27 ms·

COSMIC Alpha Released

272 points by fisian 2y ago

ur-whale 2y ago
The release page doesn't make it very clear what Cosmic is and does. The product page is better: https://system76.com/cosmic https://system76.com/cosmic [EDIT]: also useful : https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cosmic+desktop+environment https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cosmic+desktop+...
- looperhacks 2y ago
  I don't want to be mean, instead I want to learn how such an announcement can be done better. On my screen, the very first line (third sentence, but the first two are pretty short): > COSMIC, our new desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros After that, a link to the very page you linked. What more should a release post do?
  - raziel2p 2y ago
    The link to the page uses the text "has been released". It's not intuitive at all that clicking this text would bring you to a page to learn more about what Cosmic is. The text "COSMIC, our new desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros" could have been the clickable link instead.
  - agos 2y ago
    include a screenshot and a description of its key feature. give a bit of context!
- airbreather 2y ago
  well call me stupid, but I am running POP OS! 22.04 currently and can't quite really understand from their excitement web-page how I would try cosmic without a system re-install?
  - hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
    You could download and flash the .iso to a usb flash drive, then boot from that to try it out (don't choose to install it, if you're given that option)
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    You can just install cosmic, and then switch from gnome to cosmic. Or you can use the cosmic apps under gnome as well. The instructions are in the cosmic epoch git repo. That will get you pretty close. I am already using the Cosmic apps quite a bit.
kombine 2y ago
I wish the project best of luck, though I feel that it is going to take them years in order to reach parity with KDE, which combined with Qt took decades to bring to its current feature set.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  I started with Cosmic on Pop! 22.04 which was fine but then I wanted to try KDE and installed it and stayed with it after I found it to more customizable as per my preferences. At this point I feel like I probably should have just used Kubuntu instead and be up-to-date (Pop! is still stuck at 22.04). Everything works though and I am too lazy to risk issues / dealing with time spent on setting everything again.
- teekert 2y ago
  I hope they won't go for parity with KDE. KDE is great, but it's enormous. If you like it, go for it. This is almost more for the OpenBox or perhaps Gnome folks. Minimalists. Curated, opinionated, fast (yes KDE is also fast)
- panick21_ 2y ago
  It will take years until KDE will have tiling as good as Cosmic does now
- WD-42 2y ago
  It’s impressive how far they’ve got in only a year.
hkmaxpro 2y ago
Interesting Reddit discussion: When a user compliments the alpha release being lightweight and free of memory leaks, the discussion quickly moves to how the MVU design pattern in the GUI library (iced) might have helped. https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/1f2suin/cosmic_alpha_released_heres_what_people_are_saying/lkavaxa/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/1f2suin/cosmic_alph...
- airstrike 2y ago
  iced is beautiful. you can write a fully featured GUI app running at ~40MB memory
oerdier 2y ago
Pop!_OS has been my daily driver for three years and counting. I think its desktop enviroment is already fine, with a few annoyances (hiding the top bar requires GNOME Toolkit and doesn't work reliably). I've been following the progress of Cosmic casually. To me it seems a slightly more [cohesive|streamlined|robust] version of the current desktop, which would be great. Although it also seems like for non-early adopters like myself who just want to use something that works and gets out or their way is a long way off. Videos reviewing the alpha version say this fairly universally.
- Arisaka1 2y ago
  Unfortunately the one thing that will always keep me to Fedora is System76's disinterest in keeping the repositories somewhat up to date with the rest of the world. It boggles my mind why is there no Debian-based distro that are either bleeding edge or at the very least on par with Fedora's freshness in terms of updates.
  - vondur 2y ago
    Cosmic is available for Fedora too.
  - dak89 2y ago
    Good news: I heard on a podcast with someone from System76 that they plan to support Fedora with an official Cosmic spin!
    - RDaneel0livaw 2y ago
      I heard that too and am very excited for this! When I build my new machine with a new rdna4 machine, this'll be the distro/de I'll use at first bootup.
  - cassianoleal 2y ago
    > why is there no Debian-based distro that are either bleeding edge Debian testing or sid are more or less that. Barring major upgrades (Plasma 6 is taking some time), most packages are kept quite up-to-date.
oguz-ismail 2y ago
It looks exactly like Gnome. What's the point?
- dathinab 2y ago
  it not being Gnome Gnome comes with a lot of baggage both technical and organizational, this has lead to situations where Pop_OS! wasn't able to manage/change/improve things like they think they needed to do hence why they started to create Cosmic. Just be clear this was a business decision by system76 to some degree, not just some "I don't like it so I created something even if it doesn't make sense" decision. it looks like Gnome because it's for people which had been using Gnome so far, but it's just similar not the same and likely will only diverge more over the next many years assuming it succeeds
  - Lutger 2y ago
    Isn't the business decision exactly whats being questioned? Not saying it is a bad decision, but I did have the same question. Was it really necessary to write a completely new DE just to make some tweaks easier to implement? Would love to hear more details about this. At first glance, it seems like a truly massive effort for a marginal improvement, that could have been made with a fraction of the cost. I'm probably wrong though, hopefully.
    - WD-42 2y ago
      The situation between System76 and Gnome had become untenable. The modifications they wanted to make to the shell were too many and the Gnome devs don't want to support any of it. I read somewhere that 50% of the development time on Pop_Os was spent simply un-breaking the Gnome shell extension between releases of GNOME. Now they can put that time into creating what they actually want.
    - panick21_ 2y ago
      The problem was that the Gnome crowd is going increasingly in a different direction. Mutter already doesnt support a number of otherwise universal protocol. The way theming work is compelely changed. There are lots of other reason why staying with gnome was an increasing problem for them. All those reasons are only growing bigger. So to support what they wanted and what they promise their costumers they would have to do increasingly more and more work, in direct oppositon the the gnome community. Essentially eventially forking it. And then they have to maintain a huge legacy codebase. And they didnt wirte a completly new one. The compositor was already a project. So was Iced. They use lots of other existing project in the Rust ecosystem. Now they are on their own, free to build what they want, rather then endlessly pushing a rock up a mountain. They can now make more fundamental changed that would never have been possible in Gnome. They are also free to build the community they want rather then deal with the Gnome community. This also makes them a player in the Wayland community, another voice that can push protocols.
baq 2y ago
I'm looking around for a good Linux laptop. Any recommendations? I didn't check anything out in person, but have looked at reviews of framework, system76, thinkpads and there hasn't been one where there haven't been serious complaints (e.g. bent parts in some framework 16s causing the whole thing to rattle.) (Is an M1 Air with Asahi a good idea?)
- colordrops 2y ago
  You haven't found a single Thinkpad without serious complaints? What kind of complaints?
  - baq 2y ago
    The literally first google hit for L14 gen 5 in my filter bubble has a tldr of 'mixed bag'; granted, for an AMD SKU. Would you recommend an Intel version?
    - pantalaimon 2y ago
      The L series are crap no matter what CPU
      - Refusing23 2y ago
        i have an E14 for work and its trackpad is garbage same with the keyboard layout
        pantalaimon 2y ago
        T and P series are good, X series can be so-so L and E are Lenovo's entry/low cost models
        BoredPositron 2y ago
        That "FN" Key placement boggles my mind.
ThePhysicist 2y ago
I'm excited that they push Iced [1], a Rust-based cross-platform UI framework. Probably not the Rust framework which I would've betted on as the most promising one, but with the broad support and larger adoption I hope it will catapult it into the mainstream, we really need a good UI library that's not a web renderer. I was also quite excited about GPUI [2] but there seems to be very little activity in the repo for now (hard to judge though, I imagine they're just busy hacking on the editor). I wanted to write a desktop app with Rust for a while and considered Tauri, Flutter (via rust-flutter-bridge) or a native framework like Iced, I think with the larger adoption it might make sense to go with Iced, though it's probably still much more experimental than frameworks like Flutter. 1: https://iced.rs/ https://iced.rs/ 2: https://www.gpui.rs/ https://www.gpui.rs/
- mgrandl 2y ago
  I am building an app [0] with GPUI. I think it’s very ergonomic, but it’s missing so much stuff that you would expect in a GUI library. There isn’t even a text input element. I would be lying if I wasn’t thinking about jumping off. I gotta say, Iced doesn’t appear to scratch the same itch though. The only one that comes close to what I want is Vizia [1]. [0] https://github.com/MatthiasGrandl/loungy https://github.com/MatthiasGrandl/loungy [1] https://github.com/vizia/vizia https://github.com/vizia/vizia
  - james2doyle 2y ago
    Looks like TextInput was just added in the last week: https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/blob/master/widget/src/text_input.rs https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/blob/master/widget/src/text_...
    - mgrandl 2y ago
      I was talking about GPUI. In comparison Iced is way more mature.
    - airstrike 2y ago
      iced has had TextInput for 5 years now. https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/commit/63cd0fd8eb1eebae8de7d5141c846fc4ea55d702 https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/commit/63cd0fd8eb1eebae8de7d...
skerit 2y ago
I hope the theming system will be improved. Right now the only thing you can do is change the colors, padding and border radius. That's it. Flat UI design needs to die.
replete 2y ago
I spent a couple of days exploring linux distributions after deciding to drop Windows at home. It was an interesting experience, seeing how each distro approaches augmenting GNOME for desktop integration. I really like PopOS, but with the transition away from GNOME and GNOME extensions breaking between versions I went with Fedora. Looking forward to trying COSMIC out again in stable, the alpha was actually very good. Let's see how they approach extensibility, as the GNOME extension fragmentation ended up a reason for my choosing Fedora. Also if you were considering installing linux for a family member, I found ZorinOS was very good for this
- panick21_ 2y ago
  They are already making extensive use of extensibility. Much more of what is in Gnome itself is in plugins. Unlike in Gnome where all plugins are in the same JS process. Each plugin is its own process and uses Wayland to communicate. So you can have lots of complexity in a plugin, it can crash and not take down the rest.
  - tuna74 2y ago
    Can you do the equivalent change in functionality that is possible with Gnome Shell extensions?
jacek 2y ago
I had a look at COSMIC on Fedora [1]. It is fast, stable and usable, but feels little unfinished (it is an early version after all). It is not my cup of tea (maybe I am too comfortable with KDE Plasma 6), but I am glad that there's a new solid option for a desktop environment. And unlike other with DEs, where interest and development quickly fizzles out, this will probably last as it has the System76 backing. One issue that I had is fractional scaling for Electron (and older X11) apps on Wayland (same issue with Gnome and most DEs). Apps are blurry. It seems that only KDE Plasma figured it out. Plasma has an option "Apply scaling themselves", which just works. [1] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ryanabx/cosmic-epoch/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ryanabx/cosmic-epoch...
frankjr 2y ago
Installed it and on startup it immediately made a request to googleapis.com (142.251.36.106). We cannot be friends if you think this is in any way acceptable.
- tanepiper 2y ago
  On my Mac I run Little Snitch and the number of apps and os level things I've blocked for tracking is staggering at times.
- janice1999 2y ago
  A quick look at their repos suggests it could be something to do with supporting Google accounts, e.g. calendars in GNOME Accounts, or maybe to retrieve fonts? Difficult to tell without reading the related code.
  - 3np 2y ago
    gnome-online-accounts perhaps? https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/gnome-online-accounts https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/gnome-online-accounts
    - troyvit 2y ago
      If so, I'm disappointed. I thought one of the big reasons S76 was building a new desktop was to do things differently from Gnome. That said I'm a former employee and while I worked there they were very privacy focused. I don't see why that would change and I bet we'll see this solved.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    And that's fine I suppose, but it should be opt-in and not do anything before the user chooses to.
    - janice1999 2y ago
      Absolutely agree. The same goes for features like wifi login portal detection. I would much prefer it to be user triggered, or at the very least, use a self hosted service or non-Google provider like Mozilla.
1GZ0 2y ago
I'm excited about Cosmic's potential to break open the Gnome / Plasma duopoly. Not sold on the visual design of the desktop yet, but maybe I'll come around once its out of Alpha.
- severine 2y ago
  Xue the Xfce mouse LAUGHS at the notion of a duopoly!
  - tmtvl 2y ago
    As does the unnamed LXDE bird, and whatever mascots Cinnamon, MATE, Deepin, Pantheon, Budgie, and Enlightenment have. EDIT: Almost forgot about Unity, which has arisen from the ashes.
    - alskdj21 2y ago
      I still miss Unity's HUD. Imo, Unity was perfect. It has a good balance of beauty and efficiency out of the box.
      - tmtvl 2y ago
        Have you tried the new Ubuntu Unity? It's not the same as it was back in 2013 (when I last used Unity), but it's still nice in various ways.
      - schmorptron 2y ago
        Unity's (at least when I started using it with 14.04) UX, screen space usage and performance was so good. Global or locally integrated menu bar and making it searchable were great decisions. I'd much rather canonical had been successful with desktop & mobile consumer OS and upstart rather than with snappy
    - WD-42 2y ago
      Still a part of the Qt/GTK duopoly
tmtvl 2y ago
I've tried the Cosmic alpha and, while I like various things it does, I can't see myself using it as a daily driver yet: - The clock doesn't show the weekday or the year and shows the month by name rather than by number, - Can't make the stupendously oversized title bar smaller, - Can't change the mouse cursor theme, - I hate dynamic workspaces, I just want to open something on, say, workspace 3 and have it stay there. However I do like some things it does: - Independent workspaces per monitor, so if I switch workspaces on monitor 1 the workspace on monitor 2 stays the same. This is the big one which I miss in KDE, though I wonder if that means that Cosmic isn't EWMH compliant (as if it matters), - (Mostly) sane keyboard shortcuts, where (almost) every DE-specific shortcut involves the Super (AKA Meta, AKA Mod4) key. I believe Apple's OSX also does something like this where all the desktop-level shortcuts involve the CMD key, - If I move my cursor to a monitor with no open applications, hit the shortcut for the application launcher, and launch an application; then it opens that application on the monitor with the cursor. KDE (with Kwin) struggles with that, so I call that another win. For reference I'm currently trying Cosmic on Tumbleweed, some of that stuff may differ between distros.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  > - (Mostly) sane keyboard shortcuts, where (almost) every DE-specific shortcut involves the Super (AKA Meta, AKA Mod4) key. Is this also enforced for apps? I'd switch back to linux in a heartbeat if I could do this. The use of `control` as both a UI and a terminal binding basically ruins the entire os for me.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    On top of no special casing for the terminal, I find the meta key (as positioned on Mac keyboards, to the left/right of space) easier to reach than the standard Control position. That’s also addressed by replacing Caps Lock with Control, though (which I build my keyboards and remap laptops to).
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  > I wonder if that means that Cosmic isn't EWMH compliant (as if it matters), AFAIK (i haven't checked) EWMH does have provision for multiple "fake root" windows to handle multiple virtual desktops in multiple monitors, but most window managers do not bother. I think i3 (or some other popular tiling WM for X11) does support those though.
poikroequ 2y ago
I tried it out about a week ago in a VM. I like what I'm seeing so far but the alpha state is very apparent. Simply trying to configure things is still quite buggy. Then, within 5 minutes, something happened that the whole desktop is broken, just get a mostly black screen. Even after rebooting, it was still broken with no obvious way to recover. I've tried dropping into rescue mode and updating all the packages but that still didn't fix things. I couldn't find any documentation about how to recover (not even a way to reset to default settings), and don't know what else to do other than wipe out the system and reinstall. Besides that, there's still a lot of settings and functionality missing from the previous Gnome iteration. I believe they're slating for a release by the end of the year, which seems optimistic.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Software rendering isnt there yet. Did you have a hardware accilerated VM?
- filmor 2y ago
  For me it has been running with minor issues and very few crashes for the last month as my daily driver on both my work (Fedora) and my private (Gentoo) laptop.
dtx1 2y ago
I hope that cosmic manages to kill Gnome long term.
3np 2y ago
OK cool, but when a Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu 24.04 rather than 22.04? Even Mint has caught up by now. EDIT: Well, this is indeed doubles as a 24.04 LTS alpha, as noted further down in TFA.
- sethops1 2y ago
  > The COSMIC alpha on Pop!_OS is also an alpha for the latest Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS.
  - 3np 2y ago
    Derp. They buried the lede... Edited.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  That’s not going to happen until desktop Cosmic is finished, I’m sure it will be a very recent 24.04 as well. It’s a package deal and you’ll have to wait until they’re both complete. I believe the goal is spring 2025
MarketingJason 2y ago
I know it's a little thing that's probably customizable, but I can't see anything in the screenshots except the inconsistent menu bar padding.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I'm already using the PopOS window manager on NixOS, it works OK but I had to get a bit hacky to prevent hotkey collisions between it and Gnome. I bet that this will handle that for me, looking forward to trying it.
- moondev 2y ago
  I use it as well on Manjaro. It's great to have tiling without sacrificing all the creature comforts of a typical desktop.
WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
Since they have DPMS in "to do", I'll pass on this. It's not easy these days to find a compositor that doesn't screw your power management in a little subtle way. Either your displays keep waking up all the freaking time, or they won't wake up at all when you need them to, or they get blank but backlight continues to blare from them. What I liked about good ol' X was that the buck stopped with the X server, and if it was fixed there, it was fixed everywhere. Now you are in a maze of twisty little compositors, all different, all squabbling between themselves about this or that, and in the meantime nothing ever works. I bet the moment Wayland gets to a point of stability where there will be like .01% left to do to reach the complete desktop productivity and entertainment nirvana, even across all the compositors, some bored whippersnapper will declare that this .01% requires a paradigm shift and a complete rebuild from the ground up, at which point everyone will jump ship to some... Zayland, declaring Wayland obsolete effective immediately, and we'll have another decade until fonts are not shit and the clipboard works again.
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  > Now you are in a maze of twisty little compositors, all different, all squabbling between themselves about this or that, and in the meantime nothing ever works. I was about to mention that this is using wl_roots, like every other new Wayland compositor that isn't GNOME or KDE (and i remember reading some comment that even some KDE devs want to switch to wl_roots), but that was actually an assumption of mine (because it sounds like the sane(st) choice if you decide to make a new compositor) and turns out that, no, they're not using wl_roots but instead something called Smithay (which is not wl_roots bindings for Rust). [0] https://github.com/Smithay/smithay https://github.com/Smithay/smithay
sandywaffles 2y ago
I'm using the Cosmic alpha in Fedora and loving it. There are little bugs here and there, but nothing show stopping that I've seen. It's the first desktop that's been able to pry me away from KDE with tiling.
xfalcox 2y ago
I've been daily driving it on arch since the day it released and it's quite usable, with minimal bugs for my needs. I just wish they add an applet that integrates Google Calendar stuff in their calendar, so I can know if I have a meeting or something coming up at a glance.
zem 2y ago
been giving it a try for the last couple of days (switched from mate + xmonad). so far it seems pretty promising, bunch of small annoyances or missing features that will hopefully be fixed over time, but it works more smoothly than regolith (the other DE with integrated tiling support) did. primary annoyances are the lack of stable workspaces (i3 has that issue too) and the inability to remove window title bars. most apparent missing features so far are the lack of a load monitor applet and the workspace pager not showing thumbnails of what is running on each desktop. also I couldn't figure out how to put launcher buttons on the panel but not sure if that's a missing feature or something I'm missing.
rqtwteye 2y ago
I don’t know System 76’s business numbers but after owning of their devices I would much prefer if they worked on their hardware versus creating a desktop manager. This seems like a giant distraction away from their real business. And their devices definitely could improve a lot vs other brands.
- akdev1l 2y ago
  Since they announced this I have been wondering how their engineering department can justify the investment to their finance department. The only angle I see is that they believe having their own DE will help them sell more laptops. That seems like crazy assumption to me because if someone likes the DE they can just install it on their existing laptop or buy a non-System76 laptop and install it there.
  - WD-42 2y ago
    I've only become interested in buying System76 hardware since they released the DE. Simply because I know it will be the best experience for it and the purchase will go towards funding development of Cosmic.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Well the company is own by a person who is invovled with both and he started the company to move forward the open ecosystem of software and hardware. Could be invested better. Maybe, maybe not. In terms of marketing, this certainy has gotten their name out there. Between PopOS and Cosmic they are becoming known globally in the whole linux world. Every single linux influencer has been reporting on this. PopOS is an often recommended distro. Would it be better to buy google ads. Maybe in the short term. But the money would go towards their overall goal. In the long term being the company know to be behind the best open hardware and open software projects seems like a better strategy.
- uhtred 2y ago
  What's wrong with their hardware? I bought a desktop from them and it's rock solid, literally frozen on me once and that was probably a gnome bug and nothing to do with the hardware. I think if they can supply there hardware with a smooth and modern desktop they will have an amazing product.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? You can kick the alpha tires on System76's Cosmic, a new Linux desktop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234849 - Aug 2024 (10 comments) Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192303 - Aug 2024 (198 comments) Cosmic Desktop Close to Alpha Release, Adds Compositor Multi-Threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948942 - July 2024 (4 comments) Cosmic Desktop: Hammering Out New Cosmic Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40074383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40074383 - April 2024 (110 comments) Cosmic Desktop Is Slated to Debut with Pop _OS 24.04 LTS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418855 - Feb 2024 (46 comments) Cosmic Desktop: Closing in on a Cosmic Alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372762 - Feb 2024 (19 comments) Cosmic: The Road to Alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984739 - Jan 2024 (17 comments) System76's Cosmic Desktop Working Toward Its Alpha Release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959271 - Jan 2024 (10 comments) Pop _OS Cosmic Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor and Multi-Window Support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656529 - Dec 2023 (43 comments) Locked and Loaded with New Cosmic DE Updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970594 - Oct 2023 (28 comments) COSMIC DE: Desktop environment created for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36725105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36725105 - July 2023 (148 comments) Cosmic DE update: System76's new Linux desktop environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599094 - Jan 2023 (260 comments) Pop_OS Cosmic Desktop to Make Use of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066593 - Oct 2022 (93 comments) Cosmic: System76 take auto-tiling intuitive desktop environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683615 - June 2021 (1 comment) System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26798080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26798080 - April 2021 (414 comments)
dlahoda 2y ago
rust is sexy, but i prefer system76 invest to become apple in hardware(failures of hardware, noise, cheap easy to break plastic), not software(may be little software around kernel and drivers updates). my laptop died with well known display dash gpu issue, and once upgrade failed so i had to follow some esoteric command line things in recovery. afaik framework they started rust ui thing is not that may be wins idiomatic rust ui(qt slash gnome of rust). so guess there will be rewrite. and yeah, i sorrow bying system76 while being in europe, better go was local msi or even mac pro.
nikodunk 2y ago
In general, it seems like a bad idea to "start over from a clean slate" in Open Source software. More wood behind fewer arrows seems like the way to go, to avoid fragmentation, bike shedding and re-inventing wheels. But of the best things to happen to Node in the past few years was Bun and Deno. Node's pace of improvement has improved dramatically once it got some real competition to be inspired by. While I like the Gnome desktop project, they do sometimes feel a little slow in their rate of innovation & their openness to innovation. Merge requests that everyone's pretty much on board with can be open for years. Maybe Cosmic desktop's “fork” (technically re-build) and a little competition will speed them up like Node was sped up by Bun and Deno!
tekknik 2y ago
I’ve recently switched over to nixos and hyprland and couldn’t be happier. Linux UIs are stagnating all all seem to be coalescing around GNOMEs styling which I don’t particularly for. Hyprland with nix breaths new life into linux for me.
- jarbus 2y ago
  Wow, haven’t seen this before, hyprland looks amazing. Any issues with this setup?
  - tekknik 2y ago
    none so far

272 points by fisian 2y ago

The release page doesn't make it very clear what Cosmic is and does. The product page is better: https://system76.com/cosmic https://system76.com/cosmic [EDIT]: also useful : https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cosmic+desktop+environment https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cosmic+desktop+...

looperhacks 2y ago
I don't want to be mean, instead I want to learn how such an announcement can be done better. On my screen, the very first line (third sentence, but the first two are pretty short): > COSMIC, our new desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros After that, a link to the very page you linked. What more should a release post do?
- raziel2p 2y ago
  The link to the page uses the text "has been released". It's not intuitive at all that clicking this text would bring you to a page to learn more about what Cosmic is. The text "COSMIC, our new desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros" could have been the clickable link instead.
- agos 2y ago
  include a screenshot and a description of its key feature. give a bit of context!
airbreather 2y ago
well call me stupid, but I am running POP OS! 22.04 currently and can't quite really understand from their excitement web-page how I would try cosmic without a system re-install?
- hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
  You could download and flash the .iso to a usb flash drive, then boot from that to try it out (don't choose to install it, if you're given that option)
- panick21_ 2y ago
  You can just install cosmic, and then switch from gnome to cosmic. Or you can use the cosmic apps under gnome as well. The instructions are in the cosmic epoch git repo. That will get you pretty close. I am already using the Cosmic apps quite a bit.

kombine 2y ago

I wish the project best of luck, though I feel that it is going to take them years in order to reach parity with KDE, which combined with Qt took decades to bring to its current feature set.

noisy_boy 2y ago
I started with Cosmic on Pop! 22.04 which was fine but then I wanted to try KDE and installed it and stayed with it after I found it to more customizable as per my preferences. At this point I feel like I probably should have just used Kubuntu instead and be up-to-date (Pop! is still stuck at 22.04). Everything works though and I am too lazy to risk issues / dealing with time spent on setting everything again.
teekert 2y ago
I hope they won't go for parity with KDE. KDE is great, but it's enormous. If you like it, go for it. This is almost more for the OpenBox or perhaps Gnome folks. Minimalists. Curated, opinionated, fast (yes KDE is also fast)
panick21_ 2y ago
It will take years until KDE will have tiling as good as Cosmic does now
WD-42 2y ago
It’s impressive how far they’ve got in only a year.

hkmaxpro 2y ago

Interesting Reddit discussion: When a user compliments the alpha release being lightweight and free of memory leaks, the discussion quickly moves to how the MVU design pattern in the GUI library (iced) might have helped. https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/1f2suin/cosmic_alpha_released_heres_what_people_are_saying/lkavaxa/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/1f2suin/cosmic_alph...

airstrike 2y ago
iced is beautiful. you can write a fully featured GUI app running at ~40MB memory

oerdier 2y ago

Pop!_OS has been my daily driver for three years and counting. I think its desktop enviroment is already fine, with a few annoyances (hiding the top bar requires GNOME Toolkit and doesn't work reliably). I've been following the progress of Cosmic casually. To me it seems a slightly more [cohesive|streamlined|robust] version of the current desktop, which would be great. Although it also seems like for non-early adopters like myself who just want to use something that works and gets out or their way is a long way off. Videos reviewing the alpha version say this fairly universally.

Arisaka1 2y ago
Unfortunately the one thing that will always keep me to Fedora is System76's disinterest in keeping the repositories somewhat up to date with the rest of the world. It boggles my mind why is there no Debian-based distro that are either bleeding edge or at the very least on par with Fedora's freshness in terms of updates.
- vondur 2y ago
  Cosmic is available for Fedora too.
- dak89 2y ago
  Good news: I heard on a podcast with someone from System76 that they plan to support Fedora with an official Cosmic spin!
  - RDaneel0livaw 2y ago
    I heard that too and am very excited for this! When I build my new machine with a new rdna4 machine, this'll be the distro/de I'll use at first bootup.
- cassianoleal 2y ago
  > why is there no Debian-based distro that are either bleeding edge Debian testing or sid are more or less that. Barring major upgrades (Plasma 6 is taking some time), most packages are kept quite up-to-date.

oguz-ismail 2y ago

It looks exactly like Gnome. What's the point?

dathinab 2y ago
it not being Gnome Gnome comes with a lot of baggage both technical and organizational, this has lead to situations where Pop_OS! wasn't able to manage/change/improve things like they think they needed to do hence why they started to create Cosmic. Just be clear this was a business decision by system76 to some degree, not just some "I don't like it so I created something even if it doesn't make sense" decision. it looks like Gnome because it's for people which had been using Gnome so far, but it's just similar not the same and likely will only diverge more over the next many years assuming it succeeds
- Lutger 2y ago
  Isn't the business decision exactly whats being questioned? Not saying it is a bad decision, but I did have the same question. Was it really necessary to write a completely new DE just to make some tweaks easier to implement? Would love to hear more details about this. At first glance, it seems like a truly massive effort for a marginal improvement, that could have been made with a fraction of the cost. I'm probably wrong though, hopefully.
  - WD-42 2y ago
    The situation between System76 and Gnome had become untenable. The modifications they wanted to make to the shell were too many and the Gnome devs don't want to support any of it. I read somewhere that 50% of the development time on Pop_Os was spent simply un-breaking the Gnome shell extension between releases of GNOME. Now they can put that time into creating what they actually want.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    The problem was that the Gnome crowd is going increasingly in a different direction. Mutter already doesnt support a number of otherwise universal protocol. The way theming work is compelely changed. There are lots of other reason why staying with gnome was an increasing problem for them. All those reasons are only growing bigger. So to support what they wanted and what they promise their costumers they would have to do increasingly more and more work, in direct oppositon the the gnome community. Essentially eventially forking it. And then they have to maintain a huge legacy codebase. And they didnt wirte a completly new one. The compositor was already a project. So was Iced. They use lots of other existing project in the Rust ecosystem. Now they are on their own, free to build what they want, rather then endlessly pushing a rock up a mountain. They can now make more fundamental changed that would never have been possible in Gnome. They are also free to build the community they want rather then deal with the Gnome community. This also makes them a player in the Wayland community, another voice that can push protocols.

baq 2y ago

I'm looking around for a good Linux laptop. Any recommendations? I didn't check anything out in person, but have looked at reviews of framework, system76, thinkpads and there hasn't been one where there haven't been serious complaints (e.g. bent parts in some framework 16s causing the whole thing to rattle.) (Is an M1 Air with Asahi a good idea?)

colordrops 2y ago
You haven't found a single Thinkpad without serious complaints? What kind of complaints?
- baq 2y ago
  The literally first google hit for L14 gen 5 in my filter bubble has a tldr of 'mixed bag'; granted, for an AMD SKU. Would you recommend an Intel version?
  - pantalaimon 2y ago
    The L series are crap no matter what CPU
    - Refusing23 2y ago
      i have an E14 for work and its trackpad is garbage same with the keyboard layout
      - pantalaimon 2y ago
        T and P series are good, X series can be so-so L and E are Lenovo's entry/low cost models
      - BoredPositron 2y ago
        That "FN" Key placement boggles my mind.

ThePhysicist 2y ago

I'm excited that they push Iced [1], a Rust-based cross-platform UI framework. Probably not the Rust framework which I would've betted on as the most promising one, but with the broad support and larger adoption I hope it will catapult it into the mainstream, we really need a good UI library that's not a web renderer. I was also quite excited about GPUI [2] but there seems to be very little activity in the repo for now (hard to judge though, I imagine they're just busy hacking on the editor). I wanted to write a desktop app with Rust for a while and considered Tauri, Flutter (via rust-flutter-bridge) or a native framework like Iced, I think with the larger adoption it might make sense to go with Iced, though it's probably still much more experimental than frameworks like Flutter. 1: https://iced.rs/ https://iced.rs/ 2: https://www.gpui.rs/ https://www.gpui.rs/

mgrandl 2y ago
I am building an app [0] with GPUI. I think it’s very ergonomic, but it’s missing so much stuff that you would expect in a GUI library. There isn’t even a text input element. I would be lying if I wasn’t thinking about jumping off. I gotta say, Iced doesn’t appear to scratch the same itch though. The only one that comes close to what I want is Vizia [1]. [0] https://github.com/MatthiasGrandl/loungy https://github.com/MatthiasGrandl/loungy [1] https://github.com/vizia/vizia https://github.com/vizia/vizia
- james2doyle 2y ago
  Looks like TextInput was just added in the last week: https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/blob/master/widget/src/text_input.rs https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/blob/master/widget/src/text_...
  - mgrandl 2y ago
    I was talking about GPUI. In comparison Iced is way more mature.
  - airstrike 2y ago
    iced has had TextInput for 5 years now. https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/commit/63cd0fd8eb1eebae8de7d5141c846fc4ea55d702 https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/commit/63cd0fd8eb1eebae8de7d...

skerit 2y ago

I hope the theming system will be improved. Right now the only thing you can do is change the colors, padding and border radius. That's it. Flat UI design needs to die.

replete 2y ago

I spent a couple of days exploring linux distributions after deciding to drop Windows at home. It was an interesting experience, seeing how each distro approaches augmenting GNOME for desktop integration. I really like PopOS, but with the transition away from GNOME and GNOME extensions breaking between versions I went with Fedora. Looking forward to trying COSMIC out again in stable, the alpha was actually very good. Let's see how they approach extensibility, as the GNOME extension fragmentation ended up a reason for my choosing Fedora. Also if you were considering installing linux for a family member, I found ZorinOS was very good for this

panick21_ 2y ago
They are already making extensive use of extensibility. Much more of what is in Gnome itself is in plugins. Unlike in Gnome where all plugins are in the same JS process. Each plugin is its own process and uses Wayland to communicate. So you can have lots of complexity in a plugin, it can crash and not take down the rest.
- tuna74 2y ago
  Can you do the equivalent change in functionality that is possible with Gnome Shell extensions?

jacek 2y ago

I had a look at COSMIC on Fedora [1]. It is fast, stable and usable, but feels little unfinished (it is an early version after all). It is not my cup of tea (maybe I am too comfortable with KDE Plasma 6), but I am glad that there's a new solid option for a desktop environment. And unlike other with DEs, where interest and development quickly fizzles out, this will probably last as it has the System76 backing. One issue that I had is fractional scaling for Electron (and older X11) apps on Wayland (same issue with Gnome and most DEs). Apps are blurry. It seems that only KDE Plasma figured it out. Plasma has an option "Apply scaling themselves", which just works. [1] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ryanabx/cosmic-epoch/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ryanabx/cosmic-epoch...

frankjr 2y ago

Installed it and on startup it immediately made a request to googleapis.com (142.251.36.106). We cannot be friends if you think this is in any way acceptable.

tanepiper 2y ago
On my Mac I run Little Snitch and the number of apps and os level things I've blocked for tracking is staggering at times.
janice1999 2y ago
A quick look at their repos suggests it could be something to do with supporting Google accounts, e.g. calendars in GNOME Accounts, or maybe to retrieve fonts? Difficult to tell without reading the related code.
- 3np 2y ago
  gnome-online-accounts perhaps? https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/gnome-online-accounts https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/gnome-online-accounts
  - troyvit 2y ago
    If so, I'm disappointed. I thought one of the big reasons S76 was building a new desktop was to do things differently from Gnome. That said I'm a former employee and while I worked there they were very privacy focused. I don't see why that would change and I bet we'll see this solved.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  And that's fine I suppose, but it should be opt-in and not do anything before the user chooses to.
  - janice1999 2y ago
    Absolutely agree. The same goes for features like wifi login portal detection. I would much prefer it to be user triggered, or at the very least, use a self hosted service or non-Google provider like Mozilla.

1GZ0 2y ago

I'm excited about Cosmic's potential to break open the Gnome / Plasma duopoly. Not sold on the visual design of the desktop yet, but maybe I'll come around once its out of Alpha.

severine 2y ago
Xue the Xfce mouse LAUGHS at the notion of a duopoly!
- tmtvl 2y ago
  As does the unnamed LXDE bird, and whatever mascots Cinnamon, MATE, Deepin, Pantheon, Budgie, and Enlightenment have. EDIT: Almost forgot about Unity, which has arisen from the ashes.
  - alskdj21 2y ago
    I still miss Unity's HUD. Imo, Unity was perfect. It has a good balance of beauty and efficiency out of the box.
    - tmtvl 2y ago
      Have you tried the new Ubuntu Unity? It's not the same as it was back in 2013 (when I last used Unity), but it's still nice in various ways.
    - schmorptron 2y ago
      Unity's (at least when I started using it with 14.04) UX, screen space usage and performance was so good. Global or locally integrated menu bar and making it searchable were great decisions. I'd much rather canonical had been successful with desktop & mobile consumer OS and upstart rather than with snappy
  - WD-42 2y ago
    Still a part of the Qt/GTK duopoly

tmtvl 2y ago

I've tried the Cosmic alpha and, while I like various things it does, I can't see myself using it as a daily driver yet: - The clock doesn't show the weekday or the year and shows the month by name rather than by number, - Can't make the stupendously oversized title bar smaller, - Can't change the mouse cursor theme, - I hate dynamic workspaces, I just want to open something on, say, workspace 3 and have it stay there. However I do like some things it does: - Independent workspaces per monitor, so if I switch workspaces on monitor 1 the workspace on monitor 2 stays the same. This is the big one which I miss in KDE, though I wonder if that means that Cosmic isn't EWMH compliant (as if it matters), - (Mostly) sane keyboard shortcuts, where (almost) every DE-specific shortcut involves the Super (AKA Meta, AKA Mod4) key. I believe Apple's OSX also does something like this where all the desktop-level shortcuts involve the CMD key, - If I move my cursor to a monitor with no open applications, hit the shortcut for the application launcher, and launch an application; then it opens that application on the monitor with the cursor. KDE (with Kwin) struggles with that, so I call that another win. For reference I'm currently trying Cosmic on Tumbleweed, some of that stuff may differ between distros.

darby_nine 2y ago
> - (Mostly) sane keyboard shortcuts, where (almost) every DE-specific shortcut involves the Super (AKA Meta, AKA Mod4) key. Is this also enforced for apps? I'd switch back to linux in a heartbeat if I could do this. The use of `control` as both a UI and a terminal binding basically ruins the entire os for me.
- jwells89 2y ago
  On top of no special casing for the terminal, I find the meta key (as positioned on Mac keyboards, to the left/right of space) easier to reach than the standard Control position. That’s also addressed by replacing Caps Lock with Control, though (which I build my keyboards and remap laptops to).
badsectoracula 2y ago
> I wonder if that means that Cosmic isn't EWMH compliant (as if it matters), AFAIK (i haven't checked) EWMH does have provision for multiple "fake root" windows to handle multiple virtual desktops in multiple monitors, but most window managers do not bother. I think i3 (or some other popular tiling WM for X11) does support those though.

poikroequ 2y ago

I tried it out about a week ago in a VM. I like what I'm seeing so far but the alpha state is very apparent. Simply trying to configure things is still quite buggy. Then, within 5 minutes, something happened that the whole desktop is broken, just get a mostly black screen. Even after rebooting, it was still broken with no obvious way to recover. I've tried dropping into rescue mode and updating all the packages but that still didn't fix things. I couldn't find any documentation about how to recover (not even a way to reset to default settings), and don't know what else to do other than wipe out the system and reinstall. Besides that, there's still a lot of settings and functionality missing from the previous Gnome iteration. I believe they're slating for a release by the end of the year, which seems optimistic.

panick21_ 2y ago
Software rendering isnt there yet. Did you have a hardware accilerated VM?
filmor 2y ago
For me it has been running with minor issues and very few crashes for the last month as my daily driver on both my work (Fedora) and my private (Gentoo) laptop.

dtx1 2y ago

I hope that cosmic manages to kill Gnome long term.

3np 2y ago

OK cool, but when a Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu 24.04 rather than 22.04? Even Mint has caught up by now. EDIT: Well, this is indeed doubles as a 24.04 LTS alpha, as noted further down in TFA.

sethops1 2y ago
> The COSMIC alpha on Pop!_OS is also an alpha for the latest Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS.
- 3np 2y ago
  Derp. They buried the lede... Edited.
EasyMark 2y ago
That’s not going to happen until desktop Cosmic is finished, I’m sure it will be a very recent 24.04 as well. It’s a package deal and you’ll have to wait until they’re both complete. I believe the goal is spring 2025

MarketingJason 2y ago

I know it's a little thing that's probably customizable, but I can't see anything in the screenshots except the inconsistent menu bar padding.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

I'm already using the PopOS window manager on NixOS, it works OK but I had to get a bit hacky to prevent hotkey collisions between it and Gnome. I bet that this will handle that for me, looking forward to trying it.

moondev 2y ago
I use it as well on Manjaro. It's great to have tiling without sacrificing all the creature comforts of a typical desktop.

WesolyKubeczek 2y ago

Since they have DPMS in "to do", I'll pass on this. It's not easy these days to find a compositor that doesn't screw your power management in a little subtle way. Either your displays keep waking up all the freaking time, or they won't wake up at all when you need them to, or they get blank but backlight continues to blare from them. What I liked about good ol' X was that the buck stopped with the X server, and if it was fixed there, it was fixed everywhere. Now you are in a maze of twisty little compositors, all different, all squabbling between themselves about this or that, and in the meantime nothing ever works. I bet the moment Wayland gets to a point of stability where there will be like .01% left to do to reach the complete desktop productivity and entertainment nirvana, even across all the compositors, some bored whippersnapper will declare that this .01% requires a paradigm shift and a complete rebuild from the ground up, at which point everyone will jump ship to some... Zayland, declaring Wayland obsolete effective immediately, and we'll have another decade until fonts are not shit and the clipboard works again.

badsectoracula 2y ago
> Now you are in a maze of twisty little compositors, all different, all squabbling between themselves about this or that, and in the meantime nothing ever works. I was about to mention that this is using wl_roots, like every other new Wayland compositor that isn't GNOME or KDE (and i remember reading some comment that even some KDE devs want to switch to wl_roots), but that was actually an assumption of mine (because it sounds like the sane(st) choice if you decide to make a new compositor) and turns out that, no, they're not using wl_roots but instead something called Smithay (which is not wl_roots bindings for Rust). [0] https://github.com/Smithay/smithay https://github.com/Smithay/smithay

sandywaffles 2y ago

I'm using the Cosmic alpha in Fedora and loving it. There are little bugs here and there, but nothing show stopping that I've seen. It's the first desktop that's been able to pry me away from KDE with tiling.

xfalcox 2y ago

I've been daily driving it on arch since the day it released and it's quite usable, with minimal bugs for my needs. I just wish they add an applet that integrates Google Calendar stuff in their calendar, so I can know if I have a meeting or something coming up at a glance.

zem 2y ago

been giving it a try for the last couple of days (switched from mate + xmonad). so far it seems pretty promising, bunch of small annoyances or missing features that will hopefully be fixed over time, but it works more smoothly than regolith (the other DE with integrated tiling support) did. primary annoyances are the lack of stable workspaces (i3 has that issue too) and the inability to remove window title bars. most apparent missing features so far are the lack of a load monitor applet and the workspace pager not showing thumbnails of what is running on each desktop. also I couldn't figure out how to put launcher buttons on the panel but not sure if that's a missing feature or something I'm missing.

rqtwteye 2y ago

I don’t know System 76’s business numbers but after owning of their devices I would much prefer if they worked on their hardware versus creating a desktop manager. This seems like a giant distraction away from their real business. And their devices definitely could improve a lot vs other brands.

akdev1l 2y ago
Since they announced this I have been wondering how their engineering department can justify the investment to their finance department. The only angle I see is that they believe having their own DE will help them sell more laptops. That seems like crazy assumption to me because if someone likes the DE they can just install it on their existing laptop or buy a non-System76 laptop and install it there.
- WD-42 2y ago
  I've only become interested in buying System76 hardware since they released the DE. Simply because I know it will be the best experience for it and the purchase will go towards funding development of Cosmic.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Well the company is own by a person who is invovled with both and he started the company to move forward the open ecosystem of software and hardware. Could be invested better. Maybe, maybe not. In terms of marketing, this certainy has gotten their name out there. Between PopOS and Cosmic they are becoming known globally in the whole linux world. Every single linux influencer has been reporting on this. PopOS is an often recommended distro. Would it be better to buy google ads. Maybe in the short term. But the money would go towards their overall goal. In the long term being the company know to be behind the best open hardware and open software projects seems like a better strategy.
uhtred 2y ago
What's wrong with their hardware? I bought a desktop from them and it's rock solid, literally frozen on me once and that was probably a gnome bug and nothing to do with the hardware. I think if they can supply there hardware with a smooth and modern desktop they will have an amazing product.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? You can kick the alpha tires on System76's Cosmic, a new Linux desktop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234849 - Aug 2024 (10 comments) Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192303 - Aug 2024 (198 comments) Cosmic Desktop Close to Alpha Release, Adds Compositor Multi-Threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948942 - July 2024 (4 comments) Cosmic Desktop: Hammering Out New Cosmic Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40074383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40074383 - April 2024 (110 comments) Cosmic Desktop Is Slated to Debut with Pop _OS 24.04 LTS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418855 - Feb 2024 (46 comments) Cosmic Desktop: Closing in on a Cosmic Alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372762 - Feb 2024 (19 comments) Cosmic: The Road to Alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984739 - Jan 2024 (17 comments) System76's Cosmic Desktop Working Toward Its Alpha Release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959271 - Jan 2024 (10 comments) Pop _OS Cosmic Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor and Multi-Window Support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656529 - Dec 2023 (43 comments) Locked and Loaded with New Cosmic DE Updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970594 - Oct 2023 (28 comments) COSMIC DE: Desktop environment created for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36725105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36725105 - July 2023 (148 comments) Cosmic DE update: System76's new Linux desktop environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599094 - Jan 2023 (260 comments) Pop_OS Cosmic Desktop to Make Use of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066593 - Oct 2022 (93 comments) Cosmic: System76 take auto-tiling intuitive desktop environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683615 - June 2021 (1 comment) System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26798080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26798080 - April 2021 (414 comments)

dlahoda 2y ago

rust is sexy, but i prefer system76 invest to become apple in hardware(failures of hardware, noise, cheap easy to break plastic), not software(may be little software around kernel and drivers updates). my laptop died with well known display dash gpu issue, and once upgrade failed so i had to follow some esoteric command line things in recovery. afaik framework they started rust ui thing is not that may be wins idiomatic rust ui(qt slash gnome of rust). so guess there will be rewrite. and yeah, i sorrow bying system76 while being in europe, better go was local msi or even mac pro.

nikodunk 2y ago

In general, it seems like a bad idea to "start over from a clean slate" in Open Source software. More wood behind fewer arrows seems like the way to go, to avoid fragmentation, bike shedding and re-inventing wheels. But of the best things to happen to Node in the past few years was Bun and Deno. Node's pace of improvement has improved dramatically once it got some real competition to be inspired by. While I like the Gnome desktop project, they do sometimes feel a little slow in their rate of innovation & their openness to innovation. Merge requests that everyone's pretty much on board with can be open for years. Maybe Cosmic desktop's “fork” (technically re-build) and a little competition will speed them up like Node was sped up by Bun and Deno!

tekknik 2y ago

I’ve recently switched over to nixos and hyprland and couldn’t be happier. Linux UIs are stagnating all all seem to be coalescing around GNOMEs styling which I don’t particularly for. Hyprland with nix breaths new life into linux for me.

jarbus 2y ago
Wow, haven’t seen this before, hyprland looks amazing. Any issues with this setup?
- tekknik 2y ago
  none so far