From what I saw Cosmic has a lot of potential and looks pretty sleek too, right now I'm using KDE it's a great desktop, but now that I have a second monitor it randomly crashes on me, I think I'll switch to Cosmic when it reaches beta.
It could take that long. I was wondering if Ubuntu is 24.10 /25.04, 25.10, and 26.04 if pop will align their alpha2, beta, and official release with the Ubuntu release schedule.
I know they said something about a yearly release cadence for cosmic but I'm sure that's once it's officially in production.
That said, as far as an alpha goes, it's much more polished than a typical alpha. The path from here to beta might be faster than we think.
Pop devs never shied away from releasing with non LTS releases though and since one of their main pain points with releases was always gnome + cosmic plugins I'm not sure how their dependency on Ubuntu releases is affected.
I was super nervous for cosmic because I love pop. I didn't want them to bungle it and force me to distro hop. The alpha made me way less nervous and much more excited.
Whatever they do, whenever they release, I just hope they get it right! Small bugs are fine but major crashes would make me very sad.
I'm using it every day now. I have one machine installed with the 24.04 ISO and it's working fine. There's some TODO items to come which I understand will be added by Alpha2. With a little command line knowledge COSMIC is perfectly usable now and is stable.
I'm sure my command line game is weak. Do you have a solution for connecting to Bluetooth and for timing out to login screen and blanking it after a certain period?
In my experience I find just running bluetoothctl to enter the interactive mode easiest. You can enter commands without prepending bluetoothctl. You can use help at any stage. So you want to use systemctl to make sure Bluetooth is running, then enter bluetoothctl. Make sure the device is discoverable and pairing is set to on. Start your [headphones/whatever] in pairing mode and run devices. When you see the device run pair <numbers/address>. Only use the numbers. You may have to go into settings and select the device in the sound applet.
My situation doesn't require a logout timer, but if I'm walking away from the PC I just use the shortcut Super + ESC. Alternatively, there's many ways you can create a basic Bash script that when invoked times down to a systemctl suspend command. Or possibly the hybrid-sleep option could do what you want. See systemctl -h for possibilities.
Blanking the login screen is something that will be implemented shortly. Maybe I'll work on a script for that because it annoys me too. Fortunately I rarely use it. I'll repost if I do this.
I really don't think the two years people are saying in this thread is realistic. The hard work and core is written. What is there is stable. I think they will get this completed much sooner. They do have a hardware business to support after all.