My main gripe with most Linux DEs is inconsistent UI and lacking app ecosystem. For now, only GNOME is addressing these issues with GNOME Circle (I already like and use apps like Spot, Paper, Amberol, Warp, and others) while having a good-looking UI. Also, GNOME is the only DE with usable trackpad gestures. If COSMIC is going to use GTK4 for UI and implement trackpad gestures similar to these found in macOS or GNOME, it would be probably my main DE.
I am beyond excited, I expect it to be my next fulltime DE. I like aspects of the GNOME workflow but I don't like how opinionated it is and how adding extensions or swapping out modules carries a risk with it. you've actually reminded me that I want to install Pop and try out the work in progress COSMIC to see how far along it is.
I hope that it's able to be competitive with KDE and Gnome. These 2 desktop-environments are good, but they're also basically opposites in every way. I'd love to see what a third approach might look like.
I know that there's others already, but most of them aren't about new idea for how a desktop environment should works, but instead about preserving something from the past. I'm interested in seeing a novel approach!
I switched to tiling window managers a good 5 or so years ago and really can't imagine using any of the DE available. I know, I know, you can run xwm in yDE, but I've never seen the point.
Tiling window management is one of the core focuses of the cosmic compositor. Taking what made pop-shell great and taking it to the next level. So you might be interested in it.
Always happy with more choice as it's one of the main things that brought me to Linux many moons ago. Don't like the way your DE does things? Well then swap it out, wholesale or otherwise. Personally, Gnome aligns very well with the way I like to use my computers but I also love to see what the KDE devs are doing with Plasma so I'm always interested in seeing another fresh take. My only real concern is that a whole DE is a heck of a lot of work and requires significant resources that will get stretched thinner and thinner with each new feature and option and I'd say they'd need a fair amount of community buy-in to keep up with it all long term in an ever changing PC market.
Skeptical. Writing a graphical UI toolkit is a freight train of work. I'm positively curious about anything that's not GTK but I'm not sure going with a new toolkit is the right decision. Qt is the mature kid on the block that's been proven in more environments than I can count. Moreover it's a complete application framework with a ton of convenience libraries needed for speedy development already included. I guess those can be supplanted in the form of separate Rust libs. Personally I'd have gone with Qt for such a project but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I'm incredibly interested in COSMIC DE! For multiple different reasons, actually.
Rust - I'm very interested to see how performant/memory-efficient this DE will be compared with other DEs. Also, I wonder how the Iced toolkit will evolve and be adopted in other projects.
Benefits over GNOME - I'm looking forward to seeing how much out-of-box customizability and features come with COSMIC over GNOME (which I'm currently using).
Maintainability going forward - Since the DE basically started from scratch and is using a much better language for robust software, I wonder how much easier and faster it would be to maintain the desktop environment. This potential improved maintainability could be huge in overtaking other DEs sometime soon.
There’s several things that make Rust more ideal for writing software that makes efficient use of resources than C or C++.
One of these is how cumbersome it is to use tagged unions in C/C++. They’re integrated as a first class citizen in Rust in the form of enums, and both the standard library and all Rust projects as a whole utilize them extensively. An example would be the Cow<'a, T> type. The compiler also has some clever tricks like zero-sized types which can reduce the size of types which contain them.
On the surface, the borrowing and ownership model is useful for guaranteeing memory safety. Yet if you take that a step further, it’s the perfect tool for finely optimizing resource usage with confidence. In comparison, defensive programming practices are the norm in C and C++ because resource management is risky. So applications written in Rust are more likely to be better optimized.
And the GNOME project doesn’t just use C/C++ right? It uses Javascript for developing all sorts of components and Python for scripting/misc utilties. That’s what I meant by more memory-efficient.
I'm excited to see it, not to use it. I'm much happier with GNOME or Sway on Fedora. Unless they provide a way to use it on other distros (which I don't see happening, since they have no reason to), I don't plan on trying it. However, I am excited to see the Rust GUI situation improve by them using it!
I don't see why it wouldn't be available to use on other distros. The current Cosmic Shell can be installed on any. Even if they don't maintain the package for each distro, someone else will.
On the technical side, they are using pure Rust to build the DE, and the Rust GUI ecosystem has been greatly improved by their hard work. If their product turns out to be successful, Iced may eventually become "the Qt of Rust".
As a user I like their design shown in current demos, and a Wayland-first DE with first class nvidia support is really needed.
A couple of months ago our company decided to standardise on only one GNU/Linux distro and they chose PopOS. While the default desktop is better then stocj GNOME it was still far away to what I am used from the powerful, featureful and customizable KDE Plasma so after about two weeks I switched to KDE Plasma (unfortunately they have an extremely old version in their repos, but still much better).
I can only guess that Cosmic will be on pair to their current improved GNOME but will still be way lacking compared to what even an old KDE Plasma offers. And I would also much more like to see if they put more attention to keeping more updated KDE Plasma and KDE software packages in their repo. Even for Cosmic I think they would be much better of basing it on the extremely flexible and configurable KDE Plasma base and make it a heavy modification of this.
What do you prefer on KDE? I've only tried once and found it felt messy and overcomplicated compared to COSMIC. Maybe that's just the Mac user in me wanting fewer choices haha
Basically how much more features it has and you miss in any other desktop. Especially in macOS, which we were forced to use at old company, I struggled with missing stuff and utterly stupid window manager. Yeah KWin window manager is especially nice in KDE Plasma. But also how much it has this LEGO-bricks like way of creating the desktop itself. All the desktop is basically constructed from small widgets and small widget containers which can behave in a very different way. So widgets (Plasmoids) are not only an addon to add to the wallpaper, they actually build up the entire desktop. And by this you can really make the desktop behave very close to what every individual person wants. Sure there are some presets that can emulate Windows or GNOME or macOS desktop, but yeah you can reconstruct that and have it your way. The similar story is there also with the apps GNOME/GTK versions usually just are to limited in functionality as far as my taste goes and I end up missing way too many.
P.S. I remembered another thing. Despite having more features and all KDE Plasma is also performing faster and is suing less resources on the computers. So just another thing I like more.
Personally, I would have preferred if they would have embraced KDE instead and dedicated resources to improve KDE even further. KDE is pretty darn good already, especially over the last year or so with all the bugfixes and feature improvements.
In any case I am happy System76 is moving away from Gnome at least, and coming up with a full-featured DE of their own rather than having to maintain hacky extensions on top of Gnome to make it usable. As a bonus, the Iced toolkit should see improvements and perhaps become the goto toolkit for Rust GUI development.
I feel like you are overestimating how much System76 would be able to contribute to KDE. Because they have been almost Rust exclusive company for some years. All of their Tools are written in Rust and their engineers clearly likes working with it. So them contributing in an new area which needs the help and is in their expertise is better imo
At first I was excited, not because of the desktop environment itself, but rather because of the headache pain points in gnome and KDE that it sought to fix. Things like fractional scaling and native HDR support as well as being built around Wayland all played to cosmics benefit. Unfortunately for cosmic, however, KDE has really improved quite drastically this past year and fixed pretty much every pain point I had with it. They seem to be shaping up to blow cosmic out of the water before it even arrives with plasma six. Gnome is doing gnome and by that I mean they fucked off and are doing their own stupid thing. I hope cosmic does well, but it would have to be the third coming of Jesus Christ to get me to switch again
Several years ago I used System76's Gnome extension for tiling on Ubuntu. But more recently I have just been using Fedora with (basically) stock Gnome and really quite satisfied.
I might check it out just out of curiosity but I trust Gnome team to put out a more polished product just due to the difference in size
I feel mixed. The shift towards COSMIC DE got me off of POP_OS. I wanted the newer Gnome features, and that stopped being their focus. I don't wanna wait 2-3 years for a great DE when I already know I like Gnome. I switched to Fedora and use Pop Shell, and am really happy with my OS now. I also felt like the public shade between Gnome devs and S76 devs was tacky. With that said, I bet Cosmic is going to be great eventually. It'll be great to have DE in the ecosystem with a focus on performance, UI, customizability, and actually looking good. Even if I don't use it, I bet it'll push the other big DEs to get better. Friendly competition is good. Also, it's ridiculous that you have to go with a WM to get tiling, and that it's not easier to get in Gnome. Real glad Pop Shell is still available, but I don't think anyone's maintaining it so it can't last.
Howdy, I'm the maintainer of the gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell Fedora package, which is likely how you installed it on Fedora since it's not available from extensions.gnome.org. I'm glad you're finding it useful.
The pop-shell upstream is still being maintained by System76 engineers. Development work has slowed down since they started working on COSMIC DE, but they're still fixing bugs and reviewing/merging contributions. When COSMIC DE was announced I asked them how long they would keep maintaining their GNOME extensions, and they said at least until the end of life of the PopOS versions the extensions are shipped in. So pop-shell has still got some life left in it, even for a few years after COSMIC DE becomes their default in a new release.
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