I’m a System76 engineer / Pop!_OS maintainer. I’ve been a Linux user since 2007; and Rust since 2015. I’m currently working on COSMIC-related projects.
I'd recommend everyone to try out cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) when they get a chance. Whether you use COSMIC or not, it's fully functional with any desktop environment. It's packaged by default in Pop!_OS 22.04, available in Fedora 40 via ryanabx/cosmic-epoch, and the AUR.
It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community....
If COSMIC is pathetic, then GNOME must be abysmally unusable.
COSMIC was already planned long before there was any beef with GNOME.
We listen to user feedback and prioritize development of features that our developers and users want.
Good luck trying to replicate COSMIC's theming and tiling capabilities in GNOME.
Let alone the overall stability and performance of COSMIC.
COSMIC Store is the fastest app store on Linux now. I'd recommend everyone to try it out. sudo apt install cosmic-store
There's a very large gap between having tiling, and having excellent auto-tiling capabilities with intuitive shortcuts and behaviors. COSMIC's autotiling was designed from the ground up to be just as usable with a mouse as it is with a keyboard.
GNOME Shell extensions are JavaScript monkey patch injections to gnome-shell's JavaScript process. They're only compatible with the exact version of gnome-shell that they target because most of them require to override private internals of gnome-shell that are sensitive to order of injection and names of private variables and methods.
COSMIC uses a modern Wayland-based approach to shell interface design with layer-shell applets. Each applet is its own process, using the layer-shell Wayland protocol to render their windows as shell components, and communicating with the compositor securely with the security context Wayland protocol. The protocols they use are standardized, so they will be stable across COSMIC releases. Other Wayland compositors could integrate with them if they desire to.
Ubuntu is Debian with more up-to-date packages and a lot of additional third party packages. There's a lot of companies who produce development toolkits, frameworks, and applications that are explicitly built for the Ubuntu base. Some governmental agencies and organizations also require access to packages and repositories that have been audited by security agencies, which Ubuntu has gone through the process of getting certification for certain kernels and their Ubuntu Pro repositories. All of which are useful for real world customers.
Regardless of shortcomings in Snap, Pop does not rely on Snaps, and offers its own packaging for things that would otherwise require Snap on Ubuntu.
Speaking of being defensive, not only are you being far more defensive than I, but these bullet points are both misleading and wildly inaccurate. It's also telling that you think none of my points are good, when they are the truth. Could you possibly be even more a hypocrite?
All desktops use the Super key nowadays. Sway, i3, GNOME, Plasma, etc. are all using the Super key. Have been for years. The standard convention is that the Super key is reserved for system-level shortcuts handled by the window manager; and Alt key shortcuts are reserved for application-level shortcuts. Your desktop might have bound both Alt and Super because of legacy reasons.
Did you not read the blog update? That is exactly what the blog update covered… The user’s theme colors are applied to the Adwaita theme used by GTK4/libadwaita, and GTK3 theme support is provided by adw-gtk3.
How so? 22.04 is actively maintained and updated by Ubuntu, and is still the latest LTS release. On top of that, the most important packages in Pop!_OS are updated frequently, so we are on Mesa 24.0.3 and Linux 6.8.0. As for when COSMIC releases, you should read last month’s blog post.
It will be possible to configure COSMIC to look like Unity out of the box. There’s only a few panel applets that need to be implemented to make the experience 1:1.
The compositor and its applications have been developed bottom up with a full Rust stack, so stability hasn’t been a concern. We spend very little time debugging since the logic usually works if it compiles.
There’s only a handful of applications slated for the first release, and they’re almost finished. Besides core applications, we need only develop a couple additional settings pages to be ready for release, and integrate COSMIC versions of the remaining desktop portals. Altogether, that’s really not that much compared to all the work in the last two years.
Besides feature development, the main focus will be ironing out theming issues in the toolkit to adhere to our design files, and writing documentation for developers interested in building apps for cosmic. As well as the necessary work to enable a smooth upgrade from Pop 22.04 to 24.04.
Yes, you can do anything with COSMIC’s dock and panel. No extensions needed. If an applet exists on the system, you can embed it into your panel or dock.
Our internal testing won’t begin until the first ISO is ready, which marks the alpha. As it is open source, our internal testing is also publicly available to everyone interested in downloading the ISO and testing it. The Alpha will not include all features that are planned for release. Then we will switch to Beta after all featues are implemented, where QA will begin reviewing every PR to ensure that no regressions make it to release. Then it releases after we deem the beta free of oustanding issues on the board.
It should be noted that COSMIC itself hasn’t been delayed. Development on the core applications progressed much faster than expected, so we decided to skip the Alpha 1 release and release Alpha 2 instead.
Why wouldn’t you like using it right now? I wouldn’t call it “very alpha”.
That’s not implemented, but you can click the maximize button, or press Super+M to toggle maximization.
You can open the Appearance settings page and change that to your preferred color scheme. We’ve already selected our default colors and they’re not going to change from here on out.
What do you mean by minimal? The PrintScrn key opens the screenshot utility, which lets you choose between capturing a selected region, a specific window, or the whole display
What’s wrong with the file manager and editor? You can use whatever editor and file manager you want, so that shouldn’t be a blocker for daily use.
This can be configured in the cosmic comp config, but will be implemented in the settings app soon.
Super+W opens the workspaces view
Your distribution should make sure pop-launcher is installed, and each of its plugins symlinked.
That is already possible in the Desktop and Panel settings page. As you can see, I’m not using a GNOME style panel or dock here.
Wayland compositors have to implement the whole display server, including special handling of XWayland windows. XWayland windows can be very finicky and require caution to handle.
Static linking is not an issue. Binaries may require more space on disk, but the benefit is that they are self-contained, portable, with excellent performance, and low memory usage. Binaries are compiled with LTO, so unused functions are stripped from the binary. What remains is highly optimized to that application’s use cases.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a cosmic-applets-community package which bundles third party applets, or the gradual inclusion of popular applets into cosmic-applets. Given that an applet would only become popular if there’s a lot of need for those use cases, then it would make sense to open a path to getting them mainlined.
You might be surprised how much disk space those GNOME Circle applications actually require, despite being dynamically linked to a lot of GTK/GNOME libraries. Unless they’re written in a scripting language, they’re much closer to a COSMIC application than you think.
I don’t see the issue with an application having a static binary within the realm of 15-25 MB. Even if you had 100 applications installed, that’s only 2 GB of disk usage.
Each time I try AMD graphics, something is fucked for me. Back with fglrx, fglrx just sucked, so I used Nvidia. Then I had an AMD right around when they finally had opensource drivers, but it was still buggy as hell. So I went with Nvidia again (first a GTX 790, then a GTX 1060). In the meantime I had a new work notebook where I...
What makes you think I’m “salty”? I’m not the one complaining about NVIDIA not working in Wayland, or saying that I’m going to sell my GPU.
The only person who is salty is the one who would rather sell their GPU than use a Wayland desktop environment that supports NVIDIA as a first class citizen.
As pointed out in This Week in GNOME, there’s been some continued work on Variable Rate Refresh for the GNOME desktop. The VRR setting within GNOME Settings continues to be iterated on as the developers iron out how they’d like to present the Variable Rate Refresh setting for users. The developers have been discussing how to...
It wouldn’t be possible for us to build a platform toolkit, or the COSMIC platform itself, without a text editor or terminal, and it would be embarassing if we release our desktop without a terminal. Imagine telling people they need to switch to a TTY or use a software center to install a plan text editor or terminal.
COSMIC is a Wayland desktop environment for Linux that is written in Rust with Smithay and Iced. COSMIC applications are developed with the libcosmic platform toolkit, which is based on iced. They are cross-platform and supported on Windows, Mac, and Redox OS in addition to Linux....
We’ve been using COSMIC on our systems since summer of last year. Some graphics drivers have issues, particularly NVIDIA drivers using Vulkan on Wayland. There are some XWayland bugs from time to time. It is very usable as is, but some settings aren’t implemented yet, and some toolkit features aren’t fully implemented.
NVIDIA believes they’ll have the Vulkan on Wayland issue fixed in the 550 driver that they are planning to release early this year. Someone’s working on a fix in wgpu that happens to also boost performance for every driver in demos.
A Blog to Satisfy Your Monthly COSMIC Fix(es) ( blog.system76.com )
[ META ] What is the community's opinion of Pop!_OS?
It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community....
LinuxFest Northwest 2024: Meet COSMIC DE ( www.youtube.com )
April Tools: Hammering out new COSMIC Features ( blog.system76.com )
COSMUnity ( lemmy.world )
It will be possible to configure COSMIC to look like Unity out of the box. There’s only a few panel applets that need to be implemented to make the experience 1:1.
COSMIC: More Alpha, More Fun! ( blog.system76.com )
COSMIC Store Prototype ( lemmy.world )
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/13038090...
AMD GPUs are cursed for me
Each time I try AMD graphics, something is fucked for me. Back with fglrx, fglrx just sucked, so I used Nvidia. Then I had an AMD right around when they finally had opensource drivers, but it was still buggy as hell. So I went with Nvidia again (first a GTX 790, then a GTX 1060). In the meantime I had a new work notebook where I...
GNOME Sees Progress On Variable Refresh Rate Setting, Adding Battery Charge Control ( www.phoronix.com )
As pointed out in This Week in GNOME, there’s been some continued work on Variable Rate Refresh for the GNOME desktop. The VRR setting within GNOME Settings continues to be iterated on as the developers iron out how they’d like to present the Variable Rate Refresh setting for users. The developers have been discussing how to...
COSMIC DE: The Road to Alpha ( blog.system76.com )
If all goes well, we can release the alpha by the end of March...
In-progress COSMIC apps: terminal, file manager, text editor, and settings ( fosstodon.org )
COSMIC is a Wayland desktop environment for Linux that is written in Rust with Smithay and Iced. COSMIC applications are developed with the libcosmic platform toolkit, which is based on iced. They are cross-platform and supported on Windows, Mac, and Redox OS in addition to Linux....