I re-installed System 76’s Cosmic Desktop Alpha 2 into a virtual machine tonight. I know I was a little harsh about Alpha 1, and accused the system of not properly handling keyboard input. It turns out that the problem was actually with QEMU/KVM itself, because the keyboard input problem affected all the virtual machines I have installed on this system. That problem seems to have mysteriously fixed itself (probably with an update), so that keyboard input is acting normal again.

I’ve managed to install Hack Nerd Fonts and the PowerLine packages for both the bash shell as well as vim. I also grabbed and installed fastfetch from the fastfetch git repo. You’ll note that fastfetch shows the desktop is Cosmic under the Wayland graphics subsystem. The overall Cosmic desktop environment alpha 2 has shown solid improvement over alpha 1. I won’t go over any specifics as there’s already plenty written on this releases new and improved features. Rather this is a personal validation of the glowing praise I’ve read so far. It does live up to the praise it’s receiving right now.

Is it good enough to use as a daily driver? For me, not yet. For anyone else, that’s something they’re going to have to determine on a case-by-case basis. Even if it is an alpha, it’s good enough to begin that consideration for many.