Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS released

[Posted December 11, 2025 by jzb]

Version 24.04 LTS of the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS distribution has been released with the COSMIC Desktop Environment:

Today is special not only in that it's the culmination of over three years of work, but even more so in that System76 has built a complete desktop environment for the open source community. We're proud of this contribution to the open source ecosystem. COSMIC is built on the ethos that the best open source projects enable people to not only use them, but to build with them. COSMIC is modular and composable. It's the flagship experience for Pop!_OS in its own way, and can be adapted by anyone that wants to build their own unique user experience for Linux.

In addition to the COSMIC desktop environment, Pop!_OS is now available for Arm computers with the 24.04 LTS release, and the distribution has added hybrid graphics support for better battery life. LWN covered an alpha version of COSMIC in August 2024.

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The Apple of the Linux world?

Posted Dec 11, 2025 21:34 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (2 responses)

It is fantastic to see COSMIC finally ship. I cannot wait to see where it goes from here both in terms of adoption and functionality. You could argue the middle-ground between KDE and GNOME was already held by Cinnamon but COSMIC being equally at home as a stacking and a tiling environment makes it unique.

In many ways, System76 itself is even more unique. The list of companies selling a desktop experience that they control on hardware that they control is very short. The only others are Apple and I suppose Microsoft. However, I don't think Surface has that much influence over Windows itself whereas both macOS and COSMIC exist explicitly to drive the success of a "desktop" hardware business.

In fact, COSMIC is the only Linux desktop environment with a company behind it that is truly vested in its success. It is not wrong to argue that GNOME is driven by Red Hat but the nuances of the desktop experience are not really central to Red Hat strategy or their bottom line. The user experience around COSMIC however is fundamental to the success of the System76 product line.

As exciting as today is however, 24.04 is still a bit of a placeholder. In my view, the "real" next generation of Pop!OS will start with 26.04 LTS in April. It will finally be a fully up-to-date and competitive OS overall of course but it should also give us a peek into where System76 wants to take COSMIC beyond "just enough to ship" as well as incorporating some of the feedback from early users of the system. I suspect many more people will be trying COSMIC in 2026 than have been willing to give it a go so far.

The Apple of the Linux world?

Posted Dec 12, 2025 2:14 UTC (Fri) by adam820 (subscriber, #101353) [Link] (1 responses)

> The user experience around COSMIC however is fundamental to the success of the System76 product line.

Having bought and used System76 products for well over a decade, I don't think that statement is necessarily true, or at least the criteria is a bit loose. The people who are shopping for a Linux-forward machine are probably savvy enough that they're wiping and installing whatever they want on it, even if a large portion wind up staying on Pop or using COSMIC or whatever. At no point in that decade of ownership, though, have I clamored for a desktop or out-of-box experience that the hardware vendor "controlled". In fact, quite the opposite. Using a different OS, I find myself having to add extra external repos that are community maintained and run vendor-created software to make the machine "function" as it probably should just OOB from upstream components. Not to say System76 themselves don't do a tremendous amount of work enabling other environments, but personally I'd rather see upstream collaboration than pushing their own thing. But that's me; I'm glad others are maybe getting what they want.

The Apple of the Linux world?

Posted Dec 12, 2025 3:24 UTC (Fri) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Same. Same. As happy as I am with them developing COSMIC (although, haven't updated, so can't say _with using_ COSMIC, yet)...if they shipped stock Ubuntu with verified hardware, I'd still buy them. Support is the icing on the cake. In fact, my first system76 I skipped PopOS as the default install..

Way back in the day I enjoyed compiling my own kernel and going to Fry's to pick up parts for my custom build.. but I'm over that now.

I bought System76 so I knew X would start up the first time.

And now I've used it long enough that, soon, it won't boot X anymore... ;)

Now if only my librephone was just a little closer to usable.. I'd be free..

S76

Posted Dec 12, 2025 12:09 UTC (Fri) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (22 responses)

Honestly I'm bothered with the default starry-eyed reception System76 gets from Linux users. If you go on their website to order a product, at no point in the whole flow are you made aware what exactly that rather hefty premium they charge over the baseline Clevos is going towards.

I for one thought, at the time of ordering my laptop (and I'm probably not unique in this, to put it mildly, but what do I know), that the premium goes toward funding the open-source IME-free Coreboot-based firmware. One would expect that by default when dealing with a boutique Linux hardware company, right?

The reality is that the firmware is under-funded and buggy, some never-fixed bugs being actually quite annoying, especially on a laptop. My specific laptop model couldn't even _suspend_ for half a year into actual shipping, for example.

Had I known that the company's primary (and under-advertized, seemingly on purpose) priorities lie in maintaining a Ubuntu spin and in developing yet another desktop environment (god knows there's not enough Wayland WMs that can tile windows!), I wouldn't've bothered with them.

[ The laptop in question is eventually rather nice and I'm using it to write this off-topic rant, so at least there's that :) ]

S76

Posted Dec 12, 2025 15:27 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

There are enough tiling Wayland WMs, yes. I myself use Sway. But there are no DEs with tiling as a first-class option. In fact there are only two DEs for wayland, GNOME and KDE. Though I'm not likely to use Cosmic, it does look like a welcome addition.

I don't know anything of the hardware side of System76, I can't order it from where I am and in the past I have not had issues installing linux on windows laptops from mainstream vendors.

S76

Posted Dec 12, 2025 15:55 UTC (Fri) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

> in the past I have not had issues installing linux on windows laptops from mainstream vendors

These laptops use Coreboot or a proprietary BIOS?
The main point of interest of these companies (System76, NovaCustom, etc) is the Linux compatibility and the Coreboot firmware.

Wayland DEs

Posted Jan 8, 2026 8:13 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] (1 responses)

> In fact there are only two DEs for wayland, GNOME and KDE.

Pantheon defaults to Wayland since elementary OS 8.1.

Multiple other DEs have WIP Wayland support at varying degrees of maturity.

Wayland DEs

Posted Jan 11, 2026 12:49 UTC (Sun) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

Budgie is Wayland-only as of 10.10.

S76

Posted Dec 12, 2025 16:15 UTC (Fri) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Yes, and my last laptop, which I bought with Nvidia after finally throwing in the towel hoping AMD with sort out PhysX and CUDA replacements, had weird issues locking up.

Eventually I disabled hybrid graphics (this is an option on older versions, confused by that point on the article), and it was fine.

That said, the support that was provided was exceptional relative to the deteriorating landscape of consumer electronics support, despite me being a bit frustrated when I filed the ticket.

I don't think the company does one thing or another "for real" - six months to fix your firmware or however long before Nvidia is stable for me is much less time than it took for a "workable enough" DE (which will, tbh, probably be insanely frustrating at first, if like me, you don't care about tiling and just want it to work like before, and not break my workflow, dang it)

If someone was excited about COSMIC, they're probably annoyed it took years when the firmware is fixed in 6 months!!

They're probably just underfunding and understaffing all the projects.

But as long as the company sustains itself, well, heck, the Linux kernel is under maintained by all reports, no?

That's open source... TNSTAAFL

S76

Posted Dec 12, 2025 23:21 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (16 responses)

> If you go on their website to order a product, at no point in the whole flow are you made aware what exactly that rather hefty premium they charge over the baseline Clevos is going towards.

Staying in the business? Do you ask where “hefty premium” goes into when you buy hand-forged fence or hand-tailored clothes?

You are purchasing luxury product, you pay luxury prices… it's as simple as that.

> [ The laptop in question is eventually rather nice and I'm using it to write this off-topic rant, so at least there's that :) ]

Well… that's better than many other companies who try to make “totally free” hardware.

I'm not against these things, I'm just not sure why you expect that some ultra-niche and exotic elitist thingie would be competetive with something intended for mass-market.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 8:46 UTC (Sat) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (15 responses)

> I'm just not sure why you expect that some ultra-niche and exotic elitist thingie would be competetive with something intended for mass-market.

I was just making a point about misplaced priorities (which reasonable people may disagree with, even using erudite non-sequiturs like "TANSTAAFL" because why not I guess) and misleading messaging bordering on false advertizing concerning said priorities (probably benign or unintentional, but nonetheless real). The example was just an illustration.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 12:31 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (14 responses)

> The example was just an illustration.

Illustration of what exactly, though? Of the fact that to have great hardware support you need to first lock down the device and make sure only one OS works on it and then spend billions to polish things (in that order)? That's the well-known issue. Google ditched ChromeOS for Android because 20-30 millions of cheap laptops sold per year were not enough to justify development of it (officially it was merge of Android and Google but by now we know it's “merge” in the same sense of “merge” of Windows 95 and Windows 3.51 that produced Windows 4.0: take some top level bits a pieces, like Explorer interface, rewrite the majority of them from scratch, and presto: here's your merge… people stopped calling it such).

System76, probably wants to pull something like this, too — but it has to support existing customers, who don't want or need anything like that (read how even here very few are ready to buy locked-down system). That support is problematic and costly because manufacturers of components don't care about Linux on desktops or laptops and datacenter computers don't need neither hybrid graphics nor suspend support.

> even using erudite non-sequiturs like "TANSTAAFL" because why not I guess

TANSTAAFL has its own Wikipedia article and it is the core thing that explains many things that are happening out there.

Google have found out 20 million cheap devices sold per year are not enough to make their support profitable… System76, probably, sells way less than that… 20 times less or maybe even 100 times less… their support costs are much higher, as a result, and become even higher if you include reluctance of their customers to stick to one, single, OS image. This explains both price and also the desire to attract different, less picky, customers.

The one thing that they could do to differentiate itself from others is to hire more good support people: with their human R&D costs being 20 or 100 times higher per device they are not bound by the rule “one support call negates profit from the device sold” model of most other manufacturers and can stay out of the red even when customers actually talk to support. And they clearly did that.

But they couldn't create “the open-source IME-free Coreboot-based firmware”: both AMD and Intel have zero interest in supporting something like that (because there are no money in such thing) and they have means to ensure that it wouldn't happen.

Writing new desktop with tiling support in Rust looks like a strange choice for that dilemma, but it's not entirely unclear if it wouldn't work. It may work, even if chances of success are pretty low.

Sticking to Ubuntu and just providing drivers, on the other hand, wouldn't work: even if you would achieve some moderate success and would try to close down the whole thing to, finally, make money… people would quickly fork what you have created and run with it.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 12:58 UTC (Sat) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (9 responses)

> > The example was just an illustration.
> Illustration of what exactly, though?
Of neglecting the actual reason people (who may have failed to research the vendor in a sufficiently paranoid fashion before buying from them, mea maxima and all that) buy hardware from a "Linux hardware vendor". I mean, staying with the example, suspend is absolute core functionality for a portable battery-backed device. You may lack the resources to get to supporting it in a timely fashion, however you define timely, but how can you fail to even notice the (100% reproducible) problem before shipping? And then continue to sell the afflicted model without even a warning while the problem is known and unfixed?

Re: woes of supporting diverse hardware: S76 picks their hardware, they even claim to have a say in the design of the laptops Clevo manufactures for them. All hardware-specific device support they need has long been in the mainline kernel. They never (supposedly, and according to their own messaging) have to support anything they didn't themselves spec out (discounting dealing with Pop!OS on random hardware -- and if they actually spend support resources on that it's a huge own goal, but I don't use Pop!OS and have no idea). Your arguments and comparisons to Lenovos and Dells are well-taken but largely irrelevant here.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 17:31 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (8 responses)

> Re: woes of supporting diverse hardware: S76 picks their hardware, they even claim to have a say in the design of the laptops Clevo manufactures for them.

“Having a say in a design” is very different from “being to able to access hardware in the early stage to support it”.

> You may lack the resources to get to supporting it in a timely fashion, however you define timely, but how can you fail to even notice the (100% reproducible) problem before shipping? And then continue to sell the afflicted model without even a warning while the problem is known and unfixed?

What choice do they have? Compare to companies that use Linux internally (so no sales measure in millions, but plenty of knowledgeable people). I don't know about how things work in Google now, but last time I had information (in 2024!) they were only offering X1 Carbon Gen9 from 2021 and skipped Gen10, 11 entirely by going straight to Gen 12 (maybe they, finally, managed to upgrade to X1 Carbon Gen12 by now, NYKevin would, probably, know… but wouldn't say). IOW: Google spends more than year fighting hardware to make it fully compatible with one, single, version of Linux! And as you may imagine Google have plenty of Linux experts…

All other vendors only have choice of buying and then reselling old, refubrished laptops 2-5 years after they are sold with Windows (when popular distros all, finally, support that hardware) or selling laptops without fully software distro out of the box with the hope of providing updates that would make it, finally, useful a year or two after sale.

There are many Linux companies that offer you first choice, while System76 offers you the other one… and it delivers.

You are, apparently, want something else, but in the TNSTAAFL fashion: who would pay for that thing that you want, how and why? What would be the business model?

> I mean, staying with the example, suspend is absolute core functionality for a portable battery-backed device.

Yet it's also something that's quite non-trivial to make work correctly. Who can do that work before that device would be shipping? System76? Nope, they couldn't: you need to be a close partner willing to sell millions of devices to start work early enough to finish it before sale. Clevo? Nope, they wouldn't: sales of all laptops with official Linux support are not enough to justify that work. Then who?

That is why TNSTAAFL is brought here: System76 may not be “the great Linux seller” as it exist in your imagination… but they are about the best you may expect in real world.

Anything better requires sales measured in millions (or, better yet, billions) and that's fundamentally incompatible with devices that allow you to install some arbitrary OS: million-sized sales imply sales to people who don't care about “software freedom” and are prone to doing stupid things. If you don't stop them then support fees would eat all the profits.

And if you do stop them then the next step, dropping support for “these geeks that bring so little money yet demand so much” is the next obvious step.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 18:34 UTC (Sat) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (7 responses)

> “Having a say in a design” is very different from “being to able to access hardware in the early stage to support it”

The point is that the exact hardware they get from the ODM is not a surprise. A 4-models-a-year lineup of models based on known-well-in-advance boards (with considerable overlap between models to boot) should not present a serious firmware support problem to a serious company. Unless said company skimps on that aspect of its operations, that is. Which S76 clearly does -- a look at their Github will quickly learn you that they have a sole developer working on firmware across all supported models (to be clear: I have nothing but huge amount of respect for that guy); the issue backlog will equally quickly learn you that it's clearly not enough, and this very topic among others will learn you they make a conscious choice to allocate their limited resources elsewhere. Because fans like you will just lap it up anyway, apparently, while dousing any budding cognitive dissonance with "TANSTAAFL" or "cheap demanding geeks" or whatever other stock response.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 20:21 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

> A 4-models-a-year lineup of models based on known-well-in-advance boards (with considerable overlap between models to boot) should not present a serious firmware support problem to a serious company.

And you base that on sample of… how many companies are doing that?

Google manages about one model per year for their internal deployment (as in: three models are picked once per three years).

> Which S76 clearly does -- a look at their Github will quickly learn you that they have a sole developer working on firmware across all supported models

And the other “etalon” company that may afford to spend more than that is called… how exactly?

> Because fans like you will just lap it up anyway, apparently, while dousing any budding cognitive dissonance with "TANSTAAFL" or "cheap demanding geeks" or whatever other stock response.

No, because spending more on something that is already supported better that what competitors are doing is not the way to victory.

Most other companies have zero persons who help fix firmware bugs triggered by Linux distros. One is better than that.

As I have said: I'm not entirely convinced that creation of special OS and special desktop environment for their laptops is the way to bring money… but adding more firmware support people is not going to bring money, for sure.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 21:11 UTC (Sat) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (5 responses)

I guess we'll need some NovaCustom and StartLabs customers to chime in to settle this :)

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 22:31 UTC (Sat) by evad (subscriber, #60553) [Link] (4 responses)

I'm a very happy StarLabs customer, and the reasons you outline is why I buy from them and not System76.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 23:06 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

From what I can see these are providing older hardware and less variety of it. Means it can never attract non-geek customers, but can provide better support that System76.

A very prices “toys” for people who may appreciate them, like these companies that sell new Amigas or ZX Spectrum Next… extremely niche thing, but can exist, sure.

From what I understand System76 is trying to go beyond that extremely small niche… as I have said I'm not entirely sure developing their own desktop is the best way to do that, but the intent is there.

S76

Posted Dec 15, 2025 6:16 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

I've been looking to buy a Linux laptop to replace my Apple M2-based laptop. My hard requirement is a 16" 4k+ display with HDR and 96Gb of RAM. Yes, I'm prepared to pay a premium for that.

So far, there are no "Linux" vendors that have anything close to that. I can get a Lenovo laptop easily, but nothing from System76, Starlabs, Framework or other vendors. I spoke with the CTO of one vendor, and they understand me completely. But there's no way for them to fund the integration work needed to do that, even with the huge premiums that they charge.

S76

Posted Dec 15, 2025 12:04 UTC (Mon) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

Tuxedo's 16 inch laptop is available with 96 GB, an HDR display, but only 2560x1600 pixels, and local dimming is not (yet) available on Linux. So, close but no cigar?

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-Stellaris-16-Ge...

S76

Posted Dec 15, 2025 18:58 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yup. And Starlabs has _either_ 96Gb of RAM _or_ 4k (without HDR), they've been out of 4k/96Gb combo for the last 6 months. Framework doesn't have 4k yet.

Hardware engineering is _expensive_ and a lot of people just don't appreciate that.

I guess I'll check back in a year or so.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 17:15 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

> Google have found out 20 million cheap devices sold per year are not enough to make their support profitable

I've got a bone to pick with this example because it's not evidence of anything, especially from Google which famously greenlights and sunsets projects entirely based on whims and vibes (and the needs of principal engineers to get promoted by launching products). Google deciding to standardize on Android tells us about the relative political capital of the executives in each division fighting for shared resources, but not really about how worthwhile the product is or if its profitable or not.

S76

Posted Dec 13, 2025 17:49 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Google deciding to standardize on Android tells us about the relative political capital of the executives in each division fighting for shared resources

That would have been true in a world where Android division would have picked up desktop and ChromeOS division would have been disbanded. But that is not what have happened. Instead of that ChromeOS codebase was dropped, yet people (including executives!) were left in place. You see the same faces that were talking about ChromeOS two or five years ago talking to the exact same vendors, and doing the exact same deals. You can see these names right there, in the blog post. Most likely the same engineers, too.

> but not really about how worthwhile the product is or if its profitable or not

We don't know about profitability, but we do know about “worthwhiles”. Precisely because hardware is the same, people are the same, only codebase have been changed. I expected that obvious move to happen 10 years ago thus the only question, in my head, when I was reading the blog post was “why the heck that obvious move took so long? why have they created an embarrassment of a Pixel Slate when it was obvious, after Pixel C, that ChromeOS have to die?”

Remember that story ? Pixel C was pretty decent tablet for its time… precisely because it was made as ChromeOS device — but then turned into Android device to make it actually usable. To me, and anyone with half a brain, the conclusion from that story was obvious: ChromeOS could never work like Google wants it to work… it's time for Google to accept that and replace it with Android… and yes, that's precisely what happened, just not in years 2014-2016, when I expected that, but in years 2024-2026… what kept CromeOS alive in these years is entirely unclear to me, but there I can accept “power games” as an explanation.

S76

Posted Dec 14, 2025 12:46 UTC (Sun) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link] (1 responses)

> TANSTAAFL has its own Wikipedia article and it is the core thing that explains many things that are happening out there.

I've heard the expression many times and know well what it means, but I'd never seen it rendered as an initialism like that. As far as I'm concerned if you can't be bothered to even type out your aphorism, it deserves a bit of disdain.

S76

Posted Dec 14, 2025 18:51 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> As far as I'm concerned if you can't be bothered to even type out your aphorism, it deserves a bit of disdain.

Do you treat all other acronyms with similar disdain? Always demand to write “Linux Weekly News”, e.g.?

> I've heard the expression many times and know well what it means, but I'd never seen it rendered as an initialism like that.

Well… my experience in the opposite: I have first saw in the original source and it's used there as a word, not as an aphorism.

Congratulations System76!

Posted Dec 12, 2025 18:11 UTC (Fri) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

The first stable release of a new desktop is quite an accomplishment. And a little more competition in desktop Linux should be healthy for the entire ecosystem.