I love the full overview as well. On every Pop installation I restore it to super key only. The Launcher then goes to it’s original keys of super + /. You end up with the full activity view with the exception of the Gnome search bar. And we’re talking about the COSMIC extension on Gnome right now, but the COSMIC desktop environment will be much more configurable from what I’ve been led to believe.

I’ve never wanted to “rice” my Pop!_OS, but I think I’ve been disappointed that Gnome couldn’t add some simple changes like the following from COSMIC without installing third party software.

Beyond changing from Dark to Light mode and choosing an accent color you can change the application background, interface text palette tint and neutral palette tint. You’ll also be able to choose one of the three styles for the corner radii used throughout the interface and set an interface density.

Finally! Notifications can happen where you want, and they’re not connected to the calendar. This is a massive win for me. Gnome’s is really annoying being top center and dropping down into your work. I’ve always turned off 95% of notifications. If I can have them bottom left or right I will love that.

The notifications applet has been integrated into COSMIC DE! Unlike in Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, notifications exist in their own applet, separate from your calendar.

Yes, I believe theming and color options are in the pipeline. I was aiming at showing how functional the desktop was already despite being pre-alpha. I love the little stack icons they’ve added though.

Nice, glad you got it sorted. It’s a reasonably common request.

Pop!_OS being an OEM for System76 probably means they will definitely release with a file manager GUI, but I wouldn’t care if it had none at all. You should be fine to swap out the default if what you want is a Flatpak though. Alternatives include any terminal TUI like Felix and any Rust apps developed with Iced or Slint, which I would be in favor of.
Both Nautilus and Felix currently work well in the pre-alpha COSMIC, but navigating in and working with the filesystem in terminal is a breeze when set up nicely. Bash is great, but I prefer Z shell (Zsh) with auto-suggestions, auto-completions, autojump and a stack of aliases and scripts.

Have you got “Show Window Titles” toggled off in Pop shell’s settings? You can see in the extensions App. Or, try toggling off whatever you installed. Having said, auto tiling is easy enough to learn. I use the desktop without any titlebars relying on keyboard shortcuts for all window management. It’s a nicer workflow.

Nice plugin! You’re a champion. Thanks.

Emphasis on “running system”. Similar to how you can’t fully re-partition a disk you’re currently using.

Here’s a little taste of the pre-alpha COSMIC DE. Tiling is working great and stacking has been introduced. I’ve got four Alacritty windows in the left stack. Running from left to right a watch (ss) , the Helix editor, cmus player, and Felix file manager TUI. COSMIC is utilizing my ZSH config and autosuggestions along with autocompletions working great. The right stack is running Firefox, Librewolf Flatpak, Nautilus and COSMIC settings. Resize is working as expected too.