8 ms·

I see a slightly restyled Mate desktop environment. Nothing really new, some marginal advantage like a tiny bit more visible window focus. Scrollbars still invi

I see a slightly restyled Mate desktop environment. Nothing really new, some marginal advantage like a tiny bit more visible window focus. Scrollbars still invisible. Buttons even harder to distinguish from not-buttons, and not clear how a disabled button can look when everything is so graywashed. Generally, looks like another designers take on style, not usability.

teekert 2y ago
If it's a fast, Rust written, modern, Wayland native DE with quarter tiling I am already happy. Let it grow from there.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Much as those things sound nice, I feel like the GP in that a DE is very much a user-focused tool, knowing it has nice developer-friendly internals is a distant second to having a good interface.
  - FireInsight 2y ago
    Nice developer-friendly internals get more contributors and some of them might make interesting UX contributions.
- rjzzleep 2y ago
  Cosmic has a huge opportunity to make a desktop toolkit that doesn't suck. With proper components that you need for modern applications. I tried reaching out to the team on LinkedIn, but I guess it just goes into the LinkedIn spam. If they can nail the component library on their rust framework, I believe Linux Desktop applications might finally take off. But so far it doesn't seem like I could catch their interested.
- culebron21 2y ago
  If it's really a Rust ground-up new DE, it sounds promising.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
I couldn't agree more. I feel like as the computer literacy of the people making decisions in tech companies has gone up, the care that's being invested into actually making good user interfaces has gone down. This applies to Macs, Windows, and also to Linux desktop environments. Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more on aesthetics. People used to care about making sure buttons are recognizable and differentiated with icons, colors, and clear labels. Now it's just text. People used to make sure windows had clear, visible borders, and the active window was clearly identifiable. Now it's just a shadow, and if you have a dark user interface, you can't even see the shadow. People used to make sure scrollable areas where clearly identifiable, now you have to just guess at what is scrollable. From the screenshots, this looks like the same low-contrast, low-usability, but visually pretty design approach most modern desktop environments have adopted. It's unfortunate that this seems to be the direction we're going in.
- danielvaughn 2y ago
  I think people learned the wrong lessons from Apple. They thought that Mac products were successful because of their aesthetics, but in reality it's because they were the only products that tried to be usable.
  - digitalsankhara 2y ago
    To be fair I think MacOS classic (i.e. MacOS 9 et.al) was well thought out and usable IMHO.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  a classic market irony example is keyboards.. Every single user here has a keyboard, yet keyboards on a mass scale are cheap and badly designed, with no end in sight.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    My keyboard was embarrassingly expensive, but I love it. You can get what you want, but what most people want is to not care about it at all.
jklinger410 2y ago
> I see a slightly restyled Mate desktop environment You should look harder.
- stonogo 2y ago
  Why? What will we find?
  - jklinger410 2y ago
    A built in mac-like dock, completely different styling on components, no weird bottom window bar, no windows-like application menu, customized theme engine, built in window tiling. Just a few little differences.
    - culebron21 2y ago
      In Mate, you can turn this bottom icon bar on, if you really want to imitate Mac.
    - loa_in_ 2y ago
      Everything I can have in Mate
      - jklinger410 2y ago
        So is the claim that any DE with a top bar and launcher icons looks like MATE? Or because you can customize MATE, that it's just like every other DE? Makes no sense.
        loa_in_ 2y ago
        I don't think you can customise MacOS launcher to look like default MATE but you can definitely customise MATE to look like default MacOS
        culebron21 2y ago
        The claim is Mate can do almost everything this DE does, so switching to yet another wannabe Mac DE isn't worth the hassle. (I'd be interested had they broke away from this ubiquitous Mac mimicry.)
bityard 2y ago
I ran MATE for years because I thought the GNOME3 rug-pull redesign was a major step backward. MATE has not really evolved a ton since it was forked from GNOME 2, so I honestly don't see the similarity between Cosmic and MATE. If anything, Cosmic looks to me more like "GNOME 3, but behaves even _more_ like MacOS." If you like real buttons and scollbars, KDE is very nice these days and is MUCH more stable than it used to be.
diego_sandoval 2y ago
If you ignore the fact that it looks much better than Mate, maybe. The sentiment of "looks don't matter" seems to be very common among Linux users. Or maybe they don't see the difference, but it would be like not seeing the difference between a beaten Lada car and a modern Toyota Camry.
- abeyer 2y ago
  > like not seeing the difference between a beaten Lada car and a modern Toyota Camry. So, both ugly, and only one with evidence of being useful and used?
- culebron21 2y ago
  I have the newest Mate in dark theme, and there's not much difference. Both imitate Mac UI, as far as I know Mac.
zem 2y ago
as someone currently running a mate desktop with xmonad as the window manager, this is pretty much everything i want in a desktop environment. mate is showing its age a bit and has some rough edges and glitches, so if a modern, active project is taking over the mantle I'm perfectly happy to embrace it.

teekert 2y ago

If it's a fast, Rust written, modern, Wayland native DE with quarter tiling I am already happy. Let it grow from there.

Y_Y 2y ago
Much as those things sound nice, I feel like the GP in that a DE is very much a user-focused tool, knowing it has nice developer-friendly internals is a distant second to having a good interface.
- FireInsight 2y ago
  Nice developer-friendly internals get more contributors and some of them might make interesting UX contributions.
rjzzleep 2y ago
Cosmic has a huge opportunity to make a desktop toolkit that doesn't suck. With proper components that you need for modern applications. I tried reaching out to the team on LinkedIn, but I guess it just goes into the LinkedIn spam. If they can nail the component library on their rust framework, I believe Linux Desktop applications might finally take off. But so far it doesn't seem like I could catch their interested.
culebron21 2y ago
If it's really a Rust ground-up new DE, it sounds promising.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

I couldn't agree more. I feel like as the computer literacy of the people making decisions in tech companies has gone up, the care that's being invested into actually making good user interfaces has gone down. This applies to Macs, Windows, and also to Linux desktop environments. Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more on aesthetics. People used to care about making sure buttons are recognizable and differentiated with icons, colors, and clear labels. Now it's just text. People used to make sure windows had clear, visible borders, and the active window was clearly identifiable. Now it's just a shadow, and if you have a dark user interface, you can't even see the shadow. People used to make sure scrollable areas where clearly identifiable, now you have to just guess at what is scrollable. From the screenshots, this looks like the same low-contrast, low-usability, but visually pretty design approach most modern desktop environments have adopted. It's unfortunate that this seems to be the direction we're going in.

danielvaughn 2y ago
I think people learned the wrong lessons from Apple. They thought that Mac products were successful because of their aesthetics, but in reality it's because they were the only products that tried to be usable.
- digitalsankhara 2y ago
  To be fair I think MacOS classic (i.e. MacOS 9 et.al) was well thought out and usable IMHO.
mistrial9 2y ago
a classic market irony example is keyboards.. Every single user here has a keyboard, yet keyboards on a mass scale are cheap and badly designed, with no end in sight.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  My keyboard was embarrassingly expensive, but I love it. You can get what you want, but what most people want is to not care about it at all.

jklinger410 2y ago

> I see a slightly restyled Mate desktop environment You should look harder.

stonogo 2y ago
Why? What will we find?
- jklinger410 2y ago
  A built in mac-like dock, completely different styling on components, no weird bottom window bar, no windows-like application menu, customized theme engine, built in window tiling. Just a few little differences.
  - culebron21 2y ago
    In Mate, you can turn this bottom icon bar on, if you really want to imitate Mac.
  - loa_in_ 2y ago
    Everything I can have in Mate
    - jklinger410 2y ago
      So is the claim that any DE with a top bar and launcher icons looks like MATE? Or because you can customize MATE, that it's just like every other DE? Makes no sense.
      - loa_in_ 2y ago
        I don't think you can customise MacOS launcher to look like default MATE but you can definitely customise MATE to look like default MacOS
      - culebron21 2y ago
        The claim is Mate can do almost everything this DE does, so switching to yet another wannabe Mac DE isn't worth the hassle. (I'd be interested had they broke away from this ubiquitous Mac mimicry.)

bityard 2y ago

I ran MATE for years because I thought the GNOME3 rug-pull redesign was a major step backward. MATE has not really evolved a ton since it was forked from GNOME 2, so I honestly don't see the similarity between Cosmic and MATE. If anything, Cosmic looks to me more like "GNOME 3, but behaves even _more_ like MacOS." If you like real buttons and scollbars, KDE is very nice these days and is MUCH more stable than it used to be.

diego_sandoval 2y ago

If you ignore the fact that it looks much better than Mate, maybe. The sentiment of "looks don't matter" seems to be very common among Linux users. Or maybe they don't see the difference, but it would be like not seeing the difference between a beaten Lada car and a modern Toyota Camry.

abeyer 2y ago
> like not seeing the difference between a beaten Lada car and a modern Toyota Camry. So, both ugly, and only one with evidence of being useful and used?
culebron21 2y ago
I have the newest Mate in dark theme, and there's not much difference. Both imitate Mac UI, as far as I know Mac.

zem 2y ago

as someone currently running a mate desktop with xmonad as the window manager, this is pretty much everything i want in a desktop environment. mate is showing its age a bit and has some rough edges and glitches, so if a modern, active project is taking over the mantle I'm perfectly happy to embrace it.