8 ms·

I'm actually excited to try Cosmic DE. It still has some of that Gnome Shell feeling that I like but with many features I want that we'll never see in Gnome, l

• deleted 1y ago
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• mwcz 1y ago
  I'll probably be switching over too, from sway, once Cosmic is out of beta. I love tiling, and the only thing I miss while using sway is the lack of a single integrated settings application. It's possible to couple together individual apps to manage Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Monitors and everything else, but a single settings app is much better than babysitting a dozen separate ones.
  • baobun 1y ago
    FWIW you can run i3 as WM inside, say, XFCE, if you're not married to wayland. i3 and sway are almost identical otherwise.
  • flexd 1y ago
    I use Regolith Desktop packages to run Sway with Gnome. It's basically i3/Sway + Gnome settings, and works really well. I get the benefit of a sane DE (Sway) and somewhat easier settings and defaults https://regolith-desktop.com/ https://regolith-desktop.com/
    • fhchl 1y ago
      I highly recommend regolith as well, even though the Sway session has never worked without issues for me yet. X11 is very stable.
    • mwcz 1y ago
      Very cool. I'm on Fedora and not likely to switch, but it looks like there's a lot of improvements I could crib from regolith.
• TrueSlacker0 1y ago
  "Right now if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is." This drives me crazy. I'm in a flow, distraction free via the full screen and break it to see what date or time it is. Even on a multi monitor setup. Which usually ends up meaning I get pulled out of that flow because I see a new notification on some other app or because I grabbed my phone to check that info.
  • teddyh 1y ago
    Addiction issue.
    • lukan 1y ago
      But very widespread. Do you never check your phone and realize you are now suddenly doing something completely unrelated? Phones are focus breaking by design. It takes effort, silencing them.
      • tracker1 1y ago
        I live by timers/alarms on my phone... if I don't set an alarm/timer, I'll never break focus for meetings etc.
      • teddyh 1y ago
        > But very widespread. Yes. Does that invalidate the fact? > Do you never check your phone and realize you are now suddenly doing something completely unrelated? How is this relevant? But, no, as it happens, I don’t. > Phones are focus breaking by design. It takes effort, silencing them. Maybe your phone. Those who get an addictive phone may get addicted, and it does take effort to break an addiction.
    • messe 1y ago
      That's not on you to say, and pretty fucking tone deaf to boot.
      • teddyh 1y ago
• close04 1y ago
  I accidentally upgraded to the alpha (identical laptops, picked the wrong one and jumped into it) and it's been very rough and not just around the edges. Can't wait to go to beta, hopefully this addresses most of the issues. At least even the alpha was rock solid in terms of stability, so definitely fine for daily use but I didn't enjoy the user experience.
  • tormeh 1y ago
    It used to be really bad this spring, but now it's somewhat buggy but fundamentally fine. Somewhere around March games would just randomly lose focus, start stuttering, or you couldn't use fullscreen while having a secondary monitor connected, that sort of thing. Now it's mostly fine. Steam Remote Play still has issues, but this is really a niche use case.
    • tracker1 1y ago
      I've been running the 6.16 kernel via mainline for a couple months and that has taken care of most of my issues with games, running ta current gen AMD gpu. Can't speak for how much of the stability increase has been the kernel vs the DE though, just been getting more solid along the way. I just switched about 5-6 months ago though.
• yuters 1y ago
  Most things can be solved with Gnome Shell extensions, but I have to admit that having to install 5-6 extensions for basic DE features, like managing where notifications show up, makes it easier to switch to something else.
  • ChocolateGod 1y ago
    Problem is exacerbated when your GNOME Shell gets updated and takes out all your extensions.
    • heavyset_go 1y ago
      Or your extensions take out GNOME
  • alecsm 1y ago
    Most things, yes. The things I mentioned, no.
  • tracker1 1y ago
    Even then, Gnome updates regularly require massive updates to those extensions... Pop used to just do that in the box, but felt just having an entirely separate DE they control would be a better long run experience.
• cbolton 1y ago
  I'm using niri with quickshell now and it has a similar feel, as quickshell implements many features in a unified way as in Gnome Shell. In niri you can have the bar on all monitors, and you can also configure a window to fill the available space and have it "think" it's full screen while the top bar is still visible (see the toggle-windowed-fullscreen setting).
  • gorgoiler 1y ago
    Did you follow or do you have a guide or instructions for how you configured your setup?
    • seaal 1y ago
      Checkout DankMaterialShell[0], it's still in somewhat early stages of development but it supports both Niri and Hyprland. I just switched over to it from waybar in my Omarchy setup and have been loving it. [0]: https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell
    • cbolton 1y ago
      For niri I followed closely the build and "manual installation" and "example systemd setup" instructions on the website. If you do that don't forget to edit niri.service to set the correct path for the executable. For Quickshell I basically followed the website instructions but here are my notes from when I installed on Debian Trixie: git clone https://git.outfoxxed.me/quickshell/quickshell sudo apt install cmake qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-shadertools-dev spirv-tools pkg-config libcli11-dev qt6-wayland-private-dev qt6-svg-dev ninja-build qt6-svg-plugins libjemalloc-dev wayland-protocols libdrm-dev libqtqmlmodels-dev 'qt6-*-private-dev' libpam0g-dev Do not install ddcutil: it prevents detection of the external monitor except if the monitor is turned off and on again. cmake -GNinja -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCRASH_REPORTER=OFF ignore warnings `The qml plugin 'xxx' is a dependency of 'quickshell'...` cmake --build build cmake --install build For the Quickshell config I used Noctalia. This means installing some dependencies like fonts-roboto, then cloning the noctalia repository as a directory in ~/.config/quickshell/, and finally editing the quickshell systemd service to start it with the noctalia config (command "qs -c noctalia-shell").
• j1elo 1y ago
  > [in Gnome] if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is. I know in FOSS there's a ton of enthusiastic and just non professional work (nor there should be expectations of it), but still... I'd hope the user-facing interface for an OS (or any UI, really) should be designed by people with a background on design, which doesn't seem to be the case at all with this idea. It's another example of why most of us developers should not be even touching the world of laying stuff out visually :)
  • deaddodo 1y ago
    The truth is that the GNOME community probably has the most designers and UX-focused members in its community. The problem isn’t lack of designers.
    • ChocolateGod 1y ago
      For all the hate it receives, Libadwaita is one of the nicest designed toolkits currently in-use that has more than a dozen applications using it. Having an entire CSS engine at their disposal certainly does help the designers design without needing to know programming.
    • j1elo 1y ago
      That surprises me. What kind of decision process ends up choosing to hide the primary clock in a desktop OS. It's funny imagine the meeting, people voting "yes" to this. Not even in the tiny screens (by comparison) of phones this has been done (probably proposed somewhere sometime, but thankfully denied).
      • deaddodo 1y ago
        The problem isn’t enough designers, it’s too many. There are conflicting design goals throughout the UI. All could be good/great with a cohesive system, but there is none. To answer your question, the same people that wanted the system to be a Tier 1 mobile/tablet UI.
    • ankurdhama 1y ago
• alex_duf 1y ago
  I don't understand, on Gnome when you maximize a window (drag to top) you can still see the time. Now if you're talking about complete fullscreen, like when watching a video, I' don't understand the use case. Either you want fullscreen or you don't?
  • card_zero 1y ago
    Baffled me too but I get it now, they want fullscreen on the first monitor and a clock on the second.
    • alex_duf 1y ago
      Ah thanks, I was so confused
    • Dusseldorf 1y ago
      I agree GP was talking about the multi monitor scenario, but I also run into trouble with just one monitor. If I'm playing a full screen game and want to know what time it is, there's no way to focus the task bar without closing the game entirely. On Windows, hitting the start button while in a fullscreen app will give focus to the taskbar so you can glance at the time and immediately return to the game.
      • wltr 1y ago
        Yeah, I lost so many Warcraft III games on Battle.net, when I accidentally pressed that pesky button, while having a pretty decent computer with 256 MB RAM. I ended up facing a separate keyboard without the key (and some others too). Thankfully, these days when I want to play a bit (with a computer, sigh) on my Sway setup, yeah, it doesn’t react to that button. Saying all that, yeah, I never considered that — having your game being lost to buggy and slow Windows — a feature. I wouldn’t want that even today, having 125 times more RAM than 20 years ago.
        • iknowstuff 1y ago
          This is now solved because games don’t default to exclusive fullscreen anymore, so the windows compositor still runs on top of the game, so popping up the start menu is instant without any weird resolution/hdr changes
• deleted 1y ago
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• pjmlp 1y ago
  You mean like GNOME used to be usable, before the big rewrite.