I love PopOS- it’s my daily driver of choice for laptops, and just a good experience overall. I’m certainly hyped and hoping for the best with Cosmic DE, once it’s ready for the general user audience.
One thing I would love to see would be if Cosmic supported the ability to choose the default file manager (think Nemo or Dolphin) when it releases. While you can switch file manager defaults via terminal, it’s a little tricky and doesn’t always work smoothly across applications (see weirdness with Firefox and PopOS when doing so).
Anyone else here have very opinionated views on file managers? Any other default app stuff they’d like to see with Cosmic’s general release?
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.