From Regolith to Cosmic DE
I recently bought a new laptop, and since I have some time on my hands, I decided to explore the landscape of tiling window managers again. I've been using Regolith Linux for the past 5 years, and I've developed a fair bit of muscle memory for it's shortcuts.
Regolith combines Gnome with i3 (or Sway on Wayland). You get a good tiling window manager, but also the collection of tools that make a desktop environment (lock screen, monitor configuration, desktop backgrounds, notifications, ...). Instead of needing to assemble all of these components yourself, Regolith gives you a working system out-of-the-box.
I don't have many gripes about it. It generally works, and the defaults are fine. Still, I wanted to take stock of the existing landscape and see if anything better has popped up.
In 2025, the options seem to be
- Cosmic DE is a tiling window manager made by System 76. It started as an extension for Gnome Shell, and eventually became a stand-alone desktop environment.
- Omarchy an Arch-based Linux distribution using hyprland.
- KDE + i3/sway
Whilst Omarchy seems interesting, the entire desktop configuration is text-based, and I enjoy not needing google in order to accomplish a task like positioning my external monitor.
KDE and i3/sway seem to play nicely together, but I just never enjoyed KDE.
This leaves us with Cosmic.
After using it for a few weeks, I can say that it is quite a polished product. Some things are still missing (_e.g._ setting up the fingerprint reader) but it is quite usable.
At this stage, a couple of things are missing to make me stay with it.
Easy workspace manipulation
In my Regolith setup, I often move entire workspaces from one output to the another with a single shortcut. I have not been able to get this to work in Cosmic. For example, I often have Sublime Merge (my GUI client of choice), and a terminal open on a secondary monitor. When I need to commit/fixup.rebase/... I often move the entire workspace to my main monitor. With Cosmic, I would need to move each window individually.
Unique workspace numbers across outputs
In i3, workspace numbers are unique across all outputs. Using Meta + 1 moves focus to that workspace, whatever output it is on. In Cosmic, this takes me to the first workspace on the current output.
This is especially important to me, because I tend to keep applications on specific workspaces. For example, workspace 1 is my main browser window, workspace 2 is chat and email, workspace 4 is my git tool, workspace 5 is my main IDE window, ... I often move the workspaces from one output to another depending on the task at hand. My git tool is usually on a secondary display, but if I need to dive into the repository history looking for a change, I will bring it onto the main display. Whatever display it is on though, it will always be workspace 4.
Not having this makes jumping to a specific application slightly slower.
All-in-all, I enjoy working with Cosmic, but the paradigm is just different enough from i3 to feel foreign. I might revisit it in a year or two, but in the short term, I'll be re-installing Regolith.