications puts one on each half of the screen; tiling six results makes most of them too small to use. Tiling may be useful on a really big screen or even a multi-screen setup, but on laptops it does not work well.

Still not yet added as a feature is the ability to add some desirable missing desktop shortcuts like "hide window" and "show desktop (hide all windows)". The customizable settings to add those exist but do not yet work.

Settings

Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta continues to maintain a focus on maximizing user choices and that makes it very different from Ubuntu and more comparable to Kubuntu.

As before, most of the settings are found in the new COSMIC Settings manager, which is very well organized and makes everything easy to find. A few specific menus are hidden away in the panel icons but are easy enough to find there. 

The settings available do provide a wide range of customization including adding or removing anything on the panel since those are all individual applets. The panel does have additional applets that can be installed but these are currently very few in number. There are still some desirable items missing though, like the ability to display battery time and percentage charge remaining on the panel.

The dock has many user settings, including the ability to move it to any screen edge, change its color, opacity, and size, shrink or expand it to the screen edge, or turn the dock off entirely.

Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta has two window themes, light and dark. There are also nine provided highlight color schemes for each of the light and dark themes, or you can pick your own color from a color-picker. These colors provide selection highlighting in application windows and also frame the active window (the so-called "active hint" feature), which is very helpful to identify which window is in use.

This release includes seven wallpapers, all of which have "space" themes.

I think that Pop!_OS’s wide range of settings really do make it easy to customize Pop!_OS, which should prove popular with users.

Applications

The applications included with Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta are the same mix as in Alpha 7, and most are the same version, too, except for Firefox and Thunderbird which have been updated:
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 143.0.1 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) 46.3.1 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 128.14.0 ESR email client
Wget 1.21.4 command line webpage downloader

Both the Firefox and Thunderbird versions provided are the Mozilla binaries and not Ubuntu’s Snap format ones. Pop!_OS does not use Snap files by default, although snapd can be installed to facilitate using Snaps if desired. Pop!_OS is set up for the usual .deb file repositories, mirrored from Ubuntu, and also has Flatpak installed by default, although no actual Flatpak applications are installed.

As can be seen, the suite of default applications remains moderately minimal. In comparison to more complete desktop distributions like Ubuntu, it is lacking a bittorrent client, calendar, file back-up utility, webcam, image editor, photo organizer and remote desktop client. All of these can be installed from the repositories or using Flatpak, if needed.

The biggest shortcoming in Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta remains the same as I noted with Alpha 7, the lack of features in the core COSMIC applications. They all work but need some features added before they will be ready for serious daily use. 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 selected. COSMIC Media Player 0.1.0 is lacking codecs for .mov files although it will play some .webm ones. It offers to install the missing codecs, but then doesn't. COSMIC Screenshot 0.1.0 lacks a countdown timing feature. COSMIC Text Editor 0.1.0 has syntax highlighting that works, but it still lacks spellchecking. The release notes state "printing support in COSMIC Text Editor is planned for the release candidate". It is pretty late in the process to still be scrambling to add needed features but, in fact, the beta release notes promise a number of fixes for the next release candidate including to the xwayland implementation to improve gaming, rounding the “active hint” feature corners to match the window corners, Flatpak suggestions in the COSMIC Store and screen reader accessibility improvements. If these come to pass, then the release candidate could have much that is new.

Until these applications are improved, there are still many alternatives to all of them in the repositories that can be installed instead. I have tested the Nemo 6.0.2 file manager and the gedit 46.2 text editor and they work just fine on Pop!_OS.

Conclusions

Between the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha 7 on 24 April 2025 and this beta on 25 September 2025, development seems to have slowed. It is possible that there has been more work happening behind the scenes and that the release candidate version will show a capability jump.

As of this beta release, most of the desktop itself works well (plus or minus the odd crash) and it is just the core COSMIC applications that need more features added.

The development team at System76 has now put in three and a half years on the new COSMIC desktop and it won’t be long before we all see the final result in the form of a released stable version, hopefully later in 2025.

External links

Official website: 
https://system76.com/pop/pop-beta/