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'd recommend everyone to try out cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) when they get a chance. Whether you use COSMIC or not, it's fully functional with any desktop environment. It's packaged by default in Pop!_OS 22.04, available in Fedora 40 via ryanabx/cosmic-epoch, and the AUR.
I'd recommend everyone to try out cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) when they get a chance. Whether you use COSMIC or not, it's fully functional with any desktop environment. It's packaged by default in Pop!_OS 22.04, available in Fedora 40 via ryanabx/cosmic-epoch, and the AUR.
It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community....
If COSMIC is pathetic, then GNOME must be abysmally unusable.
COSMIC was already planned long before there was any beef with GNOME.
We listen to user feedback and prioritize development of features that our developers and users want.
Good luck trying to replicate COSMIC's theming and tiling capabilities in GNOME.
Let alone the overall stability and performance of COSMIC.
COSMIC Store is the fastest app store on Linux now. I'd recommend everyone to try it out. sudo apt install cosmic-store
There's a very large gap between having tiling, and having excellent auto-tiling capabilities with intuitive shortcuts and behaviors. COSMIC's autotiling was designed from the ground up to be just as usable with a mouse as it is with a keyboard.
GNOME Shell extensions are JavaScript monkey patch injections to gnome-shell's JavaScript process. They're only compatible with the exact version of gnome-shell that they target because most of them require to override private internals of gnome-shell that are sensitive to order of injection and names of private variables and methods.
COSMIC uses a modern Wayland-based approach to shell interface design with layer-shell applets. Each applet is its own process, using the layer-shell Wayland protocol to render their windows as shell components, and communicating with the compositor securely with the security context Wayland protocol. The protocols they use are standardized, so they will be stable across COSMIC releases. Other Wayland compositors could integrate with them if they desire to.
Ubuntu is Debian with more up-to-date packages and a lot of additional third party packages. There's a lot of companies who produce development toolkits, frameworks, and applications that are explicitly built for the Ubuntu base. Some governmental agencies and organizations also require access to packages and repositories that have been audited by security agencies, which Ubuntu has gone through the process of getting certification for certain kernels and their Ubuntu Pro repositories. All of which are useful for real world customers.
Regardless of shortcomings in Snap, Pop does not rely on Snaps, and offers its own packaging for things that would otherwise require Snap on Ubuntu.
Speaking of being defensive, not only are you being far more defensive than I, but these bullet points are both misleading and wildly inaccurate. It's also telling that you think none of my points are good, when they are the truth. Could you possibly be even more a hypocrite?
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.
It should be noted that COSMIC itself hasn't been delayed. Development on the core applications progressed much faster than expected, so we decided to skip the Alpha 1 release and release Alpha 2 instead.
Why wouldn't you like using it right now? I wouldn't call it "very alpha".
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.
Merging Dock with Panel | Ft Cosmic ( www.youtube.com )
A Week in Cosmic on BARE METAL! ( www.youtube.com )
A Blog to Satisfy Your Monthly COSMIC Fix(es) ( blog.system76.com )
A Blog to Satisfy Your Monthly COSMIC Fix(es) ( blog.system76.com )
[ META ] What is the community's opinion of Pop!_OS?
It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community....
Why are cosmic apps so slow to load?
My laptop is running modern hardware with NVME drive and has 64GB of RAM. Running Pop!_OS 22.04 with Gnome/Wayland....
LinuxFest Northwest 2024: Meet COSMIC DE ( www.youtube.com )
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: https://lemmy.world/post/13038090...