For the better part of three years, System76 has been building something audacious: an entirely new desktop environment written from scratch in Rust. The company, best known for selling Linux laptops and desktops, decided that existing Linux desktop shells weren’t good enough. Not GNOME. Not KDE. Nothing off the shelf. So they started over.
That bet is now materializing in Pop!_OS 24.04, the latest release from System76, which ships the COSMIC desktop as its default experience. And based on extensive benchmarking published by Phoronix, the performance story is more nuanced — and more interesting — than the hype suggests.
Pop!_OS has long been built on Ubuntu’s foundations. The 24.04 release continues that tradition, pulling from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS packages while replacing the desktop layer entirely. Ubuntu 24.04, codenamed Noble Numbat, runs GNOME 46. Pop!_OS 24.04 runs COSMIC, System76’s homegrown compositor and desktop shell built atop Smithay, a Wayland compositor library written in Rust. The underlying plumbing is similar. The surface couldn’t be more different.
Michael Larabel at Phoronix ran both distributions through a gauntlet of over 80 benchmarks on identical hardware — an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K system with an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and a 2TB NVMe SSD. The testing methodology was controlled and repeatable, using the Phoronix Test Suite. The results paint a picture of two distributions that are remarkably close in raw computational performance, with some telling divergences in specific workloads.
In pure CPU-bound tasks, the differences were negligible. Kernel compilation times, compression benchmarks, and mathematical computations showed Pop!_OS 24.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 trading blows within margin-of-error territory. This makes sense. Both distributions ship the same Linux 6.8 kernel series. Both use GCC and the same core toolchain packages. When you’re measuring how fast the processor crunches numbers, the desktop environment sitting on top is largely irrelevant.
But things get more interesting when GPU and graphics workloads enter the picture.
Pop!_OS 24.04 ships with Mesa 24.3, while Ubuntu 24.04 LTS carries Mesa 24.0. That four-version gap matters, especially for newer AMD GPUs like the RX 9070 XT used in testing. Mesa is the open-source graphics driver stack that translates OpenGL, Vulkan, and other API calls into instructions the GPU can execute. Newer Mesa versions typically bring better performance, broader hardware support, and bug fixes. In several OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks, Pop!_OS showed measurable leads — sometimes in the range of 5-10% — that can be attributed directly to the newer Mesa stack rather than anything COSMIC itself is doing.
The COSMIC desktop, for its part, uses Wayland exclusively. There is no X11 session option. This is a deliberate choice by System76, and it’s one that aligns with where the broader Linux desktop is heading. Ubuntu 24.04 defaults to Wayland under GNOME but still offers an X11 fallback. For most users in 2025, Wayland works. But edge cases remain — certain remote desktop tools, some older applications that depend on X11-specific behavior, screen recording setups. Pop!_OS users who hit these walls have fewer escape hatches.
Memory consumption is where COSMIC makes a compelling argument. Phoronix’s testing showed Pop!_OS 24.04 with COSMIC using noticeably less RAM at idle compared to Ubuntu’s GNOME 46 session. GNOME has long been criticized for its memory footprint, and while the GNOME team has made significant strides in recent releases, a from-scratch Rust implementation apparently carries less overhead. For System76’s own hardware — particularly laptops with 8GB or 16GB of RAM — this isn’t a trivial advantage.
System76 has been transparent about COSMIC’s alpha status throughout much of its development. The 24.04 release marks the point where the company considers it ready for daily use, though some features remain in progress. The file manager is functional but basic. The settings application covers most configuration needs but lacks the depth of GNOME Settings or KDE’s System Settings. Fractional scaling works but has rough edges on mixed-DPI multi-monitor setups.
None of this is unusual for a 1.0-class desktop environment. What’s unusual is that a hardware company with perhaps 50 to 100 employees decided to build one at all.
The motivation traces back to System76’s increasingly strained relationship with GNOME’s design philosophy. GNOME’s developers have strong opinions about how a desktop should work — minimal configuration options, a specific workflow model, tight integration between components. System76 wanted tiling window management as a first-class feature. They wanted a dock. They wanted more user-facing customization. For years, they maintained a fork of GNOME with these modifications layered on top, but keeping pace with upstream GNOME changes was draining engineering resources. Building COSMIC was, in a sense, the nuclear option. Expensive upfront, but potentially cheaper in the long run.
The Rust angle deserves attention beyond marketing. Rust’s memory safety guarantees mean that entire classes of bugs — buffer overflows, use-after-free errors, data races — are caught at compile time rather than discovered in production. For a desktop compositor that handles every pixel on screen and processes all user input, this matters. Wayland compositors are security-critical code. A bug in the compositor can mean a bug in the entire graphical session. Writing this layer in Rust doesn’t eliminate all bugs, but it structurally prevents many of the most dangerous ones.
Performance-wise, Rust compiles to native code with performance characteristics similar to C and C++. The Phoronix benchmarks don’t suggest any Rust-related performance tax in COSMIC. Desktop responsiveness, as measured through frame timing and input latency tests, was competitive with GNOME’s Mutter compositor. In some synthetic compositor benchmarks, COSMIC actually edged ahead.
Ubuntu 24.04, meanwhile, represents Canonical’s most polished LTS release in years. GNOME 46 brought meaningful improvements: better file search, improved accessibility features, a more refined notification system. Canonical’s snap package integration continues to be divisive — Firefox ships as a snap by default, which adds launch time overhead — but the overall experience is stable and well-documented. Ubuntu’s advantage isn’t raw performance. It’s the depth of its package archive, the breadth of its community support, and the sheer volume of tutorials, forum posts, and third-party tools that assume Ubuntu as the baseline.
Pop!_OS doesn’t have that institutional mass. What it has is focus. System76 builds Pop!_OS for a specific audience: developers, engineers, content creators, and power users who want tiling window management, sane defaults for productivity, and a system that stays out of their way. The auto-tiling in COSMIC is genuinely good — windows snap into place intelligently, workspaces are easy to manage with keyboard shortcuts, and the stacking/tiling hybrid mode lets users mix floating and tiled windows on the same workspace.
Recent community discussion on X and Reddit suggests that early adopters of Pop!_OS 24.04 are largely pleased with COSMIC’s direction, though bug reports are frequent. Wayland compatibility with certain Electron apps, screen sharing in video conferencing tools, and multi-GPU laptop switching (a critical feature for System76’s own Oryx Pro and Adder laptops) remain areas of active development. System76 has been shipping regular point updates — sometimes weekly — to address reported issues.
The broader competitive picture is worth considering. KDE Plasma 6, which shipped in early 2024, has been earning strong reviews for its performance and feature set. Fedora continues to push the leading edge of GNOME integration. Linux Mint, with its Cinnamon desktop, remains the safe harbor for users who want a traditional desktop metaphor. And then there are the immutable distributions — Fedora Atomic variants, openSUSE MicroOS, Vanilla OS — that represent a fundamentally different approach to system management. Pop!_OS 24.04 isn’t immutable, though System76 has discussed the concept for future releases.
For System76 as a business, COSMIC is strategic infrastructure. When you sell hardware, controlling the software experience is how you differentiate. Apple understood this decades ago. System76 is attempting something similar, albeit on a vastly smaller scale with an open-source ethos. Every Pop!_OS user who buys a System76 laptop because the software experience is good represents the thesis working. Every user who installs Pop!_OS on third-party hardware is expanding the distribution’s mindshare and bug-testing surface area.
The Phoronix benchmarks ultimately tell a reassuring story for System76. Pop!_OS 24.04 doesn’t sacrifice performance to run COSMIC. In GPU-accelerated workloads, it often wins, thanks to newer Mesa drivers. In CPU-bound work, it’s a wash. Memory efficiency favors COSMIC. The tradeoffs are in software maturity and ecosystem breadth, not in speed.
Whether COSMIC can attract a community of third-party theme developers, extension creators, and application integrators — the kind of organic growth that sustains a desktop environment long-term — remains the open question. Rust’s learning curve is steeper than JavaScript (GNOME extensions) or C++/QML (KDE Plasma widgets). The toolkit, libcosmic, is functional but sparsely documented. System76 is building the plane while flying it, and they’re inviting passengers aboard.
For industry professionals evaluating desktop Linux distributions in mid-2025, the calculus is straightforward. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the conservative, well-supported choice with years of guaranteed updates and the deepest third-party software compatibility. Pop!_OS 24.04 is the more opinionated choice — faster in some scenarios, leaner in memory, better for tiling workflow enthusiasts, but carrying the inherent risks of a version-one desktop environment.
Both are free. Both run on the same hardware. The question isn’t which is objectively better. It’s which set of tradeoffs matches your work.
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