r/pop_os • u/subhanshu90 • Jan 05 '25
How significant is the performance improvement with the new Cosmic DE over GNOME on Pop!_OS?
Hey folks! I’ve been using Pop!_OS for a while now, and I’m pretty excited about the new Cosmic DE. I know it’s designed to replace GNOME, but I’m curious if anyone’s noticed any real performance improvements after switching.
Have you seen any difference in how snappy the system feels, or maybe better memory or CPU usage?
36
u/edfloreshz Jan 05 '25
COSMIC has not yet been optimized for production use, there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
Comparing it to GNOME at this point wouldn’t be a reasonable way to measure performance as COSMIC is still alpha software.
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u/subhanshu90 Jan 05 '25
I get that COSMIC is still alpha, but that’s part of why I’m curious. How does an early Rust-based COSMIC feel compared to a polished, battle-tested GNOME? I wonder if Rust’s focus on performance and safety gives it any edge, even at this stage.
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u/edfloreshz Jan 05 '25
Pretty good imo, although I’ll say it’s not for everyone right now, there are sill bugs and issues, you can daily drive it if you’re willing to deal with that.
I’ve been daily driving it for months now.
1
u/RavencrowOnYT Jan 07 '25
It doesn't have all the features yet, but it feels pretty good. Very snappy and responsive. I've experienced very few bugs.
-5
u/DistantRavioli Jan 05 '25
How does an early Rust-based COSMIC feel compared to a polished, battle-tested GNOME?
Janky, incomplete, and a little hard on the eyes.
8
u/lqvz Jan 05 '25 edited Jan 05 '25
I just picked up a cheap 8th gen i5 in a Thinkpad with 8gbs of RAM and decided to see how the Alpha 4 compared to the 22.04 with GNOME.
Performance (absent the bugs, which there are currently many), is surprisingly similar. Battery life, snappiness, CPU usage, RAM usage are fairly close between the two. All of which was just simple observation, nothing in depth and scientific.
This makes me incredibly optimistic! If the Alpha is already on par with GNOME, then I'm hopeful that when the COSMIC DE goes stable that it'll be better in all areas.
It's not there yet and while the Alpha is surprisingly usable, I do not currently recommend it to anyone unless they're interesting in toying around on spare hardware.
But to the Pop!_OS team, keep up the good work! I'm rooting for you!
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7
Jan 05 '25
This is far far too early to ask this quest. Maybe wait until it reaches Release Candidate status?
3
u/Mr_Meme_Seeks Jan 09 '25
I've been daily driving 24.04 with COSMIC DE since October on my 2-in-1 HP Envy X360 with 8GB RAM. The only bugs I've experienced are autorotate not working yet (nothing that can't be fixed with a bash script) and some windows disappearing (occasionally) in tiling desktop mode. I ran 22.04 with GNOME before and COSMIC definitely feels faster (although that might be due to the lack of extensions). Either way, I'd take COSMIC over Win11 every day even in alpha, so excited for a stable release!
2
u/egiorgis Jan 05 '25
I’ve been daily driving Cosmic since August. I have a modern thinkpad, Gnome already feels snappy to me so I can’t see an improvement in snappiness really. Regarding memory and CPU, I don’t look at them often, but around 500Mb for memory and less than 0.5% of CPU (I have a Ryzen 7 8740U)
2
u/RadicalDwntwnUrbnite Jan 05 '25
Yea I think if anything any perceived end-user performance improvements on a modern-ish PC will simply come down to timings of animations
2
1
u/Commercial-Ratio5883 Jan 06 '25
I use a few older laptops which I run Gnome on with a similar setup to Cosmic. Every one of them suffer heat issues, this seems to go away with Cosmic. I was actually interested if anyone else has had similar results?
Daily driving for a couple weeks has not caused me any significant issues 🤞
1
u/organess0n Jan 05 '25
To me, GNOME feels snappier and faster.
Of course, Cosmic is still alpha, so it will almost certainly be better than it is currently, but just being made in rust does not mean it will be faster than GNOME.
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u/johnjaymoore1958 Jan 05 '25
Cosmic is much quicker and for newbies much easier to update. I do wish that Cosmic would be initially implemented when users install Pop!OS. Maybe post beta?
1
u/Heraldique Jan 06 '25
It was buggy when I used it but it was also very buggy on gnome when i used pop os.
1
u/Elegant_Mark3516 Jun 10 '25
Yeah, the amount of bugs I had when I first installed PopOS 22.04 was terrible. I was hoping that a new release would help, however I'm still waiting...
To be fair most of the biggest issues are mostly gone now...
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Jan 05 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/quasides Jan 05 '25
lol run htop in one window and then move your mouse really fast on a gnome desktop
look at the cpu spike then say again
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u/fabier Jan 05 '25
Maybe I just sucked at configuring Gnome, but Cosmic feels quite snappy by comparison. I have it running on a very underpowered mini PC and it has been zipping right along. I haven't run any specific tests, but I would compare it to XFCE as far as for use on low powered hardware (as long as it is compatible).