My new 2026 desktop setup
This writeup represents a month of continuous refinment of my new setup in the new year of 2026.
After some time I wanted to improve the old setup of cinnamon + mint. The old one offered good stability, but I wanted fresher packages with the same or close enough stability.
The only other polished distro that meets my needs is fedora so I went to the website. For some time now I wanted to try tiling windows manager and after I was they have a spin for COSMIC DE which I have checked before. The DE is still in beta but it already looked clean with the necessary things for me.
It didn’t take a lot to just have Cosmic look very clean and since vertical space is valuable I settled on just panel with no dock.
I’m using the catppucin theme with square style, JetBrains Mono and Noto Sans for fonts.
For now I have these workspaces mapped out:
w1: browser
w2: terminal
w3: telegram
Browsing
I started using spaces in zen to seperate different tabs based on use.
bullshit: yt, twitter,…
reading: pdfs, gpt, search, blogs,…
dev: docs, search,…
Tools
- Terminal: Ghostty
- Terminal multiplexer: zellij
- Editor/IDE: Helix / Zed
For most development I use helix. The best terminal editor I tried so far with not much configuration to do I just go a to project typehelix .and start working immediately. Sometimes I use zed it’s fast, elegant and has everything I need. - Monitoring: Btop
- Browser: Zen for desktop and firefox for mobile so I can sync data with the desktop since zen is firefox based.
- Shell: fish
- Others:
- I found myself comming back to old commands so I got Atuin, it’s a database of the command history that you can search. You can do other things with it like importing the data to another maching, syncing or checking your stats for most used commands and other things.
- First using a clipboard manager, I don’t believe I have been living without them it is such a quality upgrade. I don’t need to copy things in an empty file or keep browser tabs open to copy later. I use CopyQ