Pop!_OS' COSMIC Desktop May See a Fedora Entry

Fresh on the heels of the launch of Fedora Atomic Desktops, we now have a proposition for a new Fedora spin that aims to create a new line-up equipped with the COSMIC desktop environment (DE).

The Fedora team were already open to other desktop environments joining their lineup when they launched their new brand of Fedora spins, and as it stands, people have taken the hint.

Let's see what's in store.

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What's Happening: Just a few days back, a proposal was floated on the official Fedora mailing list by an independent contributor, Ryan Brue who wanted to see whether there is enough interest in creating a dedicated COSMIC SIG for Fedora.

A Fedora SIG is a Special Interest Group that is part of the Fedora Project, which usually acts as a starting point for many new projects where contributors can team up and work on achieving a set of goals.

For the proposed COSMIC SIG, the goals would be to; create RPM packaging for COSMIC's various components, come up with a plan for promoting a Fedora COSMIC Spin, contributing to COSMIC's development, and also creating a dedicated Fedora COSMIC Atomic Desktop variant.

Ryan also shared some additional insights during a discussion where he added:

My goal as things get closer to the alpha release is to develop a SIG for COSMIC, hopefully gather some people interested in helping me package rpms for COSMIC components, and then use those rpms to make a spin AND an atomic variant (I’m more of a fan of the atomic desktops myself).

Currently my COSMIC image just compiles everything manually and puts stuff where it needs to be in the filesystem, but rpms are the eventual goal.

He has already started work on this by forking an existing project by a System76 developer that was based on a OSTree image of Fedora Silverblue with COSMIC DE.

The fork is called Fedora Cosmic Atomic; an Atomic desktop which features a Pre-Alpha build of COSMIC DE. You can check it out on GitHub.

Fedora Cosmic Atomic

Seeing that the release of the alpha build for COSMIC is just around the corner, Fedora's spin should allow users to use System76's brand-new desktop environment without Ubuntu 😉

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System76 intends to debut the stable release of COSMIC with their upcoming Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS release (based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS).

When to Expect: Not anytime soon, as this is just in the proposal stage, there's a lot to be done before we get the final results of this endeavor.

For now, they are looking for more contributors to join in so that this SIG moves forward meaningfully. You can join the project's Matrix server if you would like to learn how you can contribute to the cause.

To sum up, I think Fedora's Atomic Desktops are going in a good direction. We should soon see plenty of other spins in this lineup, with some really cool desktop environments at their core, as time passes.

💬 What do you think? Will the COSMIC SIG for Fedora be a success?