exactly everything I need and nothing more. doesn't need X. reasonably lightweight. no fiddly configuration needed. nice support for tiling alongside floating.

also, very buggy (at least as of alpha.7), somewhat fickle (at least on my hardware), and I can't remap keyboard shortcuts.

After using Autotiling from the Cosmic desktop, I can't go back to anything else. I've tried distro hopping to Gnome based desktops for a few reasons, but always wind back up on Cosmic.

Brodie uploaded a video yesterday that should answer that question for you.

I see it as a great middle ground for those that wanting to use tiling WMs but do not want to dabble into editing config using text files, scripts etc. I've been running Sway for a year and my initial feedback is really positive. A lot of stuff I had to look up a lot to implement in sway just works with no hassle.

Tiling WMs have a lot of benefit to those using it, but mainly window management becomes unbelievably easier. Not needing to use mouse for simple tasks like resizing windows, moving between programs gives you way more flexibility with what you can do with your cursor.

I actually daily drove it during Alpha for a bit but stopped using it after a couple Alpha releases because it got a bit worse with each alpha release and more slow. Haven't tried the beta yet but will probably get around to it soon.

Killer feature? I mean if you want GNOME or a regular DE with tiling then sure...have at it. You're not going to get anywhere near the caliber of customization you would have with say KDE Plasma or literally any other WM out there but the trade of is you don't have to deal with config files for the tiling aspect. It's a buggy mess though. With each added feature the bugs just increased which is sort of expected.

The last time I used it the shortcuts were a bit of a pain to get working correctly and the startup was slow. It does come packaged with its own file manager and terminal. The file manager isn't anything special, but honestly the terminal isn't that bad. If I recall the terminal doesn't support images so if that's something you want (like for me it is since I use Yazi) then I'd just uninstall it. I don't think it has the option to style GTK stuff but I heard they might have changed that with the Beta.

It's launcher is pretty nice and you can do a lot with it. naturally app launching but also web searching, calculator, file searching, etc.

I wish it had an option like KDE Plasma does for laptops where you can completely disable the touchpad if you have an external mouse plugged in instead of just disable while typing. But you can circumvent that if you know what you're doing with like something like noinput cli or whatever or making a udev rule.

I think it still needs a wee bit longer to bake. If they can work out the bugs, speed it up a bit, and make the overall size of it smaller than KDE I would switch back to it. It's pretty simple and bare bones but I mean for wayland your only options are pretty much Plasma or GNOME so having a third option is awesome.

I tried a number of the alphas and just hate it. Like fundamentally hate it, not just because it was buggy.

I wish System76 would just put out a 24.10 release instead of spending all their resources on this DE.

Probably same time. Gives them enough time to work on bugs.

Been using cosmic ui on and off since the beta release and it is still pretty beta. Really good at this point honestly and a huge achievement for them but not without some annoying bugs for me.

Just something to consider before jumping. You should be ready to work around some annoyances, deal with some slowness/quirks, and probably be ready to provide feedback and bug reports.

It's better to wait for a stable product than to release it early with full of bugs