... Sweet?
I don't like GNOME. I don't like GNOME accessories; I hate CSD and hamburger menus and that big empty wasted top panel. I want more things vertical, while GNOME is moving its vertical workspace-switcher to horizontal.
The Cosmic tiling is good. That's an improvement. GNOME's window management sucks, and this is better.
I also really don't like systemd-boot and it broke one of my laptops severely.
So, I am happy that it is good for you, but it is not something I'd choose.
...Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height, Put, nut, granite, and unite. ... [0]
And I do agree on the very high amount of pixels wasted in the top panel, expecially on an ultrawide monitor, something MacOS does better. On a laptop screen it's ok for me.
As for the panel... well, Dash-to-Panel tames it:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/
... but it does not handle vertical mode well. E.g. Status icons should be in rows, not a single column.
OOTB the Gnome install was as good as can be. It's a nice way to play with Nix, batteries included.
Right now I need to deploy a server used for bioinformatics, and I need Conda... And that is a pain [0], so again I'm on the fence: Deploy Ubuntu or NixOS and persevere... I'm thinking Ubuntu, then perhaps later in the learning curve I go for Nix or perhaps just make a container to use on Nix.
I have suspend/wake working well so far, USB-C charging + screen + all peripherals via 1 USB-C cable, all "media" buttons work. And this is still on 8 GB of ram (soon the 2x32 GB will arrive ;)), I haven't even heard the fans so far! I'm on Teams, camera works, nobody would even know I'm on Linux if it wasn't for my constant evangelizing!
I'm really impressed (yeah, I know, Linux people easily are when it comes to desktops, basically we're impressed if things work).
I did enable AppIndicator. Solaar, NextCloud and Tailscale all really require it to be considered functional. I don't understand why that is not a standard thing (it is on many distros though).