28 ms·

Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

505 points by Parseus 5y ago

flenserboy 5y ago
Better to adopt Budgie and move it over to Rust if that's really where they want to go.
- anthk 5y ago
  Solus OS' BOFH got tired of Gnome and he will switch the entire stack in to Enlightenment. And inb4 "E17 and such have Gaudy theming", last E has a flatish theme, so something like Arc for E would be really easy to implement. https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    Is it even remotely stable yet? Iirc it was all hanging off of a single process sometime back so if a single dock item died basically it hosed your entire desktop. I managed to get it started once or twice, as I was a huge fan of e16 but it just seemed… unusable really.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    This Enlightenment? https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened Definitly a good choice. /s Enlightenment was a nice window manager back in the mid-1990's, nowadays who cares if it still compiles.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Current E has nothing to do with E16. https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/ EFL has been supported by Samsung and Tizen, so I expect a full rewrite soon. They are doing really good changes now.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        If you bothered to read the linked article it goes about that great Samsung and Tizen support efforts in code quality. And lets be honest, who still cares about Tizen in 2022?
pleb_nz 5y ago
Subjective. But some very very round edges going on in that new UI.
dnautics 5y ago
I wanted to be able to move the applet bar to not the top of the screen, because I have two monitors and I like to spread vscode over two monitors -- top section for code, bottom section for console (for my purposes vscode console is, sadly, strictly better than the builtin linux console because it opportunistically makes IO output that references file:line clickable). I was able to do this in linux mint, but not in PopOS.
chungy 5y ago
"There’s no visible distinction between the window title bar and the body of the window." Strikes me as a bit amusing, as this was the case also in early versions of GNOME 3. I believe it was abandoned because non-GNOME apps (or more specifically, ones that didn't follow the GNOME HIG) had a visible distinction and greater consistency was desired. Changing GNOME's own look was the way to do so.
- Animats 5y ago
  Or between what's clickable and what isn't. (New dark pattern: popups which have an X box to dismiss them being harder to dismiss. First, the box around the X disappeared. Then, the X moves to different places in the box. (Bing does this for their house ads.) Then, the active portion of the X shrinks to make it harder to hit.)
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    None of that is handled by the window manager though, right?
    - Animats 5y ago
      No, that's web. But this new window manager seems designed to bring web-like behavior to the desktop.
  - chungy 5y ago
    Also in the earlier versions, the area you could click to move a window around was significantly larger. Down into the menu bar and toolbars. That pattern did get scaled back. A few GNOME apps still do it, but most only allow it on the title bar now.
71a54xd 5y ago
This is awesome! Very cool to see developer-first real modern desktop tooling being put together.
- ismayilzadan 5y ago
  Why do you think this is a developer first desktop?
  - JaggedJax 5y ago
    System76 very much advertises Pop as an OS for engineers and developers: https://pop.system76.com/ https://pop.system76.com/
    - zepto 5y ago
      Apple advertises MacOS as an OS for engineers and developers.
NotVerstappen 5y ago
I think I would've tried Pop!_OS by now if not for the name - I know it is totally irrational, but having a ! in there really pisses me off.
- choward 5y ago
  Same here. I know naming things is hard but they went out of the way to make it extra terrible. Stick to letters and maybe numbers if you want the version in the name.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  It's not just you. I have trouble going near CockroachDB because of its name. It's absolutely unjustifiable from an engineering perspective, but the effect (for me, at least) is real.
  - rectang 5y ago
    My favorite example of reasonable name-inspired revulsion was an outfit called "Ink Competent Printers".
  - nonameiguess 5y ago
    I always took that to be a reference to "it's so robust, it'll survive nuclear winter," which is pretty cool if true. The last database standing after all other species die off.
    - dTal 5y ago
      Fun fact: the supposed extreme hardiness of cockroaches is something of a myth, and in particular they are not fond of cold (hence their affinity for human domiciles!) They should rename to TardigradeDB.
      - jakear 5y ago
        Their nuclear hardiness however has been experimentally validated [1], though flour beetles survived even better than cockroaches. Either way, both using CockroachDB and participating in this thread put cockroaches on my mind a lot more than I'd really prefer. +1 for TardigradeDB. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxCYQvGNoGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxCYQvGNoGY
anthk 5y ago
I don't like Rust, but between Gnome's JS abortion lagfest and Rust, please, use the second.
- brink 5y ago
  I don't get to meet people who dislike Rust very often. Why don't you like it?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - qsdf38100 5y ago
    my 2 cents: rust evangelists, the promises of the end of bugs, and how perfect the language is for any use case... that makes my BS detector go off. Everyone has to love Rust nowadays, it sounds like a cult or something. It makes me hate rust without even having tried it, which is dumb and sad.
    - kangalioo 5y ago
      Yep Whenever a new tool appears whose existence is justified by being "written in Rust" I cringe a little. I'm a happy Rust user, but I wish people would use the language to make cool stuff, not just spread the language for the sake of the language
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - gefhfffh 5y ago
      Don't be sad. You realizing that your emotions get in your way is already half of the solution. M
    - mmstick76 5y ago
      Every programming language that has ever existed has had evangelists. The tech field is littered with them. Whether that's people who play video games and fight over GPU brands and console brands; or people who fight over operating systems, languages, and frameworks.
shmerl 5y ago
GTK4? It seems like Rust based UI toolkit is still missing. I like the idea of using Rust for the DE, but personally I'd stick with KDE.
- billconan 5y ago
  ya, I wanted to ask the same question. there doesn't seem to be a mature gui lib for rust yet. what is this desktop based on?
  - adamnemecek 5y ago
    GTK4.
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  Yeah and they can get like infinite mindshare with it too.
  - shmerl 5y ago
    Right, but it's probably a huge project they don't want to maintain. They could limit the scope though. I.e. focus on Linux only from the start at least. But it's probably still a lot of work.
    - adamnemecek 5y ago
      ...and a desktop environment isn't? Building your own GUI toolkit isn't that bad esp. if you have a team. Cross-platform isn't that hard, windowing is like the only thing that comes to mind where there are some differences in behavior. Rendering would be done presumably using some cross-platform GPU API like Vulkan or wgpu.
      - shmerl 5y ago
        I agree, I think building GUI toolkit first is a better idea than building a new DE before you have a better foundation. Not sure what's their rush with DE then. They can improve KDE instead, until Rust based GUI toolkit is ready. Cross platform here is not easy, if you want that toolkit not to be ugly and have some kind of native look and feel.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anthropodie 5y ago
After unity, I tried couple of DEs but then forced myself to stay with Gnome because I wanted to stop endless tinkering and get work done. I tried it for half a year and then switched to Sway, a tiling window manager. Sway has little to no footprint. I have configured my system the way I like it. Now I do minor tweaks sometimes but nothing major. My entire configuration is in a single file! I am not going back to DEs ever.
- distantsounds 5y ago
  You don't need a tiling window manager to get everything in a single config file. Fluxbox has historically been great at this, while still being extremely light on resources.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Fluxbox + rox + roxlib (for Rox plugins/addons) make the ultimate DE. Everything else can be made into systray applets such as blueman or nm-applet. As for theming, Zukitre for Fluxbox + any modern theme for icons. Done. Fancy, modern yet featureful as back in the day.
- filmor 5y ago
  Sway is a window manager, not a DE. The right thing to compare it to is Mutter. I also use sway, but quite a few of my applications are from Gnome (like evince, nautilus, gnome-calendar, fractal...).
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Could you share your config? I also use sway but to me it seems like behind the statement "I have configured my system the way I like it" there is quite a lot of configuration. Also when saying "My entire configuration is in a single file", do you also include things that are normally configured in a DE settings app, like wifi, disk auto mounting, bluetooth connections, sound settings/volumes, display configurations, etc? I like (and use everyday) sway and I like using WM's as a part of puzzling together a system. I just don't think you are comparing apples to apples here.
gorjusborg 5y ago
skavi 5y ago
Looks like the Android 4.0 UI with a bit of neumorphism thrown in. I really don’t like it. I hope that’s not the style they end up with. The GTK window conveys the same information more clearly (and it looks better).
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Looks like it is already better than gnome settings. >The search also displays a list of all the settings that match the search criteria and not only where they’re located as GNOME Settings does, this makes it easier to change your settings without having to leave the section you currently are in. >the search bar is available at the top of the navigation view, this is problematic when inside nested menus as the user has to go back to the begining to access it, but in COSMIC it’s available everywhere in the app, no matter how deep inside a menu the user is.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Definitely. When I saw the new settings app my jaw hit the floor, I think GNOME's team is going to have a serious fire lit under their ass now that there's a new kid in town finessing their toolkit like a pro.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      Gnome team is busy killing their projects for so long, that they won't even notice.
  - addicted 5y ago
    Does that have anything to do with the DE though? Isn’t that a change that could have simply been made to the Gnome settings itself?
    - Shared404 5y ago
      It could, but hasn't been - and GNOME is hostile to users/devs doing such things so it probably never will.
diskzero 5y ago
Original Nautilus and early GNOME developer here. I am very out of touch with what is current, so excuse some possibly ignorant questions. How is this a Rust-based environment if it is based on GTK? I assume GTK is still essentially the C-based GTK we used with some improvements. Why is this called Rust-based? I’ll do some more research but would like to get some insight from more knowledgeable sources.
- Narishma 5y ago
  GTK is just a library, you can use it from any language it has bindings for.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    Understood. I have made significant contributions to GTK. My contributions possibly had memory leaks or memory corruption issues that will bring down the higher Rust layer. I am trying to understand the purpose of the Rust layer. It is fine with me if it is because Rust is interesting, but what is being presented doesn’t seem like a Rust desktop environment _to me_.
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      It's not 100% Rust but I think you would expect that GTK itself is fairly well tested - probably much better tested than any new app you write that uses it, so it is still worth it to write that app in Rust. And it has to be said that memory safety isn't Rust's only compelling feature. It also has a pretty great build system, a decent library ecosystem, a very strong type system which gives you an "if it compiles it works" experience surprisingly often, probably the best multithreading system, etc. etc.
    - Taywee 5y ago
      The big selling point of Rust in respect to these kinds of scenarios is that it's very often that a C or C++ library says things like "You must not call function CallAfterFoo before function Foo is called", or "Once you call DestroyObject, that object must not be used again", or "You must not call SomethingDangerous while a ResourceOwningObject exists", and so on and so on. In well-tested libraries like GTK, SQLite, Curl, and such, they are often quite robust just based on having been heavily developed and tested by many people over a very long time, and there are still ways that they can be misused and abused that are usually well-documented and warned against. A well-developed Rust wrapper actually makes it impossible to misuse one of these libraries from Rust, and therefore better enables a much smaller team of developers to write secure, robust applications. Rust can guarantee these documented restrictions at the type level and even make impossible many error conditions. So even though the UI is GTK, Rust still enables developers to write more robust applications with less fear. Personally, I find that GTK with Rust is a very pleasant experience. It's less about guaranteeing that the lower libraries have no bugs and more about preventing people from interacting with the libraries in dangerous or buggy ways.
trulyme 5y ago
Nice, exactly what Linux needs the most - another desktop environment! Sarcasm aside, it does look pretty good. But between indistinguishable window title bars and yet another settings app (wanna bet it will miss some config so users wil still need to run one of the others?), I think I'll pass. As far as I'm concerned this problem was solved ages ago, so I simply don't understand why the designers keep mucking with it. Maybe I'm just getting old. :-/
- azinman2 5y ago
  Gotta keep up with the latest Apple designs! :)
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I for one would be satisfied to miss the Big-Sur-ification boat...
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    When they keep up with MacOS circa 2004 I'll rejoice.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Nice, exactly what Linux needs the most - another desktop environment! One could argue that because no one desktop environment has taken over the Linux mindshare, we haven't invented the one yet, so people keep trying. It's not until something takes over the mindshare (like systemd did), we can all unity and start improving upon the same base.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    I'd argue that the battle over desktop environment supremacy leaves desktop Linux less compelling overall. There is so much choice that it's paralyzing and new users constantly second guess themselves. You have thousands of developers doing their own thing rather than working together to make mainstream choices like Gnome more viable.
lawl 5y ago
I honestly don't quite understand what System76s intentions with COSMIC are. To me it feels like a regression from the previous gnome and i've kicked their plugins to get a regular gnome back. It just... Doesn't do anything my custom openbox or i3 setups in the past didn't do (imo better). Nor is it better at being gnome than gnome. And now that i'm getting old and gotten used to stock gnome it just seems like it makes me change my workflow again for no good reason.
- mstipetic 5y ago
  Do you really not understand that most people don’t want to use custom i3 configs?
  - lawl 5y ago
    I do, as i said, i'm getting old and use stock gnome these days, because i don't want to maintain custom configs for everything anymore.
    - mkdirp 5y ago
      Right. And so Pop!_OS gives you a decent tiling window manager, with sane defaults, without having to spend hours on customising your configuration. What's more, the tiling they provide is an optional feature. You can enable and disable it at any time without messing with you config for hours.
      - lawl 5y ago
        If its good or not is a matter of taste in the end, but not the entire point. It also hijacked Super+L which was screen lock (like on windows). And then cosmic was even worse by changing the behavior of the super key completely. Both of these things broke my workflow for things i never asked for. I like pop and their polish compared to ubuntu [0]. I really hate it when software breaks my workflow. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28904171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28904171
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
I could not possibly care less what language you write the UI in. Write it in Brainfuck, I don't care. Just make the UX not suck and provide the functionality I need.
- coolso 5y ago
  At least when Brainfuck’s fans proselytize and mention the language as much as they possibly can, they’re being ironic and have a sense of humor about it. Humility and humor seems to be expressly forbidden in the Rust CoC, right next to not wearing a pronoun on your name tag.
tibbydudeza 5y ago
So what is the win for System76 here ???. They just make boutique computers computing against the like of Dell/Lenovo when it comes to Linux friendly computers. How many sales do they do per year to justify this direction
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  The win is that they’re no longer required to work around Gnome as Gnome’s vision is to minify the DE. This makes it difficult to develop a custom flavor if your base keeps removing features or making strongly opinionated UI decisions.
  - tibbydudeza 5y ago
    But why develop a desktop OS at all if your main focus is to sell computers unless you want to become like Apple and offer a bespoke hardware and OS experience ???. Google has done that with Chromebooks successfully but they focus on the educational market where the folks using them has very little choice in the matter.
benatkin 5y ago
I can see 2022 being another almost Year Of Linux on the Desktop. I wonder what dirty tricks big companies will pull, like Microsoft did when netbooks became a threat. (Searching around, I see a lot of people don't get it, they say that Year of Linux on the Desktop has happened. It hasn't yet and some think it never will.)
- thanatos519 5y ago
  It happened for me in 1994, and I think it's a case of "gradually, then all at once": Once Microsoft and Apple stop maintaining their software, people who still have computers and electricity will move to Linux.
  - benatkin 5y ago
    I hope so. The thing is that we have Chromebooks, which is the Linux Kernel on the Desktop (to me, doesn't satisfy the goal of Linux on the Desktop). So we need something so compelling that Google will also not be able to keep up. Or we need Chrome and/or Android to morph into something open enough to be considered Linux on the Desktop.
    - botdan 5y ago
      Modern Chromebook with their "Linux containers" are really, really close to being a wonderful developer experience with the same level of user accessibility, support, and refinement of any of the other "major" operating systems out there. I'm surprised Google hasn't capitalized on it further.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  They don't have to sabotage Linux, Linux developers and the community does that all by itself (unwittingly).
  - benatkin 5y ago
    I have your response covered under "some think it never will" :) I agree a lot of mistakes have been made but I'm not sure Linux developers/community will continue to make big enough mistakes to stop its momentum every time it gains some.
Underphil 5y ago
"...we’re all curious as to how this desktop will look like..." Is this an Americanism? My brain can't read this properly.
- innocentoldguy 5y ago
  No. It is a grammar error. I think they got that sentence mixed up with the one after it, which happens during editing sometimes.
  - Karsteski 5y ago
    Reads perfectly fine to me. Probably depends on the dialect(s) of English you're familiar with
- noahtallen 5y ago
  It’s a combination of “curious what this desktop will look like” and “curious as to how this desktop will look.” (Which could be simplified to “curious how this desktop will look.”) I’m not sure if it’s an Americanism as much as poor phrasing :)
- junon 5y ago
  The "like" here is strange, and I'd argue erroneous; remove it. Then the "as to", while correct, isn't an obvious construction. It's often paired with "curious" to help transition the sentence a bit, but it's wordy and unnecessary here. For the sake of reading, ignore it. Then it becomes: > we're all curious how this desktop will look The original text is probably written by someone who doesn't do a lot of writing, as it reads how someone might talk. I'm no expert by any means but I'm moderately aware of my own struggle with this exact problem, enough to see it in others' writing.
- topspin 5y ago
  There is a english.stackexchange.com question on this: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55672/is-it-what-it-looks-like-or-how-it-looks-like https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55672/is-it-what...
adamnemecek 5y ago
System76 should build a Rust GUI framework. I can't think of many other companies that are better positioned than them.
- mixedCase 5y ago
  Doesn't seem like there'd be any good reason to do it. Gtk4 has great low and high level bindings in the form of gtk-rs and relm.
  - adamnemecek 5y ago
    There's a very good reason. GTK never looks very good. Also it uses paradigms that are just not idiomatic in Rust.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Writing GTK4 apps sucks, at least in Rust. They removed so many idiomatic ways to build apps, and all you're left with is a shitty component system that forces you to write incomprehensible UI layout code instead of leaving it to JSON/XML languages that are much better suited to the process. In any case, gtk-rs's bindings after 9.0.0 are hardly usable, and require me to re-write entire apps just to get them to launch in the new and "improved" GTK4 wrapper, now with incredibly blurry text, compositor issues and broken stylesheets... sigh. I, for one, would love to see someone fork GTK3 for desktop purposes. GTK4's development has almost entirely been predicated by the GNOME team (despite how hard they deny it), and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many. After Pop_OS! was publically harassed by the GNOME team, I kinda expected them to take that project up. I can settle for a desktop fork all the same though.
    - mixedCase 5y ago
      Sounds like you want high level bindings, instead of gtk-rs. Have you tried relm4? > and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many Could you expand on that?
      - 5y ago
a-dub 5y ago
i always disliked gnome 3 because of the user interface (it seemed to be an amalgamation of all the bad things from os x or even macos), not because of the underlying language it's coded in.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I know a lot of people who despise GNOME 3 on the whole, but I'm willing to defend it for what it is. If you've ever used a touchscreen Linux device, it becomes a whole lot easier to appreciate what they did with the toolkit. GTK apps just... work on a touchscreen. No modifications or fancy-pants libraries required. They also work really well on desktop too, with nice plump interactive elements that make sense for the category of devices that it's targeting. It looks equally as spiffy at 200% scaling as it does at 100%, and it's snappy as all hell. I don't speak for everyone, but GTK3 is the unofficial "native" toolkit for Linux. QT isn't far behind (I've been using Plasma since GNOME 40 and it's a blast), but GTK3 just feels... right. Also licensing and custom stylesheets yadda yadda yadda.
  - _qbjt 5y ago
    I use GNOME + Wayland on desktop, with a few tweaks and extensions, and I'm totally willing to defend it. It's a lovely computing environment that just feels at home to me and I think it has a tasteful balance of modern and traditional UI patterns.
    - schmorptron 5y ago
      I'm loving gnome as well, especially since 40,but still can't help but imagine what unity would look like now had it continued development at canonical. One of my main gripes with gnome is the huge amount of wasted space in the top bar that would just be perfect for a global menu like unity had.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      That's fine, I'm not going to take that away from you since I've heard great things about Wayland with the proper hardware for it. As for GNOME, I don't think it's terrible, but it does definitely feel like a regression to me when compared with GNOME 3.3x or GNOME Classic. It's perfectly fine to like it (computer UIs are still opinionated after all), but I feel like their leadership is heading in an undesirable direction for a huge chunk of GNOME loyalists. GNOME 3.38 felt like home to me for a long time, but 40 never clicked. Plus, their "my way or the highway" mentality doesn't work well when combined with their lack of contributors and overall supremacist, absolutist viewpoint on the desktop as a whole. I do still like certain aspects of GNOME, but I worry for their future under the current leadership.
pkulak 5y ago
I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE, but selfishly... I really want System76 to succeed. They give me the same kind of feeling I had when Apple was kicking butt in the early 2000s. And I think that for them to become a general-audience company, they need to really own more of their software. They have some great ideas, and they've already plugin'ed Gnome to within and inch of it's life; it's time to move out on their own. And it's not like a new DE means apps won't work. DEs are just the window dressing and computer management. What I really wonder about is Wayland support. Is this going to be a brand-new DE that's X only? That would be a real shame. I know System76 has stuck doggedly to X because they sell so many NVidia cards, but NVidia supports GBM now.
- UltraViolence 5y ago
  I developed software for Mac OS X around 2005 and I can guarantee you that Apple certainly wasn't kicking butt back then and is probably even worse off today with OS X becoming bloated and full of cruft.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  The shell is implemented in GTK4, and the compositor depends on smithay[1], so I assume they plan for Wayland support. 1: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L19 https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...
  - pkulak 5y ago
    Interesting, thanks. Guess they went that way because of Rust, but it would have been super cool to have another wlroots compositor on the block. EDIT: Just found this, which explains a bit: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-in-c.html http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i...
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      You never know what's possible in the future but I imagine right now they're working on the core features so supporting every compositor around is down the road a bit.
jonpalmisc 5y ago
At the risk of sounding too negative/critical, I honestly just don’t like the design language here. Everything seems overly rounded, and more importantly, the screenshots even show very weird/inconsistent alignment and padding in the UI. Why is it that so many Linux GUIs — between apps and desktop environments — suffer from a lack of attention to detail? Once again, it’s early, I’m sure they are aware of some of these issues, but I can’t say I’m excited for this based on what I just saw.
- astrange 5y ago
  Rounded is good so it doesn't poke you in the eyes. There's some strange choices of ligatures in their UI font, though. Or just poor kerning. https://blog.edfloreshz.dev/images/articles/linux/system76/rust-based-de/search.png https://blog.edfloreshz.dev/images/articles/linux/system76/r... I'm not sure why this desktop UI looks like an iPad either.
  - junon 5y ago
    There is no evidence that round vs square makes any difference in perception of a UI, it's purely a preference.
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  I think it's because designing good user interfaces is hard and very time consuming (at least for me it certainly is). And generally Linux users are more contempt to put up with inconsistencies and annoyances because many probably don't care and leave most things in a default state, or customize stuff to their heart's desire. I'm not saying this is exclusive to Linux distros, I sometimes find the UI in Windows 10 to be confusing, having to jump between the settings and control panel application to find some niche option. It's apparent that parts of that UI were made 20 years ago while others are made with modern toolkits. I hope that System 76, being more consumer oriented than other companies that mainly develop for Linux, listens to feedback from a wide range of users and manages to develop an ecosystem to be the "MacOS of Linux workstations" in the sense that everything is polished and working out of the box and everyone from regular home users to advanced professionals and enthusiasts can pick up and use without major inconveniences.
999900000999 5y ago
But is it going to be faster, what I really want out of a Linux desktop is for it to look nice, but not eat up in indefinite amount of RAM.
- mmstick76 5y ago
  As far as languages go, Rust is better at resource management than C. Especially GObject C.
tannr 5y ago
Go-go System76, life has to be fun why to keep suffering?
Mikeb85 5y ago
Why aren't they working on making a laptop in-house? This seems like a massive diversion and waste of time...
- jjice 5y ago
  Pop_OS is a large product of theirs, even if it's open source. It's one of the killer parts of the System76 line up in my opinion.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    How? Is anyone going to buy a System76 laptop over a Dell XPS laptop or a ThinkPad because Pop!OS comes pre-installed instead of Ubuntu/Fedora?
    - deadbunny 5y ago
      Probably not but I can easily imagine people currently using Pop considering System76 for their next laptop.
- wmf 5y ago
  They clearly don't have enough money to change their hardware strategy.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    It's not like software development is cheap... They're hiring Rust devs to create a DE instead of working on what their actual business model is: hardware.
ijidak 5y ago
I know we developers love our languages. But I'm always skeptical when underlying language choice is featured prominently as a selling point for any new project. It tells me, this is a technology-first, users-second enthusiast project. And thus, I'll be surprised if it tackles the deepest issues users need solved. That doesn't mean it isn't cool as a proof of concept for a new or popular language. It just makes me question to what extent it's going to solve the deepest problems with similar or older projects it is competing against.
- lallysingh 5y ago
  System76 isnt making it about the implementation panguage: https://blog.system76.com/post/648371526931038208/cosmic-to-arrive-in-june-release-of-popos-2104 https://blog.system76.com/post/648371526931038208/cosmic-to-... A Ctrl-F rust showed no results. This post's author just likes Rust.
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    Ah just to clarify, the blog post you referenced is from this past June. COSMIC based on Rust is a new development that System76 has not blogged about yet besides mentioning it in a Reddit post. As a System76 fan, I too am curious to see what the point is. I have no idea what Rust is nor do I care.
  - ijidak 5y ago
    Ah. Apologies. That was my misunderstanding.
- megumax 5y ago
  From what I know, system76 didn't shill cosmos as a rust DE, the only reference to Rust being done in some reddit comment. Most PopOS users don't know what Rust is, so it wouldn't make sense to talk about Cosmos as a Rust project. Now, 90-95% of users use GNOME or KDE, having some competition from a `new` GTK4 DE can't be bad, so I would like to see Cosmos gain attention, and maybe be ported to other distros.
  - 5y ago
DCKing 5y ago
This blog post focuses on some superficialities of how their DE's apps will look slightly different. That's understandable for first impressions. I do hope these superficialities don't have all of System76's focus, as they're a dime a dozen in Linux DEs. Even the category of "we kind of look like Gnome, but with more familiar workflows" is oversaturated amongst Linux desktops (Budgie, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, Elementary/Pantheon, even "Gnome+extensions" are all in this category to various degrees). I suppose one distinguishing factor that Cosmic has is a strong Wayland focus, which is still missing from nearly all Gtk based alternatives. System76 with Pop_OS! has an opportunity to tackle topics head on like "we can make fractional scaling work somewhat decently across all apps" (IIUC currently requires shipping a forked XWayland, unfortunately), "we can make trackpads the best they can be" (requires shipping some forked libinput related things IIUC) or "we can make font rendering best we can make it". The actual desktop environment stuff I'd be interested in. A desktop environment needs more vision than shipping the same old Linux desktop problems with some other apps. I really hope System76 can make an effort there. They're trying to make their paycheck depend more on their own Linux desktop's success, and that I can only encourage.
- commoner 5y ago
  > System76 with Pop_OS! has an opportunity to tackle topics head on like "we can make fractional scaling work somewhat decently across all apps" (IIUC currently requires shipping a forked XWayland, unfortunately) I'm excited to see System76's implementation of fractional scaling in this new desktop environment. Since they have actually sold laptops with 1080p and sometimes 4K displays, they have a real incentive to get this feature working smoothly on Wayland. System76 previously developed a HiDPI daemon for X11 to be used with GNOME Shell: - Blog post: https://blog.system76.com/post/174414833678/all-about-the-hidpi-daemon https://blog.system76.com/post/174414833678/all-about-the-hi... - Help page: https://support.system76.com/articles/hidpi-multi-monitor/ https://support.system76.com/articles/hidpi-multi-monitor/ - Source: https://github.com/pop-os/hidpi-daemon https://github.com/pop-os/hidpi-daemon It handles multiple scaling factors, including fractional ones, flawlessly across displays. If the next version of COSMIC supports fractional scaling on Wayland as well as this daemon does on X11, this alone would make the entire project worthwhile. GNOME Shell still hides fine-grained fractional scaling behind an experimental flag for both X11 and Wayland,[1] with X11 needing a patch for Mutter.[2] [1] https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/04/how-to-enable-hidpi-fractional-scaling.html https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/04/how-to-enable-hidpi-fr... [2] https://github.com/puxplaying/mutter-x11-scaling https://github.com/puxplaying/mutter-x11-scaling
monsieurgaufre 5y ago
While I admire the effort and all, it just looks like a case of NIH to me.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
What is the point of the effort though? It doesn't seem to me that the user is gaining a whole lot from an almost exact rewrite of some apps that already existed. They don't need to be fast to use, so there's nothing to gain from better speed. They weren't ugly, so a slightly different styling is not a win. They weren't crashing all the time, so reliability is not it. They don't try to redesign some core desktop experience from the looks of it either. So... why?
- Shared404 5y ago
  It looks like they're keeping the core of the workflow, but refining it further than the current GNOME extension they develop can. The bigger thing is that GNOME is making it harder and harder to customize and extend, which is a problem for System 76 for obvious reasons.
Shadonototra 5y ago
> COSMIC desktop using GTK 4 GTK.. what a waste of an opportunity I wish Canonical didn't gave up with Unity 8.. Ubuntu and unity was the reason i was using linux as my main desktop OS, when they announced they'll use Gnome 3, i reinstalled windows.. when windows 10 got announced i moved to macOS, i now back to linux with Mint (i love cinnamon desktop btw) Gnome and GTK are a curse, they drive people away from linux desktop
ThinkBeat 5y ago
What exactly is a Linux "desktop environment"? Does it contain a window manager or is that fully separate? Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not? (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)? Is it libraries that applications that are to be executed under the DE? If it is using the GNOME libraries (GTK???) ? Will GNOME applications be native?
- Narishma 5y ago
  It's all of those things.
- pxc 5y ago
  > Does [a desktop environment] contain a window manager or is that fully separate? yes, it does. You can sometimes swap out the default WM for a DE, if you want > Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not? yes > (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)? not really. That's an implementation detail that just varies between different DEs and WMs more than across time. Most DEs don't use the window manager to draw the desktop background, but some do > Is it libraries [and] applications that are to be executed under the DE? yeah, at least if they're integrated with the DE or come with it on a given distro > If it is using the GNOME libraries (GTK???) ? Will GNOME applications be native? that's up to System76, basically. I think they do want most GNOME apps to be more or less native under their DE
  - ThinkBeat 5y ago
    As part of the WM, are a set of applications that are made to take full advantage of it? And the same set of applicatins are in general included in each one?
    - pxc 5y ago
      Not sure how to parse what you wrote here, but it's late and I've had a drink. But it's the other way around— the WM is part of the desktop environment. For some desktop environments, you can choose to swap out the default WM of that DE for another. (That's what I meant to say before.) Desktop environments have applications that are designed to be part of the DE. Typically some core applications, like the file manager, fall into this category. Linux desktop environments are ecosystems, and anyone can write an application that aims to fit into them and be a part of them in as first-class a way as possible. That means leveraging the desktop environment's libraries and adhering to its interface guidelines. Linux distros typically base themselves around such an ecosystem and choose most but not all of the applications in them based on their membership within that ecosystem, as well as their maturity and quality. Sometimes those ecosystems include competing apps in the same category, or apps which could be alternatives with partially overlapping use cases. Linux distros then make a choice. There are sometimes issues between desktop environments, or inter-compatibility issues that require patching to make everything work. They tend to be very niche, and very universal (expecting all applications to use a common interface or behave the same way). The only desktop environment that reliably achieves comparable features without such an issue is that of macOS (and even then, only if you exclude apps that don't aim to feel ‘native’). The best example I can think of is the menu search functionality of the Unity desktop, which IIRC required custom patching of GTK libraries. That's the worst case: novel features rely on would-be standards that simply aren't in place across desktop environments or display servers or window managers or whatever. In the best case, for example desktop shortcuts (XDG .desktop files), there are open standards that meet the needs of a wide range of desktop environments, and which all desktop environments and applications understand and meet. In terms of basic integration though, of the kind you might see on Windows, where VLC looks more or less like Windows Explorer and Firefox looks more or less like Notepad, ‘integration’ is generally a matter of configuration that distros take care of themselves. Apps based on Qt libraries can be made to look right in ecosystems built on GTK and vice-versa. (Most apps can be made to look like GTK apps.) If your point is to highlight the nuance and complexity of the situation: fine, I get it. What a ‘desktop environment’ is is nuanced and complex, and trying to nail down a philosophically satisfactory definition is technical and complicated. If, on the other hand, you'd like to develop an intuition for what desktop environments are like: 1. Any given release of Windows has just one desktop environment. macOS has another. 2. Like most things humans have created, the details are tricky but the intuition is simple, and the best way to understand the thing is to play around with it in real life. Find a bookstore that carries Linux magazines, and buy one. (It may be imported and expensive.) It'll come with a DVD that lets you try several different desktop environments. Spend some time with a few, and you will very, very quickly get a clear sense of what a desktop environment is and why the concept is meaningful.
zkldi 5y ago
That padding is genuinely terrible.
mdoms 5y ago
"Written in Rust" is simply not a good enough reason to adopt something like this. It's visually identical and functionally inferior... so what's the big deal?
apatheticonion 5y ago
Great to see! Selfishly, as a MacOS refugee and someone who has an on/off relationship with using desktop Linux as my main (and a desire to use it daily); I would love it if there was a shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux. I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately.
- pxc 5y ago
  > I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately. Why's GNOME not good enough for this use case?
  - apatheticonion 5y ago
    Gnome41 on Debian Bookworm is my current setup and am actually typing this comment from there. I use it about once a week and as far as I can tell, Gnome40+ is giving off signs that I might be able to use it as a daily driver (for work). Looking forward to the updated Files application and whatever else is coming in G42. That said, there are a lot of design choices that cater more to mobile form factors and the desktop experience suffers as a result. Then there are non DE related issues like application installation. Chromium has bizarre window and mouse performance issues related to Wayland. Graphics card drivers are difficult to install, even as someone who knows how to read documentation. Flatpak has a permissions structure that doesn't always make sense for certain applications (like OBS, Discord, IDEs) and installing applications using a package manager is very hit and miss (e.g. OBS is broken in Debian Bookworm when installed via apt because of a qt5 dependency) I don't mean to sound negative - I only complain because I love Linux and want to be able to go to my friends and colleagues and say "you can use this" - feeling confident that they will have an experience on par with MacOS.
    - moojacob 5y ago
      That Chrome bug seems frustrating... have you tried changing chrome to use Wayland instead of XWayland? Go to chrome://flags and change Preferred Ozone platform from X11 to Wayland.
phendrenad2 5y ago
It's exciting to see a new desktop environment that isn't just someone's hobby project. When was the last time this happened? The fact that System 76 can just tweak Gnome, but is choosing not to, points to the deep levels of custom development they want to be able to accomplish. New ideas... now THAT's exciting.
junon 5y ago
This looks like an accessibility failure. The contrast of the selected items is way too low, and the dark theme itself is going to cause a lot of issues for those with blurred vision. It's of course aesthetically pleasing but it's technically very ill suited for actual users aside from those without vision impairments.
syspec 5y ago
I looked at the screenshots, then I did cmd+f for "Apple" / "Mac" and found no results.
jklinger410 5y ago
I love System 76 and I love the idea of Pop OS but I just know it's going to be ugly as sin. I don't know who their designer is, but they're the only reason I'm not pumped about all of this. There is a good reason these color schemes aren't seen elsewhere, ever, in any interface. Hopefully they will fully support theming or even provide a different built in theme.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  It's basically adwaita with some different accent colors. I hate them too, but the chances of anyone changing their mind on it? Slim to none, friend.
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    Who knows, maybe they are reading this thread. Maybe they will do me a solid and make it really easy to switch off of this gross teal-brown-yellow that they are obsessed with. So far all Cosmic UI has been immune to normal GTK theming.
amaznasd 5y ago
Will it be compatible to run applications written in Python, Go or C++?
seb1204 5y ago
Honest question: would the Linux ecosystem benefit from a UI style guide? Similar to what Apple and Google provide for the mobile platforms? My thinking is that such a style guide could help developers, desktop environments and distributions at the same time. As many mention here the developer of a small app or program is not a UI guru. So if there is a guide to follow why not?
- amarshall 5y ago
  GNOME has their Human Interface Guidelines [1]. Of course GNOME is not the whole Linux ecosystem, and not everything is GTK. [1]: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/ https://developer.gnome.org/hig/
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    And the GNOME HIG is oddly barebones. It's more vague soapbox proclamations than an actual set of guidelines.
nirui 5y ago
So... besides the Rust war, I want to talk something more obvious... Take look the screenshot under "The search bar is available everywhere in the app" section, the Navigation button is not aligned with (I assume) the window title. The Navigation button did in fact aligned with the "Find a setting..." search input box (trust me, I measured it with two different rulers). But... visually it's misaligned still because the bottom borderline of the Navigation button is too blended in with the window background color. Well, that's ... dare I say... ugly?
udbhavs 5y ago
I don't know how to feel about the settings app. The floating menu bar stands out too much for a navigation element, the different color scheme makes it feel like a widget. The "Navigation" button in the top left happens to be on the title bar gradient which gives it an off-putting neumorphic vibe, especially with the box shadow being much stronger at the bottom. I am not a Linux user but at first glance I prefer the more clearly segmented look of Gnome.
fossdd 5y ago
The new settings window looks really customized. Not sure. I've no problem if they change things in PopOS. It looks better then their custom GNOME. GNOME without customizations is in my opinion the best DE. Also cause GNOME uses by default Wayland. COSMIC uses Xorg..
a5aAqU 5y ago
Sounds interesting, but I hope there is a light mode too. Dark mode isn't readable for some people.[1] [1] https://www.boia.org/blog/dark-mode-can-improve-text-readability-but-not-for-everyone https://www.boia.org/blog/dark-mode-can-improve-text-readabi...
Zababa 5y ago
I like the idea, on the other hand I wish Pop!_OS would stop changing the UI with each version release, especially when version are supported for a short time. I don't know how I'm supposed to get comfortable and productive with an OS that changes every year.
apierre_cardoso 5y ago
I have to say, they should get a designer (or a better one, if they have one already), because that feels like an engineer just discovered border-radius and is throwing it everywhere.
javier2 5y ago
I really wish they would instead dedicate this time to improving GNOME.
isaiahg 5y ago
I know it's early but I was really hoping for something that looks different from the regular gnome desktop. Let me preface that by saying that I like gnome fine. And I've used it many times. But it's always felt like the design is less focused on desktop users and more an attempt to make a mobile friendly layout fit to desktop. What system76 is doing could be a great opportunity to rethink a desktop for desktop users. And I understand that after so many years, users have come to expect certain things from a desktop and there's less room to innovate without alienating a huge segment of the userbase that doesn't want to relearn how to use their computer. But still it would be great to get a new idea in the space. And I would love to get an alternative to gnome and kde that isn't just a remix of the past desktops.

505 points by Parseus 5y ago

flenserboy 5y ago

Better to adopt Budgie and move it over to Rust if that's really where they want to go.

anthk 5y ago
Solus OS' BOFH got tired of Gnome and he will switch the entire stack in to Enlightenment. And inb4 "E17 and such have Gaudy theming", last E has a flatish theme, so something like Arc for E would be really easy to implement. https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Is it even remotely stable yet? Iirc it was all hanging off of a single process sometime back so if a single dock item died basically it hosed your entire desktop. I managed to get it started once or twice, as I was a huge fan of e16 but it just seemed… unusable really.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  This Enlightenment? https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened Definitly a good choice. /s Enlightenment was a nice window manager back in the mid-1990's, nowadays who cares if it still compiles.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Current E has nothing to do with E16. https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/ EFL has been supported by Samsung and Tizen, so I expect a full rewrite soon. They are doing really good changes now.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      If you bothered to read the linked article it goes about that great Samsung and Tizen support efforts in code quality. And lets be honest, who still cares about Tizen in 2022?

pleb_nz 5y ago

Subjective. But some very very round edges going on in that new UI.

dnautics 5y ago

I wanted to be able to move the applet bar to not the top of the screen, because I have two monitors and I like to spread vscode over two monitors -- top section for code, bottom section for console (for my purposes vscode console is, sadly, strictly better than the builtin linux console because it opportunistically makes IO output that references file:line clickable). I was able to do this in linux mint, but not in PopOS.

chungy 5y ago

"There’s no visible distinction between the window title bar and the body of the window." Strikes me as a bit amusing, as this was the case also in early versions of GNOME 3. I believe it was abandoned because non-GNOME apps (or more specifically, ones that didn't follow the GNOME HIG) had a visible distinction and greater consistency was desired. Changing GNOME's own look was the way to do so.

Animats 5y ago
Or between what's clickable and what isn't. (New dark pattern: popups which have an X box to dismiss them being harder to dismiss. First, the box around the X disappeared. Then, the X moves to different places in the box. (Bing does this for their house ads.) Then, the active portion of the X shrinks to make it harder to hit.)
- bee_rider 5y ago
  None of that is handled by the window manager though, right?
  - Animats 5y ago
    No, that's web. But this new window manager seems designed to bring web-like behavior to the desktop.
- chungy 5y ago
  Also in the earlier versions, the area you could click to move a window around was significantly larger. Down into the menu bar and toolbars. That pattern did get scaled back. A few GNOME apps still do it, but most only allow it on the title bar now.

71a54xd 5y ago

This is awesome! Very cool to see developer-first real modern desktop tooling being put together.

ismayilzadan 5y ago
Why do you think this is a developer first desktop?
- JaggedJax 5y ago
  System76 very much advertises Pop as an OS for engineers and developers: https://pop.system76.com/ https://pop.system76.com/
  - zepto 5y ago
    Apple advertises MacOS as an OS for engineers and developers.

NotVerstappen 5y ago

I think I would've tried Pop!_OS by now if not for the name - I know it is totally irrational, but having a ! in there really pisses me off.

choward 5y ago
Same here. I know naming things is hard but they went out of the way to make it extra terrible. Stick to letters and maybe numbers if you want the version in the name.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
It's not just you. I have trouble going near CockroachDB because of its name. It's absolutely unjustifiable from an engineering perspective, but the effect (for me, at least) is real.
- rectang 5y ago
  My favorite example of reasonable name-inspired revulsion was an outfit called "Ink Competent Printers".
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  I always took that to be a reference to "it's so robust, it'll survive nuclear winter," which is pretty cool if true. The last database standing after all other species die off.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Fun fact: the supposed extreme hardiness of cockroaches is something of a myth, and in particular they are not fond of cold (hence their affinity for human domiciles!) They should rename to TardigradeDB.
    - jakear 5y ago
      Their nuclear hardiness however has been experimentally validated [1], though flour beetles survived even better than cockroaches. Either way, both using CockroachDB and participating in this thread put cockroaches on my mind a lot more than I'd really prefer. +1 for TardigradeDB. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxCYQvGNoGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxCYQvGNoGY

anthk 5y ago

I don't like Rust, but between Gnome's JS abortion lagfest and Rust, please, use the second.

brink 5y ago
I don't get to meet people who dislike Rust very often. Why don't you like it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- qsdf38100 5y ago
  my 2 cents: rust evangelists, the promises of the end of bugs, and how perfect the language is for any use case... that makes my BS detector go off. Everyone has to love Rust nowadays, it sounds like a cult or something. It makes me hate rust without even having tried it, which is dumb and sad.
  - kangalioo 5y ago
    Yep Whenever a new tool appears whose existence is justified by being "written in Rust" I cringe a little. I'm a happy Rust user, but I wish people would use the language to make cool stuff, not just spread the language for the sake of the language
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gefhfffh 5y ago
    Don't be sad. You realizing that your emotions get in your way is already half of the solution. M
  - mmstick76 5y ago
    Every programming language that has ever existed has had evangelists. The tech field is littered with them. Whether that's people who play video games and fight over GPU brands and console brands; or people who fight over operating systems, languages, and frameworks.

shmerl 5y ago

GTK4? It seems like Rust based UI toolkit is still missing. I like the idea of using Rust for the DE, but personally I'd stick with KDE.

billconan 5y ago
ya, I wanted to ask the same question. there doesn't seem to be a mature gui lib for rust yet. what is this desktop based on?
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  GTK4.
adamnemecek 5y ago
Yeah and they can get like infinite mindshare with it too.
- shmerl 5y ago
  Right, but it's probably a huge project they don't want to maintain. They could limit the scope though. I.e. focus on Linux only from the start at least. But it's probably still a lot of work.
  - adamnemecek 5y ago
    ...and a desktop environment isn't? Building your own GUI toolkit isn't that bad esp. if you have a team. Cross-platform isn't that hard, windowing is like the only thing that comes to mind where there are some differences in behavior. Rendering would be done presumably using some cross-platform GPU API like Vulkan or wgpu.
    - shmerl 5y ago
      I agree, I think building GUI toolkit first is a better idea than building a new DE before you have a better foundation. Not sure what's their rush with DE then. They can improve KDE instead, until Rust based GUI toolkit is ready. Cross platform here is not easy, if you want that toolkit not to be ugly and have some kind of native look and feel.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

anthropodie 5y ago

After unity, I tried couple of DEs but then forced myself to stay with Gnome because I wanted to stop endless tinkering and get work done. I tried it for half a year and then switched to Sway, a tiling window manager. Sway has little to no footprint. I have configured my system the way I like it. Now I do minor tweaks sometimes but nothing major. My entire configuration is in a single file! I am not going back to DEs ever.

distantsounds 5y ago
You don't need a tiling window manager to get everything in a single config file. Fluxbox has historically been great at this, while still being extremely light on resources.
- anthk 5y ago
  Fluxbox + rox + roxlib (for Rox plugins/addons) make the ultimate DE. Everything else can be made into systray applets such as blueman or nm-applet. As for theming, Zukitre for Fluxbox + any modern theme for icons. Done. Fancy, modern yet featureful as back in the day.
filmor 5y ago
Sway is a window manager, not a DE. The right thing to compare it to is Mutter. I also use sway, but quite a few of my applications are from Gnome (like evince, nautilus, gnome-calendar, fractal...).
SahAssar 5y ago
Could you share your config? I also use sway but to me it seems like behind the statement "I have configured my system the way I like it" there is quite a lot of configuration. Also when saying "My entire configuration is in a single file", do you also include things that are normally configured in a DE settings app, like wifi, disk auto mounting, bluetooth connections, sound settings/volumes, display configurations, etc? I like (and use everyday) sway and I like using WM's as a part of puzzling together a system. I just don't think you are comparing apples to apples here.

gorjusborg 5y ago

skavi 5y ago

Looks like the Android 4.0 UI with a bit of neumorphism thrown in. I really don’t like it. I hope that’s not the style they end up with. The GTK window conveys the same information more clearly (and it looks better).

michaelmrose 5y ago
Looks like it is already better than gnome settings. >The search also displays a list of all the settings that match the search criteria and not only where they’re located as GNOME Settings does, this makes it easier to change your settings without having to leave the section you currently are in. >the search bar is available at the top of the navigation view, this is problematic when inside nested menus as the user has to go back to the begining to access it, but in COSMIC it’s available everywhere in the app, no matter how deep inside a menu the user is.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Definitely. When I saw the new settings app my jaw hit the floor, I think GNOME's team is going to have a serious fire lit under their ass now that there's a new kid in town finessing their toolkit like a pro.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Gnome team is busy killing their projects for so long, that they won't even notice.
- addicted 5y ago
  Does that have anything to do with the DE though? Isn’t that a change that could have simply been made to the Gnome settings itself?
  - Shared404 5y ago
    It could, but hasn't been - and GNOME is hostile to users/devs doing such things so it probably never will.

diskzero 5y ago

Original Nautilus and early GNOME developer here. I am very out of touch with what is current, so excuse some possibly ignorant questions. How is this a Rust-based environment if it is based on GTK? I assume GTK is still essentially the C-based GTK we used with some improvements. Why is this called Rust-based? I’ll do some more research but would like to get some insight from more knowledgeable sources.

Narishma 5y ago
GTK is just a library, you can use it from any language it has bindings for.
- diskzero 5y ago
  Understood. I have made significant contributions to GTK. My contributions possibly had memory leaks or memory corruption issues that will bring down the higher Rust layer. I am trying to understand the purpose of the Rust layer. It is fine with me if it is because Rust is interesting, but what is being presented doesn’t seem like a Rust desktop environment _to me_.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    It's not 100% Rust but I think you would expect that GTK itself is fairly well tested - probably much better tested than any new app you write that uses it, so it is still worth it to write that app in Rust. And it has to be said that memory safety isn't Rust's only compelling feature. It also has a pretty great build system, a decent library ecosystem, a very strong type system which gives you an "if it compiles it works" experience surprisingly often, probably the best multithreading system, etc. etc.
  - Taywee 5y ago
    The big selling point of Rust in respect to these kinds of scenarios is that it's very often that a C or C++ library says things like "You must not call function CallAfterFoo before function Foo is called", or "Once you call DestroyObject, that object must not be used again", or "You must not call SomethingDangerous while a ResourceOwningObject exists", and so on and so on. In well-tested libraries like GTK, SQLite, Curl, and such, they are often quite robust just based on having been heavily developed and tested by many people over a very long time, and there are still ways that they can be misused and abused that are usually well-documented and warned against. A well-developed Rust wrapper actually makes it impossible to misuse one of these libraries from Rust, and therefore better enables a much smaller team of developers to write secure, robust applications. Rust can guarantee these documented restrictions at the type level and even make impossible many error conditions. So even though the UI is GTK, Rust still enables developers to write more robust applications with less fear. Personally, I find that GTK with Rust is a very pleasant experience. It's less about guaranteeing that the lower libraries have no bugs and more about preventing people from interacting with the libraries in dangerous or buggy ways.

trulyme 5y ago

Nice, exactly what Linux needs the most - another desktop environment! Sarcasm aside, it does look pretty good. But between indistinguishable window title bars and yet another settings app (wanna bet it will miss some config so users wil still need to run one of the others?), I think I'll pass. As far as I'm concerned this problem was solved ages ago, so I simply don't understand why the designers keep mucking with it. Maybe I'm just getting old. :-/

azinman2 5y ago
Gotta keep up with the latest Apple designs! :)
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I for one would be satisfied to miss the Big-Sur-ification boat...
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  When they keep up with MacOS circa 2004 I'll rejoice.
capableweb 5y ago
> Nice, exactly what Linux needs the most - another desktop environment! One could argue that because no one desktop environment has taken over the Linux mindshare, we haven't invented the one yet, so people keep trying. It's not until something takes over the mindshare (like systemd did), we can all unity and start improving upon the same base.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I'd argue that the battle over desktop environment supremacy leaves desktop Linux less compelling overall. There is so much choice that it's paralyzing and new users constantly second guess themselves. You have thousands of developers doing their own thing rather than working together to make mainstream choices like Gnome more viable.

lawl 5y ago

I honestly don't quite understand what System76s intentions with COSMIC are. To me it feels like a regression from the previous gnome and i've kicked their plugins to get a regular gnome back. It just... Doesn't do anything my custom openbox or i3 setups in the past didn't do (imo better). Nor is it better at being gnome than gnome. And now that i'm getting old and gotten used to stock gnome it just seems like it makes me change my workflow again for no good reason.

mstipetic 5y ago
Do you really not understand that most people don’t want to use custom i3 configs?
- lawl 5y ago
  I do, as i said, i'm getting old and use stock gnome these days, because i don't want to maintain custom configs for everything anymore.
  - mkdirp 5y ago
    Right. And so Pop!_OS gives you a decent tiling window manager, with sane defaults, without having to spend hours on customising your configuration. What's more, the tiling they provide is an optional feature. You can enable and disable it at any time without messing with you config for hours.
    - lawl 5y ago
      If its good or not is a matter of taste in the end, but not the entire point. It also hijacked Super+L which was screen lock (like on windows). And then cosmic was even worse by changing the behavior of the super key completely. Both of these things broke my workflow for things i never asked for. I like pop and their polish compared to ubuntu [0]. I really hate it when software breaks my workflow. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28904171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28904171

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

I could not possibly care less what language you write the UI in. Write it in Brainfuck, I don't care. Just make the UX not suck and provide the functionality I need.

coolso 5y ago
At least when Brainfuck’s fans proselytize and mention the language as much as they possibly can, they’re being ironic and have a sense of humor about it. Humility and humor seems to be expressly forbidden in the Rust CoC, right next to not wearing a pronoun on your name tag.

tibbydudeza 5y ago

So what is the win for System76 here ???. They just make boutique computers computing against the like of Dell/Lenovo when it comes to Linux friendly computers. How many sales do they do per year to justify this direction

yepthatsreality 5y ago
The win is that they’re no longer required to work around Gnome as Gnome’s vision is to minify the DE. This makes it difficult to develop a custom flavor if your base keeps removing features or making strongly opinionated UI decisions.
- tibbydudeza 5y ago
  But why develop a desktop OS at all if your main focus is to sell computers unless you want to become like Apple and offer a bespoke hardware and OS experience ???. Google has done that with Chromebooks successfully but they focus on the educational market where the folks using them has very little choice in the matter.

benatkin 5y ago

I can see 2022 being another almost Year Of Linux on the Desktop. I wonder what dirty tricks big companies will pull, like Microsoft did when netbooks became a threat. (Searching around, I see a lot of people don't get it, they say that Year of Linux on the Desktop has happened. It hasn't yet and some think it never will.)

thanatos519 5y ago
It happened for me in 1994, and I think it's a case of "gradually, then all at once": Once Microsoft and Apple stop maintaining their software, people who still have computers and electricity will move to Linux.
- benatkin 5y ago
  I hope so. The thing is that we have Chromebooks, which is the Linux Kernel on the Desktop (to me, doesn't satisfy the goal of Linux on the Desktop). So we need something so compelling that Google will also not be able to keep up. Or we need Chrome and/or Android to morph into something open enough to be considered Linux on the Desktop.
  - botdan 5y ago
    Modern Chromebook with their "Linux containers" are really, really close to being a wonderful developer experience with the same level of user accessibility, support, and refinement of any of the other "major" operating systems out there. I'm surprised Google hasn't capitalized on it further.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
They don't have to sabotage Linux, Linux developers and the community does that all by itself (unwittingly).
- benatkin 5y ago
  I have your response covered under "some think it never will" :) I agree a lot of mistakes have been made but I'm not sure Linux developers/community will continue to make big enough mistakes to stop its momentum every time it gains some.

Underphil 5y ago

"...we’re all curious as to how this desktop will look like..." Is this an Americanism? My brain can't read this properly.

innocentoldguy 5y ago
No. It is a grammar error. I think they got that sentence mixed up with the one after it, which happens during editing sometimes.
- Karsteski 5y ago
  Reads perfectly fine to me. Probably depends on the dialect(s) of English you're familiar with
noahtallen 5y ago
It’s a combination of “curious what this desktop will look like” and “curious as to how this desktop will look.” (Which could be simplified to “curious how this desktop will look.”) I’m not sure if it’s an Americanism as much as poor phrasing :)
junon 5y ago
The "like" here is strange, and I'd argue erroneous; remove it. Then the "as to", while correct, isn't an obvious construction. It's often paired with "curious" to help transition the sentence a bit, but it's wordy and unnecessary here. For the sake of reading, ignore it. Then it becomes: > we're all curious how this desktop will look The original text is probably written by someone who doesn't do a lot of writing, as it reads how someone might talk. I'm no expert by any means but I'm moderately aware of my own struggle with this exact problem, enough to see it in others' writing.
topspin 5y ago
There is a english.stackexchange.com question on this: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55672/is-it-what-it-looks-like-or-how-it-looks-like https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55672/is-it-what...

adamnemecek 5y ago

System76 should build a Rust GUI framework. I can't think of many other companies that are better positioned than them.

mixedCase 5y ago
Doesn't seem like there'd be any good reason to do it. Gtk4 has great low and high level bindings in the form of gtk-rs and relm.
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  There's a very good reason. GTK never looks very good. Also it uses paradigms that are just not idiomatic in Rust.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Writing GTK4 apps sucks, at least in Rust. They removed so many idiomatic ways to build apps, and all you're left with is a shitty component system that forces you to write incomprehensible UI layout code instead of leaving it to JSON/XML languages that are much better suited to the process. In any case, gtk-rs's bindings after 9.0.0 are hardly usable, and require me to re-write entire apps just to get them to launch in the new and "improved" GTK4 wrapper, now with incredibly blurry text, compositor issues and broken stylesheets... sigh. I, for one, would love to see someone fork GTK3 for desktop purposes. GTK4's development has almost entirely been predicated by the GNOME team (despite how hard they deny it), and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many. After Pop_OS! was publically harassed by the GNOME team, I kinda expected them to take that project up. I can settle for a desktop fork all the same though.
  - mixedCase 5y ago
    Sounds like you want high level bindings, instead of gtk-rs. Have you tried relm4? > and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many Could you expand on that?
    - 5y ago

a-dub 5y ago

i always disliked gnome 3 because of the user interface (it seemed to be an amalgamation of all the bad things from os x or even macos), not because of the underlying language it's coded in.

smoldesu 5y ago
I know a lot of people who despise GNOME 3 on the whole, but I'm willing to defend it for what it is. If you've ever used a touchscreen Linux device, it becomes a whole lot easier to appreciate what they did with the toolkit. GTK apps just... work on a touchscreen. No modifications or fancy-pants libraries required. They also work really well on desktop too, with nice plump interactive elements that make sense for the category of devices that it's targeting. It looks equally as spiffy at 200% scaling as it does at 100%, and it's snappy as all hell. I don't speak for everyone, but GTK3 is the unofficial "native" toolkit for Linux. QT isn't far behind (I've been using Plasma since GNOME 40 and it's a blast), but GTK3 just feels... right. Also licensing and custom stylesheets yadda yadda yadda.
- _qbjt 5y ago
  I use GNOME + Wayland on desktop, with a few tweaks and extensions, and I'm totally willing to defend it. It's a lovely computing environment that just feels at home to me and I think it has a tasteful balance of modern and traditional UI patterns.
  - schmorptron 5y ago
    I'm loving gnome as well, especially since 40,but still can't help but imagine what unity would look like now had it continued development at canonical. One of my main gripes with gnome is the huge amount of wasted space in the top bar that would just be perfect for a global menu like unity had.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    That's fine, I'm not going to take that away from you since I've heard great things about Wayland with the proper hardware for it. As for GNOME, I don't think it's terrible, but it does definitely feel like a regression to me when compared with GNOME 3.3x or GNOME Classic. It's perfectly fine to like it (computer UIs are still opinionated after all), but I feel like their leadership is heading in an undesirable direction for a huge chunk of GNOME loyalists. GNOME 3.38 felt like home to me for a long time, but 40 never clicked. Plus, their "my way or the highway" mentality doesn't work well when combined with their lack of contributors and overall supremacist, absolutist viewpoint on the desktop as a whole. I do still like certain aspects of GNOME, but I worry for their future under the current leadership.

pkulak 5y ago

I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE, but selfishly... I really want System76 to succeed. They give me the same kind of feeling I had when Apple was kicking butt in the early 2000s. And I think that for them to become a general-audience company, they need to really own more of their software. They have some great ideas, and they've already plugin'ed Gnome to within and inch of it's life; it's time to move out on their own. And it's not like a new DE means apps won't work. DEs are just the window dressing and computer management. What I really wonder about is Wayland support. Is this going to be a brand-new DE that's X only? That would be a real shame. I know System76 has stuck doggedly to X because they sell so many NVidia cards, but NVidia supports GBM now.

UltraViolence 5y ago
I developed software for Mac OS X around 2005 and I can guarantee you that Apple certainly wasn't kicking butt back then and is probably even worse off today with OS X becoming bloated and full of cruft.
aidenn0 5y ago
The shell is implemented in GTK4, and the compositor depends on smithay[1], so I assume they plan for Wayland support. 1: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L19 https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...
- pkulak 5y ago
  Interesting, thanks. Guess they went that way because of Rust, but it would have been super cool to have another wlroots compositor on the block. EDIT: Just found this, which explains a bit: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-in-c.html http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i...
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    You never know what's possible in the future but I imagine right now they're working on the core features so supporting every compositor around is down the road a bit.

jonpalmisc 5y ago

At the risk of sounding too negative/critical, I honestly just don’t like the design language here. Everything seems overly rounded, and more importantly, the screenshots even show very weird/inconsistent alignment and padding in the UI. Why is it that so many Linux GUIs — between apps and desktop environments — suffer from a lack of attention to detail? Once again, it’s early, I’m sure they are aware of some of these issues, but I can’t say I’m excited for this based on what I just saw.

astrange 5y ago
Rounded is good so it doesn't poke you in the eyes. There's some strange choices of ligatures in their UI font, though. Or just poor kerning. https://blog.edfloreshz.dev/images/articles/linux/system76/rust-based-de/search.png https://blog.edfloreshz.dev/images/articles/linux/system76/r... I'm not sure why this desktop UI looks like an iPad either.
- junon 5y ago
  There is no evidence that round vs square makes any difference in perception of a UI, it's purely a preference.
eric__cartman 5y ago
I think it's because designing good user interfaces is hard and very time consuming (at least for me it certainly is). And generally Linux users are more contempt to put up with inconsistencies and annoyances because many probably don't care and leave most things in a default state, or customize stuff to their heart's desire. I'm not saying this is exclusive to Linux distros, I sometimes find the UI in Windows 10 to be confusing, having to jump between the settings and control panel application to find some niche option. It's apparent that parts of that UI were made 20 years ago while others are made with modern toolkits. I hope that System 76, being more consumer oriented than other companies that mainly develop for Linux, listens to feedback from a wide range of users and manages to develop an ecosystem to be the "MacOS of Linux workstations" in the sense that everything is polished and working out of the box and everyone from regular home users to advanced professionals and enthusiasts can pick up and use without major inconveniences.

999900000999 5y ago

But is it going to be faster, what I really want out of a Linux desktop is for it to look nice, but not eat up in indefinite amount of RAM.

mmstick76 5y ago
As far as languages go, Rust is better at resource management than C. Especially GObject C.

tannr 5y ago

Go-go System76, life has to be fun why to keep suffering?

Mikeb85 5y ago

Why aren't they working on making a laptop in-house? This seems like a massive diversion and waste of time...

jjice 5y ago
Pop_OS is a large product of theirs, even if it's open source. It's one of the killer parts of the System76 line up in my opinion.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  How? Is anyone going to buy a System76 laptop over a Dell XPS laptop or a ThinkPad because Pop!OS comes pre-installed instead of Ubuntu/Fedora?
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    Probably not but I can easily imagine people currently using Pop considering System76 for their next laptop.
wmf 5y ago
They clearly don't have enough money to change their hardware strategy.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  It's not like software development is cheap... They're hiring Rust devs to create a DE instead of working on what their actual business model is: hardware.

ijidak 5y ago

I know we developers love our languages. But I'm always skeptical when underlying language choice is featured prominently as a selling point for any new project. It tells me, this is a technology-first, users-second enthusiast project. And thus, I'll be surprised if it tackles the deepest issues users need solved. That doesn't mean it isn't cool as a proof of concept for a new or popular language. It just makes me question to what extent it's going to solve the deepest problems with similar or older projects it is competing against.

lallysingh 5y ago
System76 isnt making it about the implementation panguage: https://blog.system76.com/post/648371526931038208/cosmic-to-arrive-in-june-release-of-popos-2104 https://blog.system76.com/post/648371526931038208/cosmic-to-... A Ctrl-F rust showed no results. This post's author just likes Rust.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  Ah just to clarify, the blog post you referenced is from this past June. COSMIC based on Rust is a new development that System76 has not blogged about yet besides mentioning it in a Reddit post. As a System76 fan, I too am curious to see what the point is. I have no idea what Rust is nor do I care.
- ijidak 5y ago
  Ah. Apologies. That was my misunderstanding.
megumax 5y ago
From what I know, system76 didn't shill cosmos as a rust DE, the only reference to Rust being done in some reddit comment. Most PopOS users don't know what Rust is, so it wouldn't make sense to talk about Cosmos as a Rust project. Now, 90-95% of users use GNOME or KDE, having some competition from a `new` GTK4 DE can't be bad, so I would like to see Cosmos gain attention, and maybe be ported to other distros.
- 5y ago

DCKing 5y ago

This blog post focuses on some superficialities of how their DE's apps will look slightly different. That's understandable for first impressions. I do hope these superficialities don't have all of System76's focus, as they're a dime a dozen in Linux DEs. Even the category of "we kind of look like Gnome, but with more familiar workflows" is oversaturated amongst Linux desktops (Budgie, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, Elementary/Pantheon, even "Gnome+extensions" are all in this category to various degrees). I suppose one distinguishing factor that Cosmic has is a strong Wayland focus, which is still missing from nearly all Gtk based alternatives. System76 with Pop_OS! has an opportunity to tackle topics head on like "we can make fractional scaling work somewhat decently across all apps" (IIUC currently requires shipping a forked XWayland, unfortunately), "we can make trackpads the best they can be" (requires shipping some forked libinput related things IIUC) or "we can make font rendering best we can make it". The actual desktop environment stuff I'd be interested in. A desktop environment needs more vision than shipping the same old Linux desktop problems with some other apps. I really hope System76 can make an effort there. They're trying to make their paycheck depend more on their own Linux desktop's success, and that I can only encourage.

commoner 5y ago
> System76 with Pop_OS! has an opportunity to tackle topics head on like "we can make fractional scaling work somewhat decently across all apps" (IIUC currently requires shipping a forked XWayland, unfortunately) I'm excited to see System76's implementation of fractional scaling in this new desktop environment. Since they have actually sold laptops with 1080p and sometimes 4K displays, they have a real incentive to get this feature working smoothly on Wayland. System76 previously developed a HiDPI daemon for X11 to be used with GNOME Shell: - Blog post: https://blog.system76.com/post/174414833678/all-about-the-hidpi-daemon https://blog.system76.com/post/174414833678/all-about-the-hi... - Help page: https://support.system76.com/articles/hidpi-multi-monitor/ https://support.system76.com/articles/hidpi-multi-monitor/ - Source: https://github.com/pop-os/hidpi-daemon https://github.com/pop-os/hidpi-daemon It handles multiple scaling factors, including fractional ones, flawlessly across displays. If the next version of COSMIC supports fractional scaling on Wayland as well as this daemon does on X11, this alone would make the entire project worthwhile. GNOME Shell still hides fine-grained fractional scaling behind an experimental flag for both X11 and Wayland,[1] with X11 needing a patch for Mutter.[2] [1] https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/04/how-to-enable-hidpi-fractional-scaling.html https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/04/how-to-enable-hidpi-fr... [2] https://github.com/puxplaying/mutter-x11-scaling https://github.com/puxplaying/mutter-x11-scaling

monsieurgaufre 5y ago

While I admire the effort and all, it just looks like a case of NIH to me.

rhn_mk1 5y ago

What is the point of the effort though? It doesn't seem to me that the user is gaining a whole lot from an almost exact rewrite of some apps that already existed. They don't need to be fast to use, so there's nothing to gain from better speed. They weren't ugly, so a slightly different styling is not a win. They weren't crashing all the time, so reliability is not it. They don't try to redesign some core desktop experience from the looks of it either. So... why?

Shared404 5y ago
It looks like they're keeping the core of the workflow, but refining it further than the current GNOME extension they develop can. The bigger thing is that GNOME is making it harder and harder to customize and extend, which is a problem for System 76 for obvious reasons.

Shadonototra 5y ago

> COSMIC desktop using GTK 4 GTK.. what a waste of an opportunity I wish Canonical didn't gave up with Unity 8.. Ubuntu and unity was the reason i was using linux as my main desktop OS, when they announced they'll use Gnome 3, i reinstalled windows.. when windows 10 got announced i moved to macOS, i now back to linux with Mint (i love cinnamon desktop btw) Gnome and GTK are a curse, they drive people away from linux desktop

ThinkBeat 5y ago

What exactly is a Linux "desktop environment"? Does it contain a window manager or is that fully separate? Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not? (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)? Is it libraries that applications that are to be executed under the DE? If it is using the GNOME libraries (GTK???) ? Will GNOME applications be native?

Narishma 5y ago
It's all of those things.
pxc 5y ago
> Does [a desktop environment] contain a window manager or is that fully separate? yes, it does. You can sometimes swap out the default WM for a DE, if you want > Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not? yes > (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)? not really. That's an implementation detail that just varies between different DEs and WMs more than across time. Most DEs don't use the window manager to draw the desktop background, but some do > Is it libraries [and] applications that are to be executed under the DE? yeah, at least if they're integrated with the DE or come with it on a given distro > If it is using the GNOME libraries (GTK???) ? Will GNOME applications be native? that's up to System76, basically. I think they do want most GNOME apps to be more or less native under their DE
- ThinkBeat 5y ago
  As part of the WM, are a set of applications that are made to take full advantage of it? And the same set of applicatins are in general included in each one?
  - pxc 5y ago
    Not sure how to parse what you wrote here, but it's late and I've had a drink. But it's the other way around— the WM is part of the desktop environment. For some desktop environments, you can choose to swap out the default WM of that DE for another. (That's what I meant to say before.) Desktop environments have applications that are designed to be part of the DE. Typically some core applications, like the file manager, fall into this category. Linux desktop environments are ecosystems, and anyone can write an application that aims to fit into them and be a part of them in as first-class a way as possible. That means leveraging the desktop environment's libraries and adhering to its interface guidelines. Linux distros typically base themselves around such an ecosystem and choose most but not all of the applications in them based on their membership within that ecosystem, as well as their maturity and quality. Sometimes those ecosystems include competing apps in the same category, or apps which could be alternatives with partially overlapping use cases. Linux distros then make a choice. There are sometimes issues between desktop environments, or inter-compatibility issues that require patching to make everything work. They tend to be very niche, and very universal (expecting all applications to use a common interface or behave the same way). The only desktop environment that reliably achieves comparable features without such an issue is that of macOS (and even then, only if you exclude apps that don't aim to feel ‘native’). The best example I can think of is the menu search functionality of the Unity desktop, which IIRC required custom patching of GTK libraries. That's the worst case: novel features rely on would-be standards that simply aren't in place across desktop environments or display servers or window managers or whatever. In the best case, for example desktop shortcuts (XDG .desktop files), there are open standards that meet the needs of a wide range of desktop environments, and which all desktop environments and applications understand and meet. In terms of basic integration though, of the kind you might see on Windows, where VLC looks more or less like Windows Explorer and Firefox looks more or less like Notepad, ‘integration’ is generally a matter of configuration that distros take care of themselves. Apps based on Qt libraries can be made to look right in ecosystems built on GTK and vice-versa. (Most apps can be made to look like GTK apps.) If your point is to highlight the nuance and complexity of the situation: fine, I get it. What a ‘desktop environment’ is is nuanced and complex, and trying to nail down a philosophically satisfactory definition is technical and complicated. If, on the other hand, you'd like to develop an intuition for what desktop environments are like: 1. Any given release of Windows has just one desktop environment. macOS has another. 2. Like most things humans have created, the details are tricky but the intuition is simple, and the best way to understand the thing is to play around with it in real life. Find a bookstore that carries Linux magazines, and buy one. (It may be imported and expensive.) It'll come with a DVD that lets you try several different desktop environments. Spend some time with a few, and you will very, very quickly get a clear sense of what a desktop environment is and why the concept is meaningful.

zkldi 5y ago

That padding is genuinely terrible.

mdoms 5y ago

"Written in Rust" is simply not a good enough reason to adopt something like this. It's visually identical and functionally inferior... so what's the big deal?

apatheticonion 5y ago

Great to see! Selfishly, as a MacOS refugee and someone who has an on/off relationship with using desktop Linux as my main (and a desire to use it daily); I would love it if there was a shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux. I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately.

pxc 5y ago
> I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately. Why's GNOME not good enough for this use case?
- apatheticonion 5y ago
  Gnome41 on Debian Bookworm is my current setup and am actually typing this comment from there. I use it about once a week and as far as I can tell, Gnome40+ is giving off signs that I might be able to use it as a daily driver (for work). Looking forward to the updated Files application and whatever else is coming in G42. That said, there are a lot of design choices that cater more to mobile form factors and the desktop experience suffers as a result. Then there are non DE related issues like application installation. Chromium has bizarre window and mouse performance issues related to Wayland. Graphics card drivers are difficult to install, even as someone who knows how to read documentation. Flatpak has a permissions structure that doesn't always make sense for certain applications (like OBS, Discord, IDEs) and installing applications using a package manager is very hit and miss (e.g. OBS is broken in Debian Bookworm when installed via apt because of a qt5 dependency) I don't mean to sound negative - I only complain because I love Linux and want to be able to go to my friends and colleagues and say "you can use this" - feeling confident that they will have an experience on par with MacOS.
  - moojacob 5y ago
    That Chrome bug seems frustrating... have you tried changing chrome to use Wayland instead of XWayland? Go to chrome://flags and change Preferred Ozone platform from X11 to Wayland.

phendrenad2 5y ago

It's exciting to see a new desktop environment that isn't just someone's hobby project. When was the last time this happened? The fact that System 76 can just tweak Gnome, but is choosing not to, points to the deep levels of custom development they want to be able to accomplish. New ideas... now THAT's exciting.

junon 5y ago

This looks like an accessibility failure. The contrast of the selected items is way too low, and the dark theme itself is going to cause a lot of issues for those with blurred vision. It's of course aesthetically pleasing but it's technically very ill suited for actual users aside from those without vision impairments.

syspec 5y ago

I looked at the screenshots, then I did cmd+f for "Apple" / "Mac" and found no results.

jklinger410 5y ago

I love System 76 and I love the idea of Pop OS but I just know it's going to be ugly as sin. I don't know who their designer is, but they're the only reason I'm not pumped about all of this. There is a good reason these color schemes aren't seen elsewhere, ever, in any interface. Hopefully they will fully support theming or even provide a different built in theme.

smoldesu 5y ago
It's basically adwaita with some different accent colors. I hate them too, but the chances of anyone changing their mind on it? Slim to none, friend.
- jklinger410 5y ago
  Who knows, maybe they are reading this thread. Maybe they will do me a solid and make it really easy to switch off of this gross teal-brown-yellow that they are obsessed with. So far all Cosmic UI has been immune to normal GTK theming.

amaznasd 5y ago

Will it be compatible to run applications written in Python, Go or C++?

seb1204 5y ago

Honest question: would the Linux ecosystem benefit from a UI style guide? Similar to what Apple and Google provide for the mobile platforms? My thinking is that such a style guide could help developers, desktop environments and distributions at the same time. As many mention here the developer of a small app or program is not a UI guru. So if there is a guide to follow why not?

amarshall 5y ago
GNOME has their Human Interface Guidelines [1]. Of course GNOME is not the whole Linux ecosystem, and not everything is GTK. [1]: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/ https://developer.gnome.org/hig/
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  And the GNOME HIG is oddly barebones. It's more vague soapbox proclamations than an actual set of guidelines.

nirui 5y ago

So... besides the Rust war, I want to talk something more obvious... Take look the screenshot under "The search bar is available everywhere in the app" section, the Navigation button is not aligned with (I assume) the window title. The Navigation button did in fact aligned with the "Find a setting..." search input box (trust me, I measured it with two different rulers). But... visually it's misaligned still because the bottom borderline of the Navigation button is too blended in with the window background color. Well, that's ... dare I say... ugly?

udbhavs 5y ago

I don't know how to feel about the settings app. The floating menu bar stands out too much for a navigation element, the different color scheme makes it feel like a widget. The "Navigation" button in the top left happens to be on the title bar gradient which gives it an off-putting neumorphic vibe, especially with the box shadow being much stronger at the bottom. I am not a Linux user but at first glance I prefer the more clearly segmented look of Gnome.

fossdd 5y ago

The new settings window looks really customized. Not sure. I've no problem if they change things in PopOS. It looks better then their custom GNOME. GNOME without customizations is in my opinion the best DE. Also cause GNOME uses by default Wayland. COSMIC uses Xorg..

a5aAqU 5y ago

Sounds interesting, but I hope there is a light mode too. Dark mode isn't readable for some people.[1] [1] https://www.boia.org/blog/dark-mode-can-improve-text-readability-but-not-for-everyone https://www.boia.org/blog/dark-mode-can-improve-text-readabi...

Zababa 5y ago

I like the idea, on the other hand I wish Pop!_OS would stop changing the UI with each version release, especially when version are supported for a short time. I don't know how I'm supposed to get comfortable and productive with an OS that changes every year.

apierre_cardoso 5y ago

I have to say, they should get a designer (or a better one, if they have one already), because that feels like an engineer just discovered border-radius and is throwing it everywhere.

javier2 5y ago

I really wish they would instead dedicate this time to improving GNOME.

isaiahg 5y ago

I know it's early but I was really hoping for something that looks different from the regular gnome desktop. Let me preface that by saying that I like gnome fine. And I've used it many times. But it's always felt like the design is less focused on desktop users and more an attempt to make a mobile friendly layout fit to desktop. What system76 is doing could be a great opportunity to rethink a desktop for desktop users. And I understand that after so many years, users have come to expect certain things from a desktop and there's less room to innovate without alienating a huge segment of the userbase that doesn't want to relearn how to use their computer. But still it would be great to get a new idea in the space. And I would love to get an alternative to gnome and kde that isn't just a remix of the past desktops.