I’m a System76 engineer / Pop!_OS maintainer. I’ve been a Linux user since 2007; and Rust since 2015. I’m currently working on COSMIC-related projects.
All desktops use the Super key nowadays. Sway, i3, GNOME, Plasma, etc. are all using the Super key. Have been for years. The standard convention is that the Super key is reserved for system-level shortcuts handled by the window manager; and Alt key shortcuts are reserved for application-level shortcuts. Your desktop might have bound both Alt and Super because of legacy reasons.
Did you not read the blog update? That is exactly what the blog update covered… The user’s theme colors are applied to the Adwaita theme used by GTK4/libadwaita, and GTK3 theme support is provided by adw-gtk3.
How so? 22.04 is actively maintained and updated by Ubuntu, and is still the latest LTS release. On top of that, the most important packages in Pop!_OS are updated frequently, so we are on Mesa 24.0.3 and Linux 6.8.0. As for when COSMIC releases, you should read last month’s blog post.
The cosmic toolkit has its own widget library that replaces the iced widgets. These widgets are tightly integrated with cosmic’s theme engine. The toolkit also provides its own Application/Applet traits for quickly implementing a standardized COSMIC application and applet interface. Examples are in the libcosmic repository, and you can reference cosmic-applets and other repositories for real world examples.
It is a desktop environment, which is the entire graphical user interface of the OS, and all of its bundled applications. It is also a platform which developers can build COSMIC applets and applications with. Applications being desktop applications, and applets being the shell components. Shell components are small interface elements such as the panel, dock, panel buttons, on-screen displays, launcher, etc.
It will take its place alongside the two giants in this space: KDE and GNOME. KDE being a desktop environment whose applets and applications are written in C++/JavaScript using Qt/QML as its GUI library. GNOME being and desktop environment whose applets are written in JavaScript with the GNOME Shell Toolkit; and its applications are written primarily in C with GTK as its GUI library.
COSMIC is instead built from the ground up entirely in Rust from top to bottom. Every applet and application is written in Rust, and the same libcosmic GUI library is used for developing both of them. Rust is a statically typed programming language which has dethroned C/C++ in recent years, and has been the most loved programming language on StackOverflow for the last eight years. We aim to make COSMIC the preferred platform for developing applications in Rust, with a GUI toolkit that’s easier to develop than the alternatives.
Pop!_OS 22.04 uses GNOME with a lot of custom extensions and patches. Pop!_OS 24.04 will switch to COSMIC.
GNOME Shell extensions are JavaScript monkey patches that get injected directly into the gnome-shell process, which is running inside a JavaScript runtime. So they have no effect outside of GNOME Shell.
COSMIC panels are already configurable, so there’s no need for a third party panel applet to have dock applets embedded in the panel. You can configure the panel and dock to any layout. Be that a GNOME layout, Unity layout, Mac OS layout, Windows layout, etc.
It would be redundant to rebrand Pop!_OS to COSMIC OS. The cosmos was created by a Pop!
It will be possible to configure COSMIC to look like Unity out of the box. There’s only a few panel applets that need to be implemented to make the experience 1:1.
That’s not implemented, but you can click the maximize button, or press Super+M to toggle maximization.
You can open the Appearance settings page and change that to your preferred color scheme. We’ve already selected our default colors and they’re not going to change from here on out.
What do you mean by minimal? The PrintScrn key opens the screenshot utility, which lets you choose between capturing a selected region, a specific window, or the whole display
What’s wrong with the file manager and editor? You can use whatever editor and file manager you want, so that shouldn’t be a blocker for daily use.
This can be configured in the cosmic comp config, but will be implemented in the settings app soon.
Super+W opens the workspaces view
Your distribution should make sure pop-launcher is installed, and each of its plugins symlinked.
That is already possible in the Desktop and Panel settings page. As you can see, I’m not using a GNOME style panel or dock here.
Wayland compositors have to implement the whole display server, including special handling of XWayland windows. XWayland windows can be very finicky and require caution to handle.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a cosmic-applets-community package which bundles third party applets, or the gradual inclusion of popular applets into cosmic-applets. Given that an applet would only become popular if there’s a lot of need for those use cases, then it would make sense to open a path to getting them mainlined.
You might be surprised how much disk space those GNOME Circle applications actually require, despite being dynamically linked to a lot of GTK/GNOME libraries. Unless they’re written in a scripting language, they’re much closer to a COSMIC application than you think.
I don’t see the issue with an application having a static binary within the realm of 15-25 MB. Even if you had 100 applications installed, that’s only 2 GB of disk usage.
LinuxFest Northwest 2024: Meet COSMIC DE (www.youtube.com)
April Tools: Hammering out new COSMIC Features (blog.system76.com)
Cosmic & GNOME 46 Alpha, Linux 6.7 & new SteamOS device: Linux & Open Source News (tilvids.com)
COSMIC alpha updates — March 28 (www.youtube.com)
COSMIC Tasks (lemmy.ml)
The application is still being actively developed but I wanted to share my experience working on it....
COSMIC now supports theming GTK3/4 applications (lemmy.world)
COSMIC Project Collection (lemmy.ml)
I created a GitHub repository to showcase COSMIC projects....
COSMUnity (lemmy.world)
It will be possible to configure COSMIC to look like Unity out of the box. There’s only a few panel applets that need to be implemented to make the experience 1:1.
COSMUnity (lemmy.world)
COSMIC Store Prototype (lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/13038090...