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.
I recently installed Pop on another device, everything is fine except for Pop Shop which seems to be missing apps that I already have installed through there on my main desktop....
Each time I try AMD graphics, something is fucked for me. Back with fglrx, fglrx just sucked, so I used Nvidia. Then I had an AMD right around when they finally had opensource drivers, but it was still buggy as hell. So I went with Nvidia again (first a GTX 790, then a GTX 1060). In the meantime I had a new work notebook where I...
What makes you think I’m “salty”? I’m not the one complaining about NVIDIA not working in Wayland, or saying that I’m going to sell my GPU.
The only person who is salty is the one who would rather sell their GPU than use a Wayland desktop environment that supports NVIDIA as a first class citizen.
As pointed out in This Week in GNOME, there’s been some continued work on Variable Rate Refresh for the GNOME desktop. The VRR setting within GNOME Settings continues to be iterated on as the developers iron out how they’d like to present the Variable Rate Refresh setting for users. The developers have been discussing how to...
Today I saw someone once again trash System76 for rebranding Clevo machines and writing that off as some kind of deceptive business model. Ultimately, they’re not “just rebranded Clevo…”, but even if they were, the ignorant douchebag posting this misguided rant fails to acknowledge that EVERY SINGLE LAPTOP OEM does the...
We do manufacture our Thelio desktops at our factory in Denver. We also offer tour guides for anyone that wants to schedule to see how everything is manufactured and assembled.
Our laptops are not entirely Clevo though. Some of them are manufactured by Emdoor. These companies do not sell systems directly to retail consumers, so they are not technically rebranded. They do work with us to give us the necessary schematics and documentation so that we can port our Coreboot firmware to them.
Either way, their quality is no better or worse than any other ODM out there. In fact, I’ve had Dell, ASUS, and Lenovo laptops with lesser quality than a Clevo. It will largely depend on the model that you buy as to what materials are used. I distinctively remember some YouTube reviewers mistakenly assuming some models were using plastic, when they were actually using magnesium alloy.
These issues are common and need to be fixed by either AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, or the mainboard vendor; depending on which component is causing the issue. If a kernel option helps, then that’s what you’ll have to do until they fix it upstream in the kernel or firmware.
It is fine when not put in full screen. When i put it in fullscreen mode, it shrinks to about 1/3 to 1/4 and moves to upper left corner. This happens only on a wayland session/
It wouldn’t be possible for us to build a platform toolkit, or the COSMIC platform itself, without a text editor or terminal. It would also be deeply embarrassing if we release our desktop without them. Imagine telling people they need to switch to a TTY or use a software center to install a plain text editor or terminal. It is thanks to the text editor project that we have first class text rendering across the Rust GUI ecosystem now. Without it, we wouldn’t have been achieve proper bidrectional text rendering or ligatures. The text editor project also made the terminal possible, and now any application that we develop in the future can have proper text editing widgets and embedded terminals.
That would compromise our vision of a GUI platform built from the ground up in Rust. It would also not be feasible to use Flutter for applet development. We can easily make modifications directly to iced for all the Wayland integrations that we need in COSMIC, as the iced code base is very lean, and written in Rust.
The keyword is alternative. All first party applications are written natively with our libcosmic toolkit, which is based on iced-rs. We are using a fork of iced though because we needed to implement a custom runtime with the sctk (smithay client toolkit) for COSMIC applet development, but our desktop applications will use the original winit runtime.
It would certainly be easier for them to port COSMIC because there are very few dependencies on shared C libraries. Cargo links all Rust libraries statically, so it’s easier to maintain and update components. This will depend how open they are to accepting Cargo and Rust into their ecosystems.
The GTK4 project was cancelled for multiple reasons. We originally began working on Relm4 to use GTK4 for COSMIC applets. While others on the team were also experimenting with alternative Rust GUI libraries.
It required a lot of effort to patch GTK4 to support the Wayland layer shell protocol. Getting those patches merged into GTK4 was also taking a much longer time. There were long delays between code reviews; and they also wanted a series of much larger refactoring changes to be made to GTK4 before exposing the layer shell feature. It was much easier to get layer-shell working with iced, as it is a much leaner and concise code base.
GTK does not support fractional scaling, which is something we want our applets to support on day one. This was one of our major concerns. A concern that didn’t apply to iced.
It was also exceedingly difficult to create custom widgets with GTK in Rust. Even those of us with years of experience considered it to be unreasonably difficult. So it was not feasible to expect new hires on the team to be able to comfortably develop COSMIC components with it. In comparison, our team was able to develop custom widgets with iced with much less effort and with greater flexibility, so the demand for iced grew stronger.
At the end of the day, GTK is not a Rust toolkit, and its API is cumbersome to adapt to Rust. Use of GTK would always be a compromise that lessens the developer experience for COSMIC app and applet development. A compromise that would eventually require us to rewrite everything in a native Rust GUI library the moment it would become possible to do so.
Since we are developing a desktop environment from the ground up anyway, we decided that there would be much more value for our time if we contribute to the Rust ecosystem and utilize iced to make a fully featured GUI library for application development.
Translation: no one should ever attempt to innovate on the Linux desktop. GNOME is the epitome of software development and everyone else should quietly give up. If GNOME can’t fix an issue, no one can. Only GNOME has the god-given right to make decisions on how desktops are developed for Linux. There can only be one party. The One Desktop principle. Contribute to your party leader, or else…
It is Wayland only, and fractional scaling is already supported by our toolkit since the beginning. There’s little we can do about GTK3 and GTK4 applications though, which do not support fractional scaling.
COSMIC is a Wayland desktop environment for Linux that is written in Rust with Smithay and Iced. COSMIC applications are developed with the libcosmic platform toolkit, which is based on iced. They are cross-platform and supported on Windows, Mac, and Redox OS in addition to Linux....
I don’t think you can say that because we haven’t published our design language yet. Only a handful of design mockups have been published so far. The screenshots here are not design mockups but a work in progress implementation. Hence the “In-progress” part of the title.
Rounded corners are a user preference in the Appearance page in COSMIC Settings.
Closing in on a COSMIC Alpha (blog.system76.com)
Pop Shop - inconsistent apps showing
I recently installed Pop on another device, everything is fine except for Pop Shop which seems to be missing apps that I already have installed through there on my main desktop....
AMD GPUs are cursed for me
Each time I try AMD graphics, something is fucked for me. Back with fglrx, fglrx just sucked, so I used Nvidia. Then I had an AMD right around when they finally had opensource drivers, but it was still buggy as hell. So I went with Nvidia again (first a GTX 790, then a GTX 1060). In the meantime I had a new work notebook where I...
Are we going to have kernel 6.8 before 24.04?
The base Ubuntu 24.04 LTS shipping with Linux kernel 6.8 is anticipated for release on April 25th, 2024.
GNOME Sees Progress On Variable Refresh Rate Setting, Adding Battery Charge Control (www.phoronix.com)
As pointed out in This Week in GNOME, there’s been some continued work on Variable Rate Refresh for the GNOME desktop. The VRR setting within GNOME Settings continues to be iterated on as the developers iron out how they’d like to present the Variable Rate Refresh setting for users. The developers have been discussing how to...
Actual manufacturers of laptops / desktops
Today I saw someone once again trash System76 for rebranding Clevo machines and writing that off as some kind of deceptive business model. Ultimately, they’re not “just rebranded Clevo…”, but even if they were, the ignorant douchebag posting this misguided rant fails to acknowledge that EVERY SINGLE LAPTOP OEM does the...
Graphical corruption
Sometimes when resuming from sleep, or when playing a fullscreen video, my screen will fill with white video blocks....
Wayland - QEMU (virt-manager) fullscreen is not actual fullscreen
It is fine when not put in full screen. When i put it in fullscreen mode, it shrinks to about 1/3 to 1/4 and moves to upper left corner. This happens only on a wayland session/
COSMIC DE: The Road to Alpha (blog.system76.com)
If all goes well, we can release the alpha by the end of March...
In-progress COSMIC apps: terminal, file manager, text editor, and settings (fosstodon.org)
COSMIC is a Wayland desktop environment for Linux that is written in Rust with Smithay and Iced. COSMIC applications are developed with the libcosmic platform toolkit, which is based on iced. They are cross-platform and supported on Windows, Mac, and Redox OS in addition to Linux....