Doing some additional COSMIC testing and I have confirmed that COSMIC is excessively writing to the drive whenever changing a setting, using an SSD masks the problem avoiding the desktop locking up but it doesn't stop the writes happening
On a HDD the problem really presents itself as shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoyzaLW52No
Yes the bug is reported, alpha software will be alpha software
@BrodieOnLinux probably a good thing you only have a hard drive then or this might've flown under the radar! I did notice some slowness but that is bad