26 ms·

System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

500 points by TangerineDream 6y ago

spicybright 6y ago
Why another WM to further divide up dev time for desktop environments. I'm not say people shouldn't make what they want, but I think they'd meet their goals a lot easier contributing to an existing project instead of forking.
- Lobosque 6y ago
  Forks may also contribute upstream
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  I'm still using unity because it was the last usable polished out of the box usable DE for me. I'm glad they try to do this, the linux desktop needs a contender to the too rich kde and too limited gnome, but with a modern touch.
- rvz 6y ago
  That's the Linux desktop ecosystem. Another window manager that some users will use and will later complain that their browser isn't working with it or it crashes with etc Wayland, X11, Yet another Linux app or even Z shell, etc. Sometimes it's only 'fun' swapping in alternatives of alternative system components, until you actually need to get work done. Then it must not get in the way of the user. I prefer the desktop environment of 'It just works' and 'If it ain't broke don't fix it'. It's called macOS.
  - turbinerneiter 6y ago
    You are basically teabagging. There is a lot of awesome people in the Free Desktop community, who work hard for what they believe in. Criticism is always welcome, there is a lot of work to do and a lot of stuff to improve. But having people who use a different OS come in and ridicule all of that work is not really nice. I've been happily using the treaded GNOME without filepicker thumbnails for 10 years now and I'm neither less productive not less happy than you. Enjoy your Mac! OSX has a lot of great inspirations for the Free Desktop.
    - sk1pper 6y ago
      Not parent commenter but I've had the same experience - and I'm sure this comment will be received just as poorly as theirs, but I've given up on Linux desktop. It just isn't stable. I've tried so many times and I don't know what 1) is wrong with me or 2) the "I'm just as productive on Linux" people are smoking. Just getting basic stuff to work like bluetooth is a hassle. Headphones stuck in headset mode, let's go drop an argument to the bluetooth kernel module to enable autoswitching to A2DP. Touchpad driver for my machine kinda sucks, click and drag is still a little broken. Screen tearing watching YouTube videos on Firefox. Oh and it randomly freezes requiring a hard restart. Good luck upgrading packages, you never know what will randomly break. Extra good luck upgrading to the next LTS release, your machine might not boot when you go to restart. I've been wanting to love Linux desktop for 10+ years and I just give up. I don't have time for this stuff anymore. And I'm not using esoteric distros. Ubuntu LTS, I also tried Fedora and it was even worse. Sorry, but none of this happens to me on macOS or Windows. They're not perfect - of course crash, have certain quirks, etc, but they waste much less of my time on basic desktop functionality being unstable or needing special treatment.
      - turbinerneiter 6y ago
        That's ok. My experience is much better and I don't know why there is a difference either. I just don't get why people love to dunk so hard on something they don't use and do it in such a disrespectful way. What you said is totally fine, altough I could argue that you thinking I smoke is an insult, I mean it was one time, come on, I didn't even inhale.
      - type0 6y ago
        A lot of complaints sounds to be hardware specific, so there's really no cure for it than filing the bugs. > Ubuntu LTS, I also tried Fedora and it was even worse. The firmware for a lot of hardware has been lacking for years and sometimes can bug down after upgrades. And we shouldn't even speak about the proprietary buggy-man that terrorizes a lot of linux users trying to get their hardware to work, that is called NVidia. If you would have waited upgrading for a few weeks after a new release becomes available things are often fixed. You need to understand is that it's community effort and filing bugs is also very important.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Not in Big Sur it doesn’t. They dramatically changed the appearance for the worse. Tons more wasted space. They broke long-standing keyboard shortcuts. The move to iOS-ify MacOS with Catalyst just doesn’t work. Messages on Big Sur is effectively non-functional. I have a chat with a friend that breaks the message entry box reliably. If he sends me a message I have to create a new message to him to get the input box. It’s janky crap. Personally I’m excited by a hardware company selling a fully integrated Linux machine and taking an interest in making a working OS. This could finally get me free of Apple’s misguided antics.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    > I prefer the desktop environment of 'It just works' and 'If it ain't broke don't fix it'. It's called macOS. Pffft. No it's called XFCE. My Macs are broken way more often by updates and are way less compatible with my hardware than anything else in my house. They really don't just work... They're dead ass not even half as stable as Manjaro.
  - approxim8ion 6y ago
    That's your preference. But I would certainly be fuming if the only option on Linux was, say, GNOME. The workflow doesn't agree with me and neither do some of their UI choices. Thankfully, the "Linux desktop ecosystem" has afforded me a number of options that I much enjoy using.
- polyamid23 6y ago
  It's a gnome extension.
kactus 6y ago
Wonder if the file picker will have image thumbnails.
- k_bx 6y ago
  My favourite “UX bug” is when Discord wants to upgrade, it downloads a newer deb, you open it in App Store, and it only shows the “delete” button. Wonder if it’ll ever be fixed.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Yeah the AppStore is a joke...the search especially, thats one big point where devs don't eat their dogfood, i bet that 99.9% of Gnome-devs never try'd "AppStore" (so much for linux desktop year), but a working thing like synaptic is probably too complicated for "normal" Linux-Users (do they even exist?)...just give them a Store (that does not work)...thanks gnome.
  - iudqnolq 6y ago
    I wish my discord did that... it just errors after timing out trying to connect to their update server. Sometimes force killing helps, sometimes trying the next day does. Once it connects the rest is all automatic though.
- superkuh 6y ago
  Unless they also fork Gtk3 and Gtk4 the GNOME will still seep in and ruin the desktop. Things like gtkfilechooserwidget are terribly broken in gtk3 and gtk4 but at least gtk4 finally got a patch that allows you to paste into a file->open window without it error'ing out. But gtk4 is still firmly in the "no text entry window for you" in file chooser menus by default. Also, I looked at the github repo for cosmic under pop!_os's stuff and there's no actual code. It's all boilerplate with a single gsettings schema .xml file. There's no DE in that repo.
- mushufasa 6y ago
  current pop_os has image 'previews' in a sidebar as you select images, which isn't the same as a thumbnail but accomplishes much the same purpose
tekromancr 6y ago
Things System 76 does: maintain their own os distro, desktop environment, coreboot fork, system firmware Things System 76 refuses to do: usbc PD I say this as a very happy S76 customer
- justaguy88 6y ago
  Firmware/bios/uefi/coreboot seems like a reasonable thing for a hardware company to spend energy on
- foxhop 6y ago
  I love USBC power. Is there a good reason?
  - llcoolv 6y ago
    There of course is - you don't write a perfectly useless kernel patch - you ain't coolandfun andthatsit.
    - foxhop 6y ago
      I don't follow, does USBC power distribution not exist in the Linux kernel?
  - zoward 6y ago
    A lot of Lenovo laptops have one USB-C port which doubles as the power cable. I'm typing on a Thinkpad right now with that very configuration. My daughter's Chrmoebook is the same way. She bent the USB-C port on it and now it won't charge. I'm being really, really careful with my Thinkpad.
  - isantop 6y ago
    The laptop mentioned requires a 200W charger (dedicated GPU, high-end CPU). This is double what the USB PD specs allow.
  - wging 6y ago
    They actually do have USB-C power in many models.
themodelplumber 6y ago
Way to go, it's nice to see the innovation. System76 seems like a company that is paying attention to what their customers want, creating something useful and unique out of various well-considered parts.
supernovae 6y ago
This looks exactly like Windows 10x...
- Already__Taken 6y ago
  quite the compliment
qihqi 6y ago
Does it has thumbnail in filepicker?
justaguy88 6y ago
What's their strategy here? Do they hope that their window manager will drive hardware sales?
- O_H_E 6y ago
  Well, their additions to Gnome in PopOS have been very well received. So..maybe. The "power user" space (especially the non-cli oriented one) is really lacking out-of-the-box solutions rn. It wouldn't be the first time tailored software drove hardware sales.
  - dagenleg 6y ago
    I am genuinely wondering how big is the intersection between "non-cli users" and "power users" on Linux
    - erinnh 6y ago
      Considering this is a tiling window manager, rather high Id say. Im a power user, so to say, and Ive been using pop shell for about 6-9 months now. I love not having to write my own scripts to do the most basic tasks in sway anymore. Things like my calendar works throughout the desktop without me having to wrangle various things.
      - type0 6y ago
        > I love not having to write my own scripts to do the most basic tasks in sway anymore. Speaking of it there's now Sway edition of Manjaro and it looks very good
- mulmen 6y ago
  Yes? The lack of a workable window manager is one of the biggest things that prevents me from using a Linux laptop as a daily driver. It makes sense that System76 would work toward a serviceable Linux desktop OS. For the same reason it makes sense that Apple develops MacOS but charges no license fees.
IceWreck 6y ago
So they're making a gnome extension and branding it as a DE
- sodality2 6y ago
  It is "GNOME-based desktop environment" making it sound like there are other changes as well.
- dsego 6y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, Ubuntu's Unity was a compiz plugin. It's a very sad state of affairs in linux desktop.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
When Ubuntu dropped the hammer on Gnome2, I saw Unity desktop and was kinda... ewwww. And next I have installed Gnome 3. After 15 minutes with it I decided that Unity is actually not that bad, so I switched to it. In the following years Unity kinda grew on me, so I'm sad that it was axed and now everyone use this Gnome3 abomination. It is not as bad as it was five years before, but loss of top menu and general preference for biggins buttons instead of drop-down menus is a bad idea for desktop computers. I wish someone would fix Gnome3 by making it look back like Unity .
- znpy 6y ago
  I have found peace of mind using XFCE :)
- silon42 6y ago
  A someone that prefers Gnome2 and KDE... Gnome3 and Unity are both ewwww...
  - pmontra 6y ago
    I'm using a dozen extensions to make Gnome 3 behave like Gnome 2 as much as I can. No animations, no menu on top, no top bar, task bar at the bottom, no dock, no activities, one virtual desktop per project. That was impossible with Unity.
    - nikodunk 6y ago
      Why don’t you use Gnome Classic out of curiosity?
      - pmontra 6y ago
        I did use Gnome Fallback (Flashback?) until Gnome Shell had all the extensikns I needed and got rid of some bugs. Gnome Fallback was almost abandonware by the time I switched. It started to develop new glitches as the world around it moved on. Is Gnome Classic the other option I have at login on Ubjntu 20.04? I gave it a try one year ago. Either it didn't work or wasn't the desktop I was looking for. I prefer my custom desktop. Of course nobody can develop one system that suits the tastes of every single person. The important thing to do is to leave enough freedom to make people customize their systems.
llcoolv 6y ago
I think that those "Let's make our own DE" dumb kids are both a symptom and a cause why Linux never broke on the mainstream workstation market. Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X. Why waste all the time on such a massive amount of extremely useless work? Just because it is fun? And yeah, you can downvote this into oblivion, I don't care. The fact is that 80% of the comments on this thread are making fun of the very same retards for the very same reasons.
- marcodiego 6y ago
  >Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X In terms of appearance, maybe. Make that work consistently with most used programs with the same shortcuts, composition, behavior and rich integration between all these apps and then we're talking. Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast demands many people thinking, designing, implementing, testing and fixing. It is very expensive and only affordable for companies that can make enough money with to return the investment. Linux has no presence on the desktop because vendors that make the most money with it have 0 presence on the desktop.
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    Additionally, out-of-the-box functionality matters a lot. DEs like XFCE have insane tweakability, but outside of a handful of settings most users don't take advantage of that. The majority of Windows and macOS users don't spend hours tweaking their setup to perfection, they just install Chrome and Spotify and maybe vertically orient their taskbar/dock if they're feeling spicy and it's off to the races. And moving the needle on the out of the box usability front often requires changes that can't be made by changing the default configuration or becoming a contributor to an existing DE. The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive.
    - smoldesu 6y ago
      >The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive. That's kinda the point of PopOS in the first place: retrofitting GNOME and Ubuntu with extra utilities for a better "out of the box" experience. Manjaro does basically the same thing on the Arch side of the fence, and both are essential to providing that experience you're describing. The GNOME team isn't intentionally holding back features or making intentionally bad choices here, they're just part of the brick in the wall. The GNOME desktop should be bland, so that the distro can provide a default and the end user can make changes where necessary. It's all part of one big machine.
loloquwowndueo 6y ago
First thing that came to mind is “why are they basing this on Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish” - slightly confusing name :)
varispeed 6y ago
I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching their talk with Louis Rossman I really like this company. Hopefully one day they'll have a product that will match my needs. The link to the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGle6z9KfZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGle6z9KfZQ
- kaibee 6y ago
  Drop the 4K IPS for a 2560x1440 panel instead.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    I wouldn't say no to that if other specs matched.
  - bmurphy1976 6y ago
    My aging eyesight says no. 4k or bust for me.
    - rubyist5eva 6y ago
      at 14" is the difference even distinguishable? I can barely tell the difference between 1080p and retina on screens that small
      - bmurphy1976 6y ago
        It's complicated. For me it's about how smooth the text is and how consistent the experience is. 4k with 2x (integer scaling) is a pleasant balance of crisp rendering and appropriate text size. The lower resolutions would require non-integer scaling and so far my experience doing that in Linux environments has been very poor. I don't expect this to be a smooth experience any time in the near future. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
ohazi 6y ago
I've been hearing a surprising amount of positive feedback from people who have tried the current Gnome based DE on Pop OS. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard that they have some sort of tiling / snapping that works well. I'd like to try it, but I'm heavily invested in upstream Debian and am not really interested in installing another Debian derivative. Are there plans to package this up? I'm currently using XFCE on two computers with key bindings for snap left/right and snap top-left/top-right/bottom-left/bottom-right. On a big display, this setup is excellent. On a laptop it works, but often feels a little cramped, and it's particularly painful with a laptop trackpad instead of a mouse. It would be nice if there was an option to split ~67%/33%... apparently Windows(!) can do that. I've also been playing with i3 on another laptop, and for a lot of things the experience is clearly better (e.g. web browsing on a laptop without a mouse), but for others (e.g. kicad) it either doesn't work well, or I haven't managed to configure it well enough yet. The rabbit hole is infinitely deep, and while I enjoy tinkering with it every now and then, I'm probably not going to use it as a daily driver anytime soon.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  It's just a set of about 3 gnome extensions, at least on Pop OS 20.10 right now. So in theory you just need to install the gnome extensions and you're good: https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell I've been using it for a year and love it--typing this reply in a browser window tiled next to a terminal. It's easy to add little exceptions too for modal apps you want to hover outside the tiling.
- ChefboyOG 6y ago
  I'm using it on a Surface Pro 3 that runs Pop OS and have nothing but positives to report. Additionally, it's by far the best tablet experience I've had not just on Linux, but period.
  - marmaduke 6y ago
    do you have any issues with sleep/suspend on the surface? I have a sp4 and had such issues even with Windows for the longest time.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
schmorptron 6y ago
Fork & maintain unity, pretty please? :)
snicker7 6y ago
"Keyboard" or "Mouse" driven? What about trackpad? I would love some gestures to quickly switch windows and workspaces.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Gnome 3 has gesture support. I don't think many are built in, certainly not as many as mac OS gives you out of the box. But you can go wild: https://github.com/mpiannucci/gnome-shell-extended-gestures https://github.com/mpiannucci/gnome-shell-extended-gestures
  - ufo 6y ago
    GNOME 40 (just released) is also adding a some new three-finger gestures for workspace switching.
    - snicker7 6y ago
      That's great! I mean, its ten years too late. But still!
- s3tz 6y ago
  Yeah, I think for me it's almost entirely the trackpad that's the dealbreaker still. There isn't a single laptop that I can use linux on where the trackpad just doesnt suck. I'll tolerate the noise and the subpar display, even the speakers can suck, but the trackpad should be at least 80% of the way of what a macbook has.
axaxs 6y ago
Nice to see! And glad they are...gasp...listening to people. The Gnome devs could learn a lot from that approach. The most popular distros all include a dock. And yet with Gnome 40, they not only refused to add a dock, they moved what gimped dock they had to the bottom of the screen. But you can't see it until you hit the top left corner. I wish I was making that up. (keyboard shortcuts aside, in fairness) Rant aside, I'll definitely give it this a go. PopOS is a really nice distro.
- toomanyducks 6y ago
  To be pedantic, you can see the dash/dock when you hit the super key, I don't believe anyone actually uses the hot corner. Also to be pedantic, there are plenty of desktops that don't use a dock, in the form of most window managers. I'm currently running opnebox with no dock and it's totally fine, though the approach is better suited to tiling window managers.
  - s3tz 6y ago
    It's a completely unnecessary extra action the completely breaks your flow.
    - JeremyNT 6y ago
      I'm a GNOME user and almost never use its dock directly. I have my typical programs added as favorites on the dock and switch to them directly via keyboard with meta + 1 through meta + 9. Seldom used applications don't make that cut, but they're... seldom used. I tend to switch to them using alt-tab rather than clicking through on the dock. In general, I prefer using the keyboard, so I have never once wished that a dock was more prominent in GNOME. I'm glad it stays out of my way until I explicitly summon it with a keypress.
    - ThatMedicIsASpy 6y ago
      The power of window managers. Use whatever floats your boat. I love i3wm too much and its the exact reason I love Linux
  - 6y ago
rubyist5eva 6y ago
Is this built as a Gnome Shell Extension? Would love to be able to just pop this into my shell on OpenSuse without having to change to an Ubuntu based distribution. Also, what are they going to do once nobody is supporting Gnome 3.38 anymore, porting this to Gnome 40+ seems like it's going to be a pain in the ass. Hopefully it doesn't necessitate a Gnome Shell fork...
- eudes_ochoa 6y ago
  I don't know if the thing they're announcing here is just an extension, but the features mentioned in the article all come included in the pop shell gnome extension. https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell
kodah 6y ago
I never regret being a PopOS user. This DE is almost exactly what I have running today, which is compelling.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
I wish Ubuntu would maintain a gnome3+ fork like that, with top menu and reasonable file picker, or partner-up with System76. Not because I can't use another distro, but because I think a well-tested default target desktop distro is important and helping the community. I'm still on Ubuntu 20.04 because I need third-party based stuff to run, such as Chromium and Electron-based apps such as Skype and Teams (which however doesn't actually work). But gnome3 simply sucks so I'll have to move to something else; maybe Kubuntu or even Unity again (the community fork).
- superkuh 6y ago
  File picker loss of functionality is the fault of Gtk3 and Gtk4. It would still apply even in systems without GNOME at all. Maintaing a fork of Gtk3 and 4 with patches to restore 2010 era functionality would be difficult but not infeasible. Arch does some of it. I've looked at the code and it is quite a terrible mess. It's no two line patch to change settings anymore because everything gets reset multiple times in functions you don't expect.
  - heftig 6y ago
    What is Arch doing?
    - superkuh 6y ago
      https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gtk3-classic/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gtk3-classic/ is a partial fix, but it still doesn't restore the filename-entry location bar.
- HorkHunter 6y ago
  KDE really is the unsung hero of the Linux community
  - smetj 6y ago
    Couldn't agree more.
still_grokking 6y ago
I of course appreciate the effort but besides "a big Gnome extension" I don't see much that could be called a new desktop environment. Also the planed features read a little bit funny to me, to be honest, as that are all things KDE Plasma provides out-of-the-box. But clearly looks like an improvement over vanilla Gnome, that's sure!
fnl 6y ago
I've recently switched from my usual MBP upgrade to System 76 (Oryx Pro). While yes, Apple's walled garden does feel like a Rolls Royce compared to anything, the price tag difference this time was just way too step for me to keep buying a new Mac: It was basically 2x or more for roughly similar hardware, if not slightly worse on the MBP side. Overall, using Pop_OS! with its specialized GNOME3 setup has been a bliss, and I must say I had expected a far more difficult migration. In a few days I was happily up and running with my new machine. And then, there is the support - Apple's support outside of visiting a Genius Bar is basically non-existent. System76 has diligently helped me even set up external hardware that wasn't theirs! Long story short, very much looking forward to COSMIC and continuing this experience. The only thing I do miss a lot is my iTerm2... :)
- skrtskrt 6y ago
  iTerm2 is a beauty, is there a closest equivalent on Linux? There seem to be 25 popular choices especially now with the GPU-accelerated ones. Tried a few of the classics like Termite and they all seemed painfully outdated and crappy compared to iTerm.
  - mxschumacher 6y ago
    I use iterm at work and a combination of alacritty, fish and i3-wm (so I don't open multiple tabs but just several terminal windows) on my personal machine, I'm really happy with that setup.
  - joelthelion 6y ago
    Gnome terminal is really good.
    - skrtskrt 6y ago
      On Pop OS I just stuck with gnome-terminal, it was plenty good if not quite as slick as iterm2.
      - instb3at 6y ago
symlinkk 6y ago
What a waste of time. Just use vanilla GNOME.
einpoklum 6y ago
I was willing suspend my incredulity of the merit of yet another desktop environment. ... but they lost me at "GNOME-based". [extends hands and head upwards:] Why, ye gods, why?
young_unixer 6y ago
I was really hoping for a traditional, Windows-like environment but with professional modern design. Like XFCE or KDE, but beautiful.
- tored 6y ago
  Yes, me too. System76 has done great work with Pop!_OS and pushing Linux as a true laptop OS, however their default theme and wallpaper always make me nauseous, something I feel a color blind would put together. Beautiful is not something I associate with Pop!_OS and System76. Weird thing is that Linux as a server has made great progress the last decade, but it seems that the Linux desktop has evolved backwards. It started sometime around the introduction of Gnome 3.
- dartharva 6y ago
  Mint already did that with Cinnamon
nix23 6y ago
Oh no not another one....well i have i3 and change ~maybe later to sway.
abbaselmas 6y ago
System76 blog is on tumblr! I thought that tumblr was dead.
- asidiali 6y ago
  This was my biggest takeaway also, why Tumblr...
  - fullstop 6y ago
    They also have a Telegram channel!
amanzi 6y ago
Great to see a dock properly integrated into the settings app. The first thing I do in Pop_OS is track down and install the dash to dock extension and fiddle with the settings until it's sitting on the right-hand side of my screen just like God intended.
zydeco 6y ago
Will it have a spatial file manager?
RosanaAnaDana 6y ago
Currently using System76 with Pop_OS! as my daily driver. Love it. No regrats.
yepthatsreality 6y ago
Oof why does this blog hijack my browser history? Gnome additions are welcome as Gnome stupidly strips features to try to tell people how to use a computer.
least 6y ago
The improvements and changes System76 have added to base Gnome are really great. I particularly like the many different keyboard driven ways to manipulate windows and even enforce tiling on top of Gnome, rather than having to run i3, bspwm, or some other dedicated tiling window manager.
kharann 6y ago
Looks great! When I introduce people to Linux I usually start them off with PopOS!, or KDE I really think it's a great DE. I would probably use it if I wasn't heavily invested into window managers
sdwvit 6y ago
I would love to contribute to this somehow. S76 are amazing.
hardwaresofton 6y ago
Just checking in to say I'm loving my Oryx Pro ~1 year later. It's been a fantastic system (I wrote about it when I first got it[0]), and although I use it more as a desktop (it sits on my desktop attached to two monitors with the lid closed) it has been a workhorse for me. The software and drivers also work fantastically, and are open source -- I've even contributed a line or two. BTW I use arch :). But I mention that to say it works great on Arch too. System76 may have actually bring about the era of the linux-first desktop/laptop, and I'm glad I bought it instead of a Lenovo. [EDIT] whoa the post is from 2019, it's been like 1.5+ years. Time flies. [0]: https://www.vadosware.io/post/starting-my-journey-with-the-system76-oryx-pro-and-arch/ https://www.vadosware.io/post/starting-my-journey-with-the-s...
shmerl 6y ago
I still prefer KDE Plasma.
stratigos 6y ago
System76 makes decent laptops that run linux really well. Ive had zero of the notorious firmware issues of trying to linux-on-laptop. As a software developer, I wouldnt ever use Pop_OS again. Vanilla Ubuntu is way better, and less complex, and has way better support. All I recall from Pop_OS related issues, on System76's behalf, are tumbleweeds. Oh and Ive had 4 of their laptops, used primarily for software development, since 2016. For a physical machine, its been a great experience, albeit slightly too expensive (and for that reason Im not buying them anymore). At a software level, I am forever disinterested in whatever it is theyre offering. Even the marketing language describing this "Cosmic" thing is has hard to parse and understand as my experience with Pop_OS.
supernintendo 6y ago
Does anyone run System76 hardware with a distro other than Pop!_OS and if so, how's it working out for you? I love what the company is doing and will probably consider a System76 laptop in the future (once they move away from Clevo to custom designs), but I'm pretty attached to my Linux environment of choice. Arch Linux and KDE Plasma have been very good to me for years and the idea of moving to an apt + GNOME-based system doesn't quite appeal to me. That said, the tiling window management features here look really nice and I'd love to see something similar for Plasma (KWin scripts work fine but have always felt just a bit jank in my experience).
- deadbunny 6y ago
  You can replace Kwin with a WM of your choice.
itsjloh 6y ago
I really like Pop!_OS' tiling feature but the one thing that really bugs me is you can't disable windows always raising on hover. You're meant to be able to tweak it using Gnome Tweaks however disabling the option and enabling tiling means flinging your mousing anywhere causes all the windows in its track to raise to the front. If you've got a floating window it just disappears behind the stack. Theres an open issue[1] but it hasn't been solved yet. [1]: https://github.com/pop-os/shell/issues/627 https://github.com/pop-os/shell/issues/627
jerrac 6y ago
Makes me wonder how usability studies are run. I should look into that sometime. In my case, I've never liked the OSX style dock, and I use the super key to switch windows all the time. So the two biggest features I pulled out of that article are actually things I'll have to turn off. Oh, and I used to love the hot corner, but it didn't work so well when I had multiple monitors on both sides of my main monitor. So I got used to just hitting super.
jbeard4 6y ago
I recently upgraded from a 10 year old Lenovo W520 to a System76 Lemur Pro, and have been extremely pleased with the purchase. It is lightweight (~2 lbs); software is fast, responsive, and free of bloat; chassis feels robust; specs are above average for the ultra book category (40GB RAM and 2 NVMe drives); good battery life (around 6 hours real world use); and good online documentation. Overall, I would highly recommend, and I am excited to see what direction they continue to go in as a company.
hparadiz 6y ago
I hope the Super key is configurable cause I use it for Cut/Copy/Paste and all my hotkeys basically.
Apofis 6y ago
A lot of great usability improvements from MacOS! Great news. Looks like the Ubuntu Unity separation will be less painful... Gnome isn't that great to use without a lot of customization. System76 is more than just a laptop, PopOS! is great. It's also nice to have CoreBoot and a discreet Nvidia RTX GPU. With PopOS they have figured-out scaling with various monitors... I have an external ultrawide that's not even 2k and it works great with the laptop's built-in 4k with proper scaling on both (not easy to do)... a regular 1080p external also works great. Finally, I think I configured the most expensive workstation in my life with these guys, north of $80k.
Shadonototro 6y ago
gnome is the problem, they should have used a different base.. linux as a desktop died because the majority went with gnome
alexeiz 6y ago
So far it looks like their PopShell extension with a dock. I already have a very similar setup with "Dash to Dock".
xbar 6y ago
Love what you're doing in software. System76 will be my next computer, too.
dartharva 6y ago
Honest question, why is it that whenever any party tries making a new DE/WM it always turns out to be a GNOME derivative? Unity, Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon, MATE.. and now COSMIC. Why not choose something else like KDE or XFCE to fork?
- jayp1418 6y ago
  Because mostly KDE and XFCE are very customisable with few configuration files doesn't require creating whole new DE
  - regularfry 6y ago
    The other way of looking at it is that Gnome is rampantly opinionated, and if you disagree, a fork might be your best option far more often than it is with other desktop environments.
- Hasnep 6y ago
  Budgie and Pantheon are built on the GTK toolkit but aren't forks of Gnome, similar to xfce.
jz9yu616 6y ago
I wish they had a KDE version of Pop. Also, all we don't need is another fork. The biggest problem with open source is that there are so many forks that there's no focus on polishing what we already have. https://itsfoss.com/desktop-linux-torvalds/ https://itsfoss.com/desktop-linux-torvalds/
kstenerud 6y ago
The contrast is too low :( If they took a design cue from https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/ it could be good.
- bschwindHN 6y ago
  Hilarious because that site has some sort of shitty scrolling mechanism which prevents me from reading it.
p1necone 6y ago
Those transition animations in the mockup are way too long, I hope that's tweakable (or just faster) in the final release.
aero-glide2 6y ago
More fragmentation. Why isn't this just directly implemented in gnome
- gowld 6y ago
  Because GNOME refuses to collaborate with anyone.
paride5745 6y ago
I wish they would just use elementaryOS, instead of having yet another soft-fork of GNOME 3.
codewiz 6y ago
Is this yet another GNOME3 fork? Please don't contribute to the fragmentation of the Linux desktop, seriously. I'm primarily a KDE user, but I'd rather see all distros ship vanilla GNOME than the inconsistent mess we have today. Every time I help a new Linux user, I find that they're using a desktop I have never seen before, and I don't know how to help them setup Japanese input or HiDPI support without switching the entire desktop. I recently previewed GNOME40, and it's great: finally, virtual desktops and the "dock" behave similarly to any other OS, and animations are as smooth as macOS. Also, Wayland now works so well that you won't even notice you're using it. Even Canonical has figured out how to work with upstream to resolve their usability and performance concerns. Why can't System76 engineers do the same?
- codewiz 6y ago
  I found the source code: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic It's just an extension for gnome-shell 3.38. So not a fork, but it might still delay them in upgrading to GNOME40.
hatsunearu 6y ago
Another day, another fork of Gnome 3. Even the freaking mockup looks like Gnome 3.
KirillPanov 6y ago
> Pop!_OS Wow, I used to get annoyed when product names included the plus symbol, because it made them hard to grep for and unreliable to web-search for. This just takes it to a whole new level.
cortexio 6y ago
Man, i really wonder why linux desktop environments have to suck so hard (gachibass). They are all so slugish and just ugly, clunky and bad design. I had to try so many until i had something close to something workable. I ended up with xfce, but had to disable compositor and install compton as a replacement. Just all that, for just a plain desktop environment that feels snappy. But the design is still shit though. As for gnome3.. i cant remember, but i think it was slow as well, and im mainly talking about alt-tab. if an alt-tab takes more than 5ms, it's trash. Like, windows 7 & 10 are the only ones who did it correctly in my opinion.. but yeah it's windows >_< still, baffles me that such a low standard cant be reached by almost ALL linux distros.
29athrowaway 6y ago
It's not a desktop environment, they are extensions for the gnome shell. If you look at the source of gnome shell extensions and themes you'll find that they use JavaScript and CSS. If you spend enough effort you can make gnome look completely different.
macco 6y ago
The way System76 is innovating is really great. In my opinion they are the only hardware company that has a good Linux strategy and the resources to implement it. Now the last piece is getting big enough to develop custom bare-bones for their laptops. I hope they can pull that off.
eecc 6y ago
I wouldn’t mind trying it, but does System 76 support dual boot with Microsoft Secure Boot? I’m also curious if it can include pinch-to-zoom; I’m old enough to find it a must-have.
ximm 6y ago
What I find interesting: 345 comments on this page and "cosmic" is mentioned twice. Apparently no one is really interested.
mikl 6y ago
I’m sure another new desktop environment will be the key to ensure this’ll finally be the year of desktop Linux. The amount of fragmentation in Linux desktop environments, window managers, etc. is amazing.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  The fragmentation is one thing, but it's the way each variation is really just subtly different from several other variations that exemplifies what Linux has become. This is supposed to be the OS of composability, why are DEs so inflexible that you need so many bespoke variations?
milkrocks 6y ago
Why are the tops of each window so big and empty, what a waste of space.
st3ve445678 6y ago
This looks really great. Pop OS is the one Linux that is almost perfect out of the box for me. But I always install Plank for my dock. I also like the Super key launcher change, that is basically how I use it anyway. Good stuff.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  I was using it it and loving it for about 6 months. Then I did an upgrade and it broke the install. Major PITA. Went back to Ubuntu. It's unfortunate, and may have been fluke, but it degrades "trust".
Blaiz0r 6y ago
Nice article, I think it's interesting using Gnome as the foundation for a more customised DE, POP OS has brought some really nice features. As an aside, I really like these UI/UX videos, can anyone shed any light on how they are made?
green7ea 6y ago
I would love to buy a 14" system76 laptop if it had a nice 'lenovo' like keyboard. The only AMD laptop they have has a numpad which off centers the keyboard which is a deal breaker :-(. I would also miss the trackpoint
qshaman 6y ago
I just hope they offered another theme , i dont think the current one is very aesthetically pleasing, i love their vision as a company , I just dont like their laptops really, I bought a gazelle a few years back , i loved the unboxing experience and the very good support but it just feels cheap , the keyboard isn’t great either, and is pretty noisy . Seems like all linux laptop manufacturers are using similar chasis ? I want to support them , they are doing important work , but their laptops are not competitive for the price, you can install linux on a xps or a thinkpad, and get a better quality device for a lower price.
- moistbar 6y ago
  > Seems like all linux laptop manufacturers are using similar chasis ? As I understand it, most Linux laptop manufacturers will gently modify a standard Clevo machine so it works a little better with Linux and leave it at that.
manuel_w 6y ago
How does Debian GNU/Linux run on System76 devices? Can anyone comment on that?

Why another WM to further divide up dev time for desktop environments. I'm not say people shouldn't make what they want, but I think they'd meet their goals a lot easier contributing to an existing project instead of forking.

Lobosque 6y ago
Forks may also contribute upstream
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
I'm still using unity because it was the last usable polished out of the box usable DE for me. I'm glad they try to do this, the linux desktop needs a contender to the too rich kde and too limited gnome, but with a modern touch.
rvz 6y ago
That's the Linux desktop ecosystem. Another window manager that some users will use and will later complain that their browser isn't working with it or it crashes with etc Wayland, X11, Yet another Linux app or even Z shell, etc. Sometimes it's only 'fun' swapping in alternatives of alternative system components, until you actually need to get work done. Then it must not get in the way of the user. I prefer the desktop environment of 'It just works' and 'If it ain't broke don't fix it'. It's called macOS.
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  You are basically teabagging. There is a lot of awesome people in the Free Desktop community, who work hard for what they believe in. Criticism is always welcome, there is a lot of work to do and a lot of stuff to improve. But having people who use a different OS come in and ridicule all of that work is not really nice. I've been happily using the treaded GNOME without filepicker thumbnails for 10 years now and I'm neither less productive not less happy than you. Enjoy your Mac! OSX has a lot of great inspirations for the Free Desktop.
  - sk1pper 6y ago
    Not parent commenter but I've had the same experience - and I'm sure this comment will be received just as poorly as theirs, but I've given up on Linux desktop. It just isn't stable. I've tried so many times and I don't know what 1) is wrong with me or 2) the "I'm just as productive on Linux" people are smoking. Just getting basic stuff to work like bluetooth is a hassle. Headphones stuck in headset mode, let's go drop an argument to the bluetooth kernel module to enable autoswitching to A2DP. Touchpad driver for my machine kinda sucks, click and drag is still a little broken. Screen tearing watching YouTube videos on Firefox. Oh and it randomly freezes requiring a hard restart. Good luck upgrading packages, you never know what will randomly break. Extra good luck upgrading to the next LTS release, your machine might not boot when you go to restart. I've been wanting to love Linux desktop for 10+ years and I just give up. I don't have time for this stuff anymore. And I'm not using esoteric distros. Ubuntu LTS, I also tried Fedora and it was even worse. Sorry, but none of this happens to me on macOS or Windows. They're not perfect - of course crash, have certain quirks, etc, but they waste much less of my time on basic desktop functionality being unstable or needing special treatment.
    - turbinerneiter 6y ago
      That's ok. My experience is much better and I don't know why there is a difference either. I just don't get why people love to dunk so hard on something they don't use and do it in such a disrespectful way. What you said is totally fine, altough I could argue that you thinking I smoke is an insult, I mean it was one time, come on, I didn't even inhale.
    - type0 6y ago
      A lot of complaints sounds to be hardware specific, so there's really no cure for it than filing the bugs. > Ubuntu LTS, I also tried Fedora and it was even worse. The firmware for a lot of hardware has been lacking for years and sometimes can bug down after upgrades. And we shouldn't even speak about the proprietary buggy-man that terrorizes a lot of linux users trying to get their hardware to work, that is called NVidia. If you would have waited upgrading for a few weeks after a new release becomes available things are often fixed. You need to understand is that it's community effort and filing bugs is also very important.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Not in Big Sur it doesn’t. They dramatically changed the appearance for the worse. Tons more wasted space. They broke long-standing keyboard shortcuts. The move to iOS-ify MacOS with Catalyst just doesn’t work. Messages on Big Sur is effectively non-functional. I have a chat with a friend that breaks the message entry box reliably. If he sends me a message I have to create a new message to him to get the input box. It’s janky crap. Personally I’m excited by a hardware company selling a fully integrated Linux machine and taking an interest in making a working OS. This could finally get me free of Apple’s misguided antics.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  > I prefer the desktop environment of 'It just works' and 'If it ain't broke don't fix it'. It's called macOS. Pffft. No it's called XFCE. My Macs are broken way more often by updates and are way less compatible with my hardware than anything else in my house. They really don't just work... They're dead ass not even half as stable as Manjaro.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  That's your preference. But I would certainly be fuming if the only option on Linux was, say, GNOME. The workflow doesn't agree with me and neither do some of their UI choices. Thankfully, the "Linux desktop ecosystem" has afforded me a number of options that I much enjoy using.
polyamid23 6y ago
It's a gnome extension.

kactus 6y ago

Wonder if the file picker will have image thumbnails.

k_bx 6y ago
My favourite “UX bug” is when Discord wants to upgrade, it downloads a newer deb, you open it in App Store, and it only shows the “delete” button. Wonder if it’ll ever be fixed.
- nix23 6y ago
  Yeah the AppStore is a joke...the search especially, thats one big point where devs don't eat their dogfood, i bet that 99.9% of Gnome-devs never try'd "AppStore" (so much for linux desktop year), but a working thing like synaptic is probably too complicated for "normal" Linux-Users (do they even exist?)...just give them a Store (that does not work)...thanks gnome.
- iudqnolq 6y ago
  I wish my discord did that... it just errors after timing out trying to connect to their update server. Sometimes force killing helps, sometimes trying the next day does. Once it connects the rest is all automatic though.
superkuh 6y ago
Unless they also fork Gtk3 and Gtk4 the GNOME will still seep in and ruin the desktop. Things like gtkfilechooserwidget are terribly broken in gtk3 and gtk4 but at least gtk4 finally got a patch that allows you to paste into a file->open window without it error'ing out. But gtk4 is still firmly in the "no text entry window for you" in file chooser menus by default. Also, I looked at the github repo for cosmic under pop!_os's stuff and there's no actual code. It's all boilerplate with a single gsettings schema .xml file. There's no DE in that repo.
mushufasa 6y ago
current pop_os has image 'previews' in a sidebar as you select images, which isn't the same as a thumbnail but accomplishes much the same purpose

tekromancr 6y ago

Things System 76 does: maintain their own os distro, desktop environment, coreboot fork, system firmware Things System 76 refuses to do: usbc PD I say this as a very happy S76 customer

justaguy88 6y ago
Firmware/bios/uefi/coreboot seems like a reasonable thing for a hardware company to spend energy on
foxhop 6y ago
I love USBC power. Is there a good reason?
- llcoolv 6y ago
  There of course is - you don't write a perfectly useless kernel patch - you ain't coolandfun andthatsit.
  - foxhop 6y ago
    I don't follow, does USBC power distribution not exist in the Linux kernel?
- zoward 6y ago
  A lot of Lenovo laptops have one USB-C port which doubles as the power cable. I'm typing on a Thinkpad right now with that very configuration. My daughter's Chrmoebook is the same way. She bent the USB-C port on it and now it won't charge. I'm being really, really careful with my Thinkpad.
- isantop 6y ago
  The laptop mentioned requires a 200W charger (dedicated GPU, high-end CPU). This is double what the USB PD specs allow.
- wging 6y ago
  They actually do have USB-C power in many models.

themodelplumber 6y ago

Way to go, it's nice to see the innovation. System76 seems like a company that is paying attention to what their customers want, creating something useful and unique out of various well-considered parts.

supernovae 6y ago

This looks exactly like Windows 10x...

Already__Taken 6y ago
quite the compliment

qihqi 6y ago

Does it has thumbnail in filepicker?

justaguy88 6y ago

What's their strategy here? Do they hope that their window manager will drive hardware sales?

O_H_E 6y ago
Well, their additions to Gnome in PopOS have been very well received. So..maybe. The "power user" space (especially the non-cli oriented one) is really lacking out-of-the-box solutions rn. It wouldn't be the first time tailored software drove hardware sales.
- dagenleg 6y ago
  I am genuinely wondering how big is the intersection between "non-cli users" and "power users" on Linux
  - erinnh 6y ago
    Considering this is a tiling window manager, rather high Id say. Im a power user, so to say, and Ive been using pop shell for about 6-9 months now. I love not having to write my own scripts to do the most basic tasks in sway anymore. Things like my calendar works throughout the desktop without me having to wrangle various things.
    - type0 6y ago
      > I love not having to write my own scripts to do the most basic tasks in sway anymore. Speaking of it there's now Sway edition of Manjaro and it looks very good
mulmen 6y ago
Yes? The lack of a workable window manager is one of the biggest things that prevents me from using a Linux laptop as a daily driver. It makes sense that System76 would work toward a serviceable Linux desktop OS. For the same reason it makes sense that Apple develops MacOS but charges no license fees.

IceWreck 6y ago

So they're making a gnome extension and branding it as a DE

sodality2 6y ago
It is "GNOME-based desktop environment" making it sound like there are other changes as well.
dsego 6y ago
If I'm not mistaken, Ubuntu's Unity was a compiz plugin. It's a very sad state of affairs in linux desktop.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

When Ubuntu dropped the hammer on Gnome2, I saw Unity desktop and was kinda... ewwww. And next I have installed Gnome 3. After 15 minutes with it I decided that Unity is actually not that bad, so I switched to it. In the following years Unity kinda grew on me, so I'm sad that it was axed and now everyone use this Gnome3 abomination. It is not as bad as it was five years before, but loss of top menu and general preference for biggins buttons instead of drop-down menus is a bad idea for desktop computers. I wish someone would fix Gnome3 by making it look back like Unity .

znpy 6y ago
I have found peace of mind using XFCE :)
silon42 6y ago
A someone that prefers Gnome2 and KDE... Gnome3 and Unity are both ewwww...
- pmontra 6y ago
  I'm using a dozen extensions to make Gnome 3 behave like Gnome 2 as much as I can. No animations, no menu on top, no top bar, task bar at the bottom, no dock, no activities, one virtual desktop per project. That was impossible with Unity.
  - nikodunk 6y ago
    Why don’t you use Gnome Classic out of curiosity?
    - pmontra 6y ago
      I did use Gnome Fallback (Flashback?) until Gnome Shell had all the extensikns I needed and got rid of some bugs. Gnome Fallback was almost abandonware by the time I switched. It started to develop new glitches as the world around it moved on. Is Gnome Classic the other option I have at login on Ubjntu 20.04? I gave it a try one year ago. Either it didn't work or wasn't the desktop I was looking for. I prefer my custom desktop. Of course nobody can develop one system that suits the tastes of every single person. The important thing to do is to leave enough freedom to make people customize their systems.

llcoolv 6y ago

I think that those "Let's make our own DE" dumb kids are both a symptom and a cause why Linux never broke on the mainstream workstation market. Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X. Why waste all the time on such a massive amount of extremely useless work? Just because it is fun? And yeah, you can downvote this into oblivion, I don't care. The fact is that 80% of the comments on this thread are making fun of the very same retards for the very same reasons.

marcodiego 6y ago
>Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X In terms of appearance, maybe. Make that work consistently with most used programs with the same shortcuts, composition, behavior and rich integration between all these apps and then we're talking. Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast demands many people thinking, designing, implementing, testing and fixing. It is very expensive and only affordable for companies that can make enough money with to return the investment. Linux has no presence on the desktop because vendors that make the most money with it have 0 presence on the desktop.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  Additionally, out-of-the-box functionality matters a lot. DEs like XFCE have insane tweakability, but outside of a handful of settings most users don't take advantage of that. The majority of Windows and macOS users don't spend hours tweaking their setup to perfection, they just install Chrome and Spotify and maybe vertically orient their taskbar/dock if they're feeling spicy and it's off to the races. And moving the needle on the out of the box usability front often requires changes that can't be made by changing the default configuration or becoming a contributor to an existing DE. The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive.
  - smoldesu 6y ago
    >The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive. That's kinda the point of PopOS in the first place: retrofitting GNOME and Ubuntu with extra utilities for a better "out of the box" experience. Manjaro does basically the same thing on the Arch side of the fence, and both are essential to providing that experience you're describing. The GNOME team isn't intentionally holding back features or making intentionally bad choices here, they're just part of the brick in the wall. The GNOME desktop should be bland, so that the distro can provide a default and the end user can make changes where necessary. It's all part of one big machine.

loloquwowndueo 6y ago

First thing that came to mind is “why are they basing this on Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish” - slightly confusing name :)

varispeed 6y ago

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching their talk with Louis Rossman I really like this company. Hopefully one day they'll have a product that will match my needs. The link to the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGle6z9KfZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGle6z9KfZQ

kaibee 6y ago
Drop the 4K IPS for a 2560x1440 panel instead.
- varispeed 6y ago
  I wouldn't say no to that if other specs matched.
- bmurphy1976 6y ago
  My aging eyesight says no. 4k or bust for me.
  - rubyist5eva 6y ago
    at 14" is the difference even distinguishable? I can barely tell the difference between 1080p and retina on screens that small
    - bmurphy1976 6y ago
      It's complicated. For me it's about how smooth the text is and how consistent the experience is. 4k with 2x (integer scaling) is a pleasant balance of crisp rendering and appropriate text size. The lower resolutions would require non-integer scaling and so far my experience doing that in Linux environments has been very poor. I don't expect this to be a smooth experience any time in the near future. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

ohazi 6y ago

I've been hearing a surprising amount of positive feedback from people who have tried the current Gnome based DE on Pop OS. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard that they have some sort of tiling / snapping that works well. I'd like to try it, but I'm heavily invested in upstream Debian and am not really interested in installing another Debian derivative. Are there plans to package this up? I'm currently using XFCE on two computers with key bindings for snap left/right and snap top-left/top-right/bottom-left/bottom-right. On a big display, this setup is excellent. On a laptop it works, but often feels a little cramped, and it's particularly painful with a laptop trackpad instead of a mouse. It would be nice if there was an option to split ~67%/33%... apparently Windows(!) can do that. I've also been playing with i3 on another laptop, and for a lot of things the experience is clearly better (e.g. web browsing on a laptop without a mouse), but for others (e.g. kicad) it either doesn't work well, or I haven't managed to configure it well enough yet. The rabbit hole is infinitely deep, and while I enjoy tinkering with it every now and then, I'm probably not going to use it as a daily driver anytime soon.

qbasic_forever 6y ago
It's just a set of about 3 gnome extensions, at least on Pop OS 20.10 right now. So in theory you just need to install the gnome extensions and you're good: https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell I've been using it for a year and love it--typing this reply in a browser window tiled next to a terminal. It's easy to add little exceptions too for modal apps you want to hover outside the tiling.
ChefboyOG 6y ago
I'm using it on a Surface Pro 3 that runs Pop OS and have nothing but positives to report. Additionally, it's by far the best tablet experience I've had not just on Linux, but period.
- marmaduke 6y ago
  do you have any issues with sleep/suspend on the surface? I have a sp4 and had such issues even with Windows for the longest time.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

schmorptron 6y ago

Fork & maintain unity, pretty please? :)

snicker7 6y ago

"Keyboard" or "Mouse" driven? What about trackpad? I would love some gestures to quickly switch windows and workspaces.

qbasic_forever 6y ago
Gnome 3 has gesture support. I don't think many are built in, certainly not as many as mac OS gives you out of the box. But you can go wild: https://github.com/mpiannucci/gnome-shell-extended-gestures https://github.com/mpiannucci/gnome-shell-extended-gestures
- ufo 6y ago
  GNOME 40 (just released) is also adding a some new three-finger gestures for workspace switching.
  - snicker7 6y ago
    That's great! I mean, its ten years too late. But still!
s3tz 6y ago
Yeah, I think for me it's almost entirely the trackpad that's the dealbreaker still. There isn't a single laptop that I can use linux on where the trackpad just doesnt suck. I'll tolerate the noise and the subpar display, even the speakers can suck, but the trackpad should be at least 80% of the way of what a macbook has.

axaxs 6y ago

Nice to see! And glad they are...gasp...listening to people. The Gnome devs could learn a lot from that approach. The most popular distros all include a dock. And yet with Gnome 40, they not only refused to add a dock, they moved what gimped dock they had to the bottom of the screen. But you can't see it until you hit the top left corner. I wish I was making that up. (keyboard shortcuts aside, in fairness) Rant aside, I'll definitely give it this a go. PopOS is a really nice distro.

toomanyducks 6y ago
To be pedantic, you can see the dash/dock when you hit the super key, I don't believe anyone actually uses the hot corner. Also to be pedantic, there are plenty of desktops that don't use a dock, in the form of most window managers. I'm currently running opnebox with no dock and it's totally fine, though the approach is better suited to tiling window managers.
- s3tz 6y ago
  It's a completely unnecessary extra action the completely breaks your flow.
  - JeremyNT 6y ago
    I'm a GNOME user and almost never use its dock directly. I have my typical programs added as favorites on the dock and switch to them directly via keyboard with meta + 1 through meta + 9. Seldom used applications don't make that cut, but they're... seldom used. I tend to switch to them using alt-tab rather than clicking through on the dock. In general, I prefer using the keyboard, so I have never once wished that a dock was more prominent in GNOME. I'm glad it stays out of my way until I explicitly summon it with a keypress.
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 6y ago
    The power of window managers. Use whatever floats your boat. I love i3wm too much and its the exact reason I love Linux
- 6y ago

rubyist5eva 6y ago

Is this built as a Gnome Shell Extension? Would love to be able to just pop this into my shell on OpenSuse without having to change to an Ubuntu based distribution. Also, what are they going to do once nobody is supporting Gnome 3.38 anymore, porting this to Gnome 40+ seems like it's going to be a pain in the ass. Hopefully it doesn't necessitate a Gnome Shell fork...

eudes_ochoa 6y ago
I don't know if the thing they're announcing here is just an extension, but the features mentioned in the article all come included in the pop shell gnome extension. https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell

kodah 6y ago

I never regret being a PopOS user. This DE is almost exactly what I have running today, which is compelling.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

I wish Ubuntu would maintain a gnome3+ fork like that, with top menu and reasonable file picker, or partner-up with System76. Not because I can't use another distro, but because I think a well-tested default target desktop distro is important and helping the community. I'm still on Ubuntu 20.04 because I need third-party based stuff to run, such as Chromium and Electron-based apps such as Skype and Teams (which however doesn't actually work). But gnome3 simply sucks so I'll have to move to something else; maybe Kubuntu or even Unity again (the community fork).

superkuh 6y ago
File picker loss of functionality is the fault of Gtk3 and Gtk4. It would still apply even in systems without GNOME at all. Maintaing a fork of Gtk3 and 4 with patches to restore 2010 era functionality would be difficult but not infeasible. Arch does some of it. I've looked at the code and it is quite a terrible mess. It's no two line patch to change settings anymore because everything gets reset multiple times in functions you don't expect.
- heftig 6y ago
  What is Arch doing?
  - superkuh 6y ago
    https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gtk3-classic/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gtk3-classic/ is a partial fix, but it still doesn't restore the filename-entry location bar.
HorkHunter 6y ago
KDE really is the unsung hero of the Linux community
- smetj 6y ago
  Couldn't agree more.

still_grokking 6y ago

I of course appreciate the effort but besides "a big Gnome extension" I don't see much that could be called a new desktop environment. Also the planed features read a little bit funny to me, to be honest, as that are all things KDE Plasma provides out-of-the-box. But clearly looks like an improvement over vanilla Gnome, that's sure!

fnl 6y ago

I've recently switched from my usual MBP upgrade to System 76 (Oryx Pro). While yes, Apple's walled garden does feel like a Rolls Royce compared to anything, the price tag difference this time was just way too step for me to keep buying a new Mac: It was basically 2x or more for roughly similar hardware, if not slightly worse on the MBP side. Overall, using Pop_OS! with its specialized GNOME3 setup has been a bliss, and I must say I had expected a far more difficult migration. In a few days I was happily up and running with my new machine. And then, there is the support - Apple's support outside of visiting a Genius Bar is basically non-existent. System76 has diligently helped me even set up external hardware that wasn't theirs! Long story short, very much looking forward to COSMIC and continuing this experience. The only thing I do miss a lot is my iTerm2... :)

skrtskrt 6y ago
iTerm2 is a beauty, is there a closest equivalent on Linux? There seem to be 25 popular choices especially now with the GPU-accelerated ones. Tried a few of the classics like Termite and they all seemed painfully outdated and crappy compared to iTerm.
- mxschumacher 6y ago
  I use iterm at work and a combination of alacritty, fish and i3-wm (so I don't open multiple tabs but just several terminal windows) on my personal machine, I'm really happy with that setup.
- joelthelion 6y ago
  Gnome terminal is really good.
  - skrtskrt 6y ago
    On Pop OS I just stuck with gnome-terminal, it was plenty good if not quite as slick as iterm2.
    - instb3at 6y ago

symlinkk 6y ago

What a waste of time. Just use vanilla GNOME.

einpoklum 6y ago

I was willing suspend my incredulity of the merit of yet another desktop environment. ... but they lost me at "GNOME-based". [extends hands and head upwards:] Why, ye gods, why?

young_unixer 6y ago

I was really hoping for a traditional, Windows-like environment but with professional modern design. Like XFCE or KDE, but beautiful.

tored 6y ago
Yes, me too. System76 has done great work with Pop!_OS and pushing Linux as a true laptop OS, however their default theme and wallpaper always make me nauseous, something I feel a color blind would put together. Beautiful is not something I associate with Pop!_OS and System76. Weird thing is that Linux as a server has made great progress the last decade, but it seems that the Linux desktop has evolved backwards. It started sometime around the introduction of Gnome 3.
dartharva 6y ago
Mint already did that with Cinnamon

nix23 6y ago

Oh no not another one....well i have i3 and change ~maybe later to sway.

abbaselmas 6y ago

System76 blog is on tumblr! I thought that tumblr was dead.

asidiali 6y ago
This was my biggest takeaway also, why Tumblr...
- fullstop 6y ago
  They also have a Telegram channel!

amanzi 6y ago

Great to see a dock properly integrated into the settings app. The first thing I do in Pop_OS is track down and install the dash to dock extension and fiddle with the settings until it's sitting on the right-hand side of my screen just like God intended.

zydeco 6y ago

Will it have a spatial file manager?

RosanaAnaDana 6y ago

Currently using System76 with Pop_OS! as my daily driver. Love it. No regrats.

yepthatsreality 6y ago

Oof why does this blog hijack my browser history? Gnome additions are welcome as Gnome stupidly strips features to try to tell people how to use a computer.

least 6y ago

The improvements and changes System76 have added to base Gnome are really great. I particularly like the many different keyboard driven ways to manipulate windows and even enforce tiling on top of Gnome, rather than having to run i3, bspwm, or some other dedicated tiling window manager.

kharann 6y ago

Looks great! When I introduce people to Linux I usually start them off with PopOS!, or KDE I really think it's a great DE. I would probably use it if I wasn't heavily invested into window managers

sdwvit 6y ago

I would love to contribute to this somehow. S76 are amazing.

hardwaresofton 6y ago

Just checking in to say I'm loving my Oryx Pro ~1 year later. It's been a fantastic system (I wrote about it when I first got it[0]), and although I use it more as a desktop (it sits on my desktop attached to two monitors with the lid closed) it has been a workhorse for me. The software and drivers also work fantastically, and are open source -- I've even contributed a line or two. BTW I use arch :). But I mention that to say it works great on Arch too. System76 may have actually bring about the era of the linux-first desktop/laptop, and I'm glad I bought it instead of a Lenovo. [EDIT] whoa the post is from 2019, it's been like 1.5+ years. Time flies. [0]: https://www.vadosware.io/post/starting-my-journey-with-the-system76-oryx-pro-and-arch/ https://www.vadosware.io/post/starting-my-journey-with-the-s...

shmerl 6y ago

I still prefer KDE Plasma.

stratigos 6y ago

System76 makes decent laptops that run linux really well. Ive had zero of the notorious firmware issues of trying to linux-on-laptop. As a software developer, I wouldnt ever use Pop_OS again. Vanilla Ubuntu is way better, and less complex, and has way better support. All I recall from Pop_OS related issues, on System76's behalf, are tumbleweeds. Oh and Ive had 4 of their laptops, used primarily for software development, since 2016. For a physical machine, its been a great experience, albeit slightly too expensive (and for that reason Im not buying them anymore). At a software level, I am forever disinterested in whatever it is theyre offering. Even the marketing language describing this "Cosmic" thing is has hard to parse and understand as my experience with Pop_OS.

supernintendo 6y ago

Does anyone run System76 hardware with a distro other than Pop!_OS and if so, how's it working out for you? I love what the company is doing and will probably consider a System76 laptop in the future (once they move away from Clevo to custom designs), but I'm pretty attached to my Linux environment of choice. Arch Linux and KDE Plasma have been very good to me for years and the idea of moving to an apt + GNOME-based system doesn't quite appeal to me. That said, the tiling window management features here look really nice and I'd love to see something similar for Plasma (KWin scripts work fine but have always felt just a bit jank in my experience).

deadbunny 6y ago
You can replace Kwin with a WM of your choice.

itsjloh 6y ago

I really like Pop!_OS' tiling feature but the one thing that really bugs me is you can't disable windows always raising on hover. You're meant to be able to tweak it using Gnome Tweaks however disabling the option and enabling tiling means flinging your mousing anywhere causes all the windows in its track to raise to the front. If you've got a floating window it just disappears behind the stack. Theres an open issue[1] but it hasn't been solved yet. [1]: https://github.com/pop-os/shell/issues/627 https://github.com/pop-os/shell/issues/627

jerrac 6y ago

Makes me wonder how usability studies are run. I should look into that sometime. In my case, I've never liked the OSX style dock, and I use the super key to switch windows all the time. So the two biggest features I pulled out of that article are actually things I'll have to turn off. Oh, and I used to love the hot corner, but it didn't work so well when I had multiple monitors on both sides of my main monitor. So I got used to just hitting super.

jbeard4 6y ago

I recently upgraded from a 10 year old Lenovo W520 to a System76 Lemur Pro, and have been extremely pleased with the purchase. It is lightweight (~2 lbs); software is fast, responsive, and free of bloat; chassis feels robust; specs are above average for the ultra book category (40GB RAM and 2 NVMe drives); good battery life (around 6 hours real world use); and good online documentation. Overall, I would highly recommend, and I am excited to see what direction they continue to go in as a company.

hparadiz 6y ago

I hope the Super key is configurable cause I use it for Cut/Copy/Paste and all my hotkeys basically.

Apofis 6y ago

A lot of great usability improvements from MacOS! Great news. Looks like the Ubuntu Unity separation will be less painful... Gnome isn't that great to use without a lot of customization. System76 is more than just a laptop, PopOS! is great. It's also nice to have CoreBoot and a discreet Nvidia RTX GPU. With PopOS they have figured-out scaling with various monitors... I have an external ultrawide that's not even 2k and it works great with the laptop's built-in 4k with proper scaling on both (not easy to do)... a regular 1080p external also works great. Finally, I think I configured the most expensive workstation in my life with these guys, north of $80k.

Shadonototro 6y ago

gnome is the problem, they should have used a different base.. linux as a desktop died because the majority went with gnome

alexeiz 6y ago

So far it looks like their PopShell extension with a dock. I already have a very similar setup with "Dash to Dock".

xbar 6y ago

Love what you're doing in software. System76 will be my next computer, too.

dartharva 6y ago

Honest question, why is it that whenever any party tries making a new DE/WM it always turns out to be a GNOME derivative? Unity, Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon, MATE.. and now COSMIC. Why not choose something else like KDE or XFCE to fork?

jayp1418 6y ago
Because mostly KDE and XFCE are very customisable with few configuration files doesn't require creating whole new DE
- regularfry 6y ago
  The other way of looking at it is that Gnome is rampantly opinionated, and if you disagree, a fork might be your best option far more often than it is with other desktop environments.
Hasnep 6y ago
Budgie and Pantheon are built on the GTK toolkit but aren't forks of Gnome, similar to xfce.

jz9yu616 6y ago

I wish they had a KDE version of Pop. Also, all we don't need is another fork. The biggest problem with open source is that there are so many forks that there's no focus on polishing what we already have. https://itsfoss.com/desktop-linux-torvalds/ https://itsfoss.com/desktop-linux-torvalds/

kstenerud 6y ago

The contrast is too low :( If they took a design cue from https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/ it could be good.

bschwindHN 6y ago
Hilarious because that site has some sort of shitty scrolling mechanism which prevents me from reading it.

p1necone 6y ago

Those transition animations in the mockup are way too long, I hope that's tweakable (or just faster) in the final release.

aero-glide2 6y ago

More fragmentation. Why isn't this just directly implemented in gnome

gowld 6y ago
Because GNOME refuses to collaborate with anyone.

paride5745 6y ago

I wish they would just use elementaryOS, instead of having yet another soft-fork of GNOME 3.

codewiz 6y ago

Is this yet another GNOME3 fork? Please don't contribute to the fragmentation of the Linux desktop, seriously. I'm primarily a KDE user, but I'd rather see all distros ship vanilla GNOME than the inconsistent mess we have today. Every time I help a new Linux user, I find that they're using a desktop I have never seen before, and I don't know how to help them setup Japanese input or HiDPI support without switching the entire desktop. I recently previewed GNOME40, and it's great: finally, virtual desktops and the "dock" behave similarly to any other OS, and animations are as smooth as macOS. Also, Wayland now works so well that you won't even notice you're using it. Even Canonical has figured out how to work with upstream to resolve their usability and performance concerns. Why can't System76 engineers do the same?

codewiz 6y ago
I found the source code: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic It's just an extension for gnome-shell 3.38. So not a fork, but it might still delay them in upgrading to GNOME40.

hatsunearu 6y ago

Another day, another fork of Gnome 3. Even the freaking mockup looks like Gnome 3.

KirillPanov 6y ago

> Pop!_OS Wow, I used to get annoyed when product names included the plus symbol, because it made them hard to grep for and unreliable to web-search for. This just takes it to a whole new level.

cortexio 6y ago

Man, i really wonder why linux desktop environments have to suck so hard (gachibass). They are all so slugish and just ugly, clunky and bad design. I had to try so many until i had something close to something workable. I ended up with xfce, but had to disable compositor and install compton as a replacement. Just all that, for just a plain desktop environment that feels snappy. But the design is still shit though. As for gnome3.. i cant remember, but i think it was slow as well, and im mainly talking about alt-tab. if an alt-tab takes more than 5ms, it's trash. Like, windows 7 & 10 are the only ones who did it correctly in my opinion.. but yeah it's windows >_< still, baffles me that such a low standard cant be reached by almost ALL linux distros.

29athrowaway 6y ago

It's not a desktop environment, they are extensions for the gnome shell. If you look at the source of gnome shell extensions and themes you'll find that they use JavaScript and CSS. If you spend enough effort you can make gnome look completely different.

macco 6y ago

The way System76 is innovating is really great. In my opinion they are the only hardware company that has a good Linux strategy and the resources to implement it. Now the last piece is getting big enough to develop custom bare-bones for their laptops. I hope they can pull that off.

eecc 6y ago

I wouldn’t mind trying it, but does System 76 support dual boot with Microsoft Secure Boot? I’m also curious if it can include pinch-to-zoom; I’m old enough to find it a must-have.

ximm 6y ago

What I find interesting: 345 comments on this page and "cosmic" is mentioned twice. Apparently no one is really interested.

mikl 6y ago

I’m sure another new desktop environment will be the key to ensure this’ll finally be the year of desktop Linux. The amount of fragmentation in Linux desktop environments, window managers, etc. is amazing.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
The fragmentation is one thing, but it's the way each variation is really just subtly different from several other variations that exemplifies what Linux has become. This is supposed to be the OS of composability, why are DEs so inflexible that you need so many bespoke variations?

milkrocks 6y ago

Why are the tops of each window so big and empty, what a waste of space.

st3ve445678 6y ago

This looks really great. Pop OS is the one Linux that is almost perfect out of the box for me. But I always install Plank for my dock. I also like the Super key launcher change, that is basically how I use it anyway. Good stuff.

itsoktocry 6y ago
I was using it it and loving it for about 6 months. Then I did an upgrade and it broke the install. Major PITA. Went back to Ubuntu. It's unfortunate, and may have been fluke, but it degrades "trust".

Blaiz0r 6y ago

Nice article, I think it's interesting using Gnome as the foundation for a more customised DE, POP OS has brought some really nice features. As an aside, I really like these UI/UX videos, can anyone shed any light on how they are made?

green7ea 6y ago

I would love to buy a 14" system76 laptop if it had a nice 'lenovo' like keyboard. The only AMD laptop they have has a numpad which off centers the keyboard which is a deal breaker :-(. I would also miss the trackpoint

qshaman 6y ago

I just hope they offered another theme , i dont think the current one is very aesthetically pleasing, i love their vision as a company , I just dont like their laptops really, I bought a gazelle a few years back , i loved the unboxing experience and the very good support but it just feels cheap , the keyboard isn’t great either, and is pretty noisy . Seems like all linux laptop manufacturers are using similar chasis ? I want to support them , they are doing important work , but their laptops are not competitive for the price, you can install linux on a xps or a thinkpad, and get a better quality device for a lower price.

moistbar 6y ago
> Seems like all linux laptop manufacturers are using similar chasis ? As I understand it, most Linux laptop manufacturers will gently modify a standard Clevo machine so it works a little better with Linux and leave it at that.

manuel_w 6y ago

How does Debian GNU/Linux run on System76 devices? Can anyone comment on that?