https://system76.com/pop/download/
Release Notes
Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS includes the new COSMIC Desktop Environment, designed and developed by System76.
Some GNOME apps are replaced by COSMIC apps
- GNOME Files (Nautilus) > COSMIC Files
- GNOME Terminal > COSMIC Terminal
- GNOME Text Editor > COSMIC Text Editor
- GNOME Media Player (Totem) > COSMIC Media Player
Pop!_Shop is replaced by COSMIC Store
Key components
- COSMIC Epoch 1
- Linux kernel 6.17.9
- Mesa 25.1.5-1
- NVIDIA Driver 580
Some games may start partially off-screen. Press F11 or Super+F11 to fullscreen the game
Display toggle hotkeys and an on-screen display is not supported yet
COSMIC has a built-in screenshot tool. If you require annotations, we recommend Flameshot, which can be installed from Flathub via COSMIC Store. Version 13.1 or higher is required for COSMIC
COSMIC is not currently optimized for touch devices. An on-screen-keyboard is in development.
The COSMIC Desktop will be continuously updated with new features and improvements after release
Kernels and hardware support are continuously updated in Pop!_OS
You can follow COSMIC DE feature and improvement progress on the project board


Unfortunately, KDE is planning to remove X11 session entirely around 2027, so if the problem still persists then it might be wise to find another distro or stick with old KDE versions.
Personally, I have XFCE installed alongside KDE for running programs that are buggy on Wayland (which was few and far in-between). Otherwise, my hardware supports Wayland well (as it only has Intel integrated graphics anyways).
I used XFCE many years because there were bugs and limitations in KDE I couldn’t live with.
Now I’ve used KDE for about 2 years without issues, and they pull this stupid stunt!
I still have XFCE installed, and when I switched to that my games worked fine again. Then when I wanted to switch back to KDE/X11 I couldn’t. It was friggin removed as an option after the latest upgrade, despite I specifically used KDE/X11 instead of Wayland because of a KDE/Wayland limitation that you can’t disable compositing.
I do use compositing, but I like to have the option to disable it if I need to. And it was when I noticed I couldn’t disable compositing, I switched to XFCE to see if that worked.
So long story short, I had to install a kde-x11-session package to be able to switch to it? WTF??
I must admit this incident has made me think of switching to another distro that respect user settings more.
PS:
My short trip to XFCE was quite nice, they have refined the design some since last I used it. But damned I’ll have to port all my hotkeys again, I used top have them in xbindkeys, but I moved them to native KDE to be compatible with both X11 and Wayland. 🙄
This is the blog post that details KDE’s plan to remove X11. The linux experiment, as far as I know, also mentioned it in his linux open source news videos.
Hopefully things will work with Wayland at that point.