I used to hear about COSMIC and think "Glad to see more choice, but I doubt this will go anywhere".

I wanted a Sway-like experience but with a desktop experience, and so tried it.

It's surprisingly good: a DE with powerful enough window tiling.

It's now my daily driver.

Since they're backed by a sole company, I'm still not convinced on their longevity, but remain hopeful!

I'm not familiar with Pop OS, which I now realise is what the post is.

I hard bounced off COSMIC with the complete lack of theming. I can't even set my clock to a reasonable format in it. The only thing it has going for it is sane multi-monitor support, which neither KDE nor GNOME have gotten right so far (though at KDE there is some activity around it, dunno 'bout GNOME).

Have you tried the new-ish KDE window tiling? (Super-T by default) I had a similar desire to you, and am quite happy with what KDE provided. It'd be interesting to read a comparison between the two.

Although I'm happy enough with what KDE gives me that COSMIC would have to be substantially better before I'd endure the switching costs.

I like tiling a lot more than I like floating windows. Cosmic is my daily driver and is awesome. I just wish it had a bit more customization options, I don't want to spend days rummaging through wikis like with hyprland but having a bit more control over it would be nice, not a deal breaker though

I skimmed the linked story and I still don’t really know what POP!_OS is. They are using the Linux kernel and wrote their own desktop environment, but what’s in between that? Does it include all the GNU system tools? Is there a lot of software that takes advantage of the COSMIC desktop environment? Do they have an App Store? Is it closer to something like Ubuntu or is it more like Android?

I think even if the company goes away we will see this continue. It modern it rust and some if its fundamentals are already used by other projects. Of course not same way, but its not just going away.