Five years ago, on October 27, 2017, the well-known Linux PC manufacturer System76 officially launched the Linux distribution Pop!_OS.
The launch of System76's own distribution is closely related to a decision made by Ubuntu that year. Before the release of Pop!_OS, all computers produced by System76 had Ubuntu pre-installed . After Ubuntu decided to abandon the use of Unity's default desktop environment and return to GNOME, System76 began to consider creating its own maintained distribution - based on Ubuntu.
After their in-depth research into GNOME, they found that the desktop environment is rich in technology, has a sophisticated workflow, and can customize the desktop according to the needs of customers through the extension framework. So System 76 plans to adapt the GNOME desktop environment's existing themes, icons, and fonts to fit the System76 branding, as well as distro settings and default applications -- designed to boost productivity and optimize the developer experience. Based on these changes, the first Pop!_OS released by System76 is actually a customized version of Ubuntu with GNOME.
Since then, System76 has continued to actively optimize the Pop!_OS desktop environment and was also named "Best Ubuntu-based distribution" in 2020.
Although System76 has been working on GNOME for many years and has been optimized based on it, in 2021, System76 announced the desktop environment "COSMIC" specially created for Pop!_OS, and said that it will be pre-installed in Pop!_OS 21.04 to replace the previously used GNOME .
In fact, COSMIC is not a product built from scratch, but based on the GNOME desktop environment, and System76 hopes to provide a complete and carefully polished desktop user experience in Pop!_OS based on this. The biggest difference between the two - and also the biggest highlight of COSMIC is that it can be customized. System76 sees this as an elegant solution that envisions making the desktop easier to use through customization, a powerful and efficient feature for users.
System76 has poured a lot of confidence into COSMIC. In order to provide higher performance, its development team decided to abandon the GTK toolkit and use Iced-Rs instead, which is a native Rust cross-platform graphics toolkit.
In addition, Pop!_OS 22.10 , which was originally launched this month, was not released directly because the development team focused development time on the Rust implementation of COSMIC instead of 22.10 .
In general, Pop!_OS has mainly made various attempts and explorations around the desktop environment in the past 5 years, and has also achieved good results - at least it has been rated as the Linux distribution with the best experience.
Click here to see more development history of Pop!_OS .