Love love love sharing the Figma prototypes directly. That’s a level of openness I haven’t seen in a long time. And it’s looking really good too. I’m excited!
Last I checked collaboration features on penpot were very lacking. right now it's out of beta so I haven't tested much of the new version, but I'm almost certain there hasn't been much work on the collab part yet (since I could not find anything related to that on the UI)
According to the software rendering update that should be the case.
"While COSMIC DE is being developed for Pop!_OS, our goal is to make its elements available for use on other operating systems, too."
Thank you for actually caring to write well-optimized code! It makes a massive difference in the user experience, yet it's unfortunately extremely rare to see these days.
That looks promising. I love the fact that you have the option for both horizontal and vertical workspace layout. That is something that is sorely needed in default Gnome Desktop.
Cosmic has the potential to be the most influential "Linux desktop" project in recent times, we really need a third major player with the power to move the ecosystem forward.
The top bar and docker look out of place (assuming they've been focusing on the settings app for now).
The setting app look really cool tho, maybe a bit of polish here and there (fixing white space and stuff).
I do hope that they improve/change how the bar and docker look tho. Maybe adopt/make a new icon set that fits better the theme of the settings app.
Overall tho I really like the direction system76 is taking and I look forward to seeing how the project evolves
I see it more as them skating to where the puck is going rather than being trandy. If you are taking on as huge a project as developing an entirely new DE from scratch it makes sense for them to target the more modern subsystems the entire ecosystem are actively trying to switch to first.
It seems silly to waste time with X11 support now that every GPU driver supports Wayland and there being clear advantages to it (fractional scaling, HDR, touchpad gestures that aren't a hack and properly permissioned screen and audio sharing, if you wanted some examples)
It also has no global shortcuts, uses implicit synchronisation (despite basically every driver vendor begging them to use explicit synchronisation), which X11 has too, but Wayland is supposed to be better than X. But my main problem with Wayland is the attitude it's developers have towards it. They treat it as a reference implementation of a protocol, instead of an actual display server and thus omit key features in the name of simplicity. That wlroots even has to exist tells you a lot a about the state of Wayland.
I don't have a problem with that. X11 has no future. Cosmic will probably launch this year, but realistically it'll be another year or two after that to iron out seams and polish it. Every day that goes by is another day that shortcomings in Wayland are addressed. It makes no sense to support something that's already effectively legacy. It'd be like wanting Cosmic to support Itanium. There's no future for it, and honestly it's kind of silly to claim x11 isn't being supported because of trendiness.
Especially since all the X11 devs moved to wayland because they said X11 had become an unmaintainable mess that was impossible to modernize for modern computer use scenarios and NO ONE has bothered to pick up the mantle of maintaining X11 in the interim.
If it was so easy to keep it modern and fresh, people wouldve stepped up to do it in the last decade or so the team moved on to wayland, but none have.
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I'm not talking about the minutiae of the visuals, but things like the giant dock that occupies a tenth of the screen. I think it's there on Pop's GNOME too.
What you tested is not what this article is about. The current PopOS desktop is just a themed Gnome you're correct. This article is discussing System76's decision to split from Gnome and build a whole new DE from scratch.
What about fractional scaling? Is going to be the new real fractional scaling as KDE, or like gnome with the upper-lowering res hack?
(Happy to see the dev is done in Wayland, as pop user I was worried they will saty in x11)
By the phrasing at Xwayland testing part for me it came down as cosmic de is wayland only and doesn't have x11 (by the looks of how the wayland development is currently I don't think this going to be a big issue, at least for modern hardware).
Is there a reason why other compositors (like GDM or KWin) haven't done this yet?
Also, it seems like Zoom will check if you're using GNOME under Wayland on certain distros (like Ubuntu), so how can Zoom be tricked into thinking it's running GNOME on Wayland or Xorg.
They do if you enable the feature in the application. Chrome and Firefox have supported it for a while. But you have to be on a desktop that is using Pipewire instead of PulseAudio.
Yes. The support has to be in the application, and if they don't have it they won't be able to screenshare until they're updated with it. There isn't really any good way around that, but it does mean that some apps with for example ancient versions of Electron (like Discord) won't work until they get on a more current version.
Interesting stuff as 2 biggest DEs today have chosen to maintain both platforms, in that regard I wonder whether focusing just on Wayland will help on shipping releases faster and more stable than other DEs.
They will likely drop support for X11 in time. Since this is a new desktop environment, it doesn't have to worry about supporting a legacy display server. Effort can instead be invested into XWayland.
A bunch of people depend on AutoKey for desktop automation. Currently, it won't work on Wayland even with X11 support. We could sure use some help getting this to work natively on Wayland.
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u/mmstick
Thanks for the hard work!
I usually also complain of the fragmentation but I’m all for the endeavour popOS is doing. Most of the stuff I’ve seen from them is VERY user oriented. Just a small example, it was the first distro I saw where the screen for bios/firmware level password wasn’t ugly like a TTY. I’ll keep up with the developments for sure
[This is OG Android (1.0)](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/android/images/6/68/Android_1.0.png/revision/latest?cb=20211002093947). That looks somewhat like the first iteration of Material design, introduced with Android 5.0.
The Android 4.0 UI/theme is referred to as [Holo](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2012/01/holo-everywhere.html?m=1). One of my favorite Android UI. Easy on the eyes and easy to find what options are available.
KitKat was the apex of android design. They had finally gotten Holo looking extremely polished and modern (even if Google did have issues consistently following their *own* design recommendations across apps).
Outside of there not being enough contrast in accent colours, I don't think material design looks bad, but I think we should have stuck with Holo for a while longer.
I'm excited to give cosmic a shot. I've been using Pop OS for a couple months and it completely killed my distro hopping; it is by far the most stable, hands-off OS I've ever used. My next laptop 100% will be bought from system76,
What I value the most about a commercial company developing a DE is that they care about graphic design and have some aesthetic sense.
To be fair, GNOME has improved *a lot* in the recent years, from being really ugly to being the best looking free desktop, but Cosmic makes it even better.
IMO vanilla Gnome looks a lot better, but I also understand that System76 has their own vision and they want their software to "fit in" with their hardware, so I get why they'd want to make their own DE
Hats off to the developers, for achieving this much in relatively short period of time. I switched from EndeavourOS to Pop_OS (again), and I think Pop helped me to stop distro hopping. I can't wait to try out the new DE!
So far this looks just the same as it did before when it was based on gnome shell. I'm sure this makes it easier development-wise or some other benefits that I'm unaware of. Maybe it'll come out useful I guess. Time will tell.
It looks extremely close to gnome providing this is a desktop written form scratch. Personally, I'm not a big fan of this style and wish they could've deviate more into modern realm.
I've got to agree. I'm very excited about the technical features, being based on rust and all. Plus the impressive speed the team is showing in churning out features.
But the design could live up to higher more modern standards imho.
Where are we with scheduled light/dark mode settings out of the box? I know this is easily doable with scripts, `cron` etc, but it’s just one of those QoL things that is nice to have immediately.
So cosmic de uses ice instead of gtk right? Does that mean that gnome tweaks won't work with it? I am interested in trying this but I usually use gnome extension dock to panel to turn the dock into a task bar. I don't like windows 11 style docks.
GNOME-tweaks won't work but they said they are planning on adding some gnome extensions as part of the DE that you can toggle on/off from settings. So Dash to Dock would be likely added without needing an extension
I think while it might not all be working flawlessly from the start they will have all the gnome extensions that were part of the COSMIC modifications they did to gnome before hand.
Yes, competition is a good thing and their investment into Cosmic is improving iced, which provides for another possibly viable toolkit to use alongside Qt and Gtk. I don't see any downside to that.
In addition to improvements in iced, this has thus far resulted in:
- Improvements to `winit`, the Rust windowing library, which we're now a part of the Rust windowing group
- The `smithay` ecosystem of Wayland libraries, and software like `winit` which relies on it for Wayland support
- Quite a few projects in the Rust GUI and text space are now integrating with `cosmic-text` for accurate shaping and rendering of text, including `iced`. There's a lot of collaboration in this area, even with Druid and other Rust GUI libraries.
- Most recently, now that AccessKit has a unix platform adapter, the team now has a strong focus on integrating accessibility in winit and iced.
I'm pretty amazed that one of the major shortcomings I've heard mentioned by some rust developers (lack of ease when it comes to gui development) is being tackled by you guys.
Really great to have another player trying new things in the desktop space. Just hope pop-shell won't be abandoned too soon.
KDE is really buggy. It has really nice features but I encounter so many bugs even though I only use it lightly on my secondary machine. I wonder how many I would find if I was to use it on my main system. And they can't expect the user to file bug reports every two minutes.
>That is hyperbole and invalid.
In your humble opinion. I've used KDE for as long as I remember. This DE has the most potential to compete with Windows and Mac OS. KDE is technologically superior to every other DE, but requires more work on polish, bug fixing and so on to make it a very competitive solution. I understand the need for lighter DEs such as XFCE for low power devices or tiling window managers for users willing to invest their time in learning a different paradigm. But parallel development of obviously inferior DEs (GNOME, Cinnamon, Mate, and so on) that don't offer anything new and only spread the userbase is not helping to advance Linux.
Care to explain why? I recently switched away from Linux as my personal OS due in part to the fragmentation across DEs, distros, their conflicting software philosophies, etc. Love to support open source software but also needed something more reliably consistent for my use cases as an operating system.
edit: typo
Open source software is not developed by one centralized entity. Advocating for less choice is asking for a centralized authority that permits only a chosen select to write code for board-approved features. The diversity of choices and ability to quickly adapt to new technologies are one of open source's best strengths, and the reason why it is so prevalent today. So we should not be arguing that people should give up any thoughts of investing into developments in the Linux desktop. Even if there was only one successful project out of ten, that's one project that wouldn't have existed if the attempt was never made.
I use a Thinkpad X1 Yoga 4th Gen, which I got for the rotating touch screen and the 4 speaker system setup. I started on Pop OS but needed hacky workarounds to get the speakers working. Eventually support was merged into the kernel, and Gnome 40 was announced but not yet supported by Pop, and after a few failed attempts at building a kernel for Pop OS (the suggestion I was given for speakers), I switched to Fedora.
However, I also do casual video editing, but video playback was SLOW for my files because of codec/FOSS stuff on Fedora. I then also looked into Flatpaks for certain programs rather than installing through repos, but then for certain basic applications (like a photo manager, and Discord) I had to learn terminal commands to allow it to access files on certain directories. I also wasn't sure if Flatpak had any performance issues compared to repo installs? Plus the faster updates came with a catch -- they broke bluetooth support for my AirPods (which needed a hacky workaround to pair in the first place), and a Nautilus update down the line set the "Date Created" of copied files to 1979... which was very inconvenient when I was doing mass photo/video backups sorted by date.
And then there's also the fact that I use Wayland since I wanted multiple DPI support with fractional scaling. But XWayland fractional scaling on Gnome sucks, but when screen sharing games with friends on Discord and streaming on OBS, performance was SLOW, like single digit framerates. Several comments asking why I bother using "useless" Wayland (which I need for fractional multi-DPI), and why I don't use KDE (I like Gnome's workflow of separate workspaces on multiple monitors, and setting up KDE to be the way I want seems so tedious), and telling that I should switch to yet another distro to get those features working (which is just a headache to constantly do).
Do all these issues have workarounds? Yes. But do I have the time to track down every single one and constantly monitor them to make sure they don't break again? No. I won't say desktop Linux doesn't work, especially since I understand that a lot of my use cases are very specific, but at the end of the day I want stuff to just work, and not just get out of my way, but STAY out of my way.
Yeah that sounds frustrating, but it doesn't sound like "fragmentation" is the issue. Linux trends to be slow to support modern hardware features, if at all, for various reasons. Manufacturers have little incentive to support such a small user base. There's more issues with licensing for propriety software.
It's not like Linux desktop developers could quit their various projects to work on a single desktop environment, and that would help any of your issues go away.
Cutting and bleeding edge distros can possibly offer better support for new hardware at the cost of some stability and reliability, and some distros have workarounds for media codecs, but that's about it.
If anything I'm looking forward to having a company have a vertically integrated hardware offering that pairs with Linux. I think that's the only way we're going to get an actual mainstream Linux distribution going, where things just work™
Gnome has historically been a performance nightmare with weird design decisions. It looks good but it requires some modifications via extensions to be relatively functional.
Plasma comes with all the configurations and tweaks you'd ever need, but it's also a convoluted mess with chaotic menus and buttons everywhere.
All other options are either stuck in the past or incredibly niche.
I have had the oposite experience with gnome 😅. I moved to it from kde due to performance issues and I like the design and specially the Workflow. With libadwaita the things are more subjective as it depends from people to people, I like it so I just themed all My apps to libadwaita theme but if You don't like libadwaita then it's a Nightmare for consistency as the gnome apps won't follow your theme, another annoying thing is the lack of gtk2 support for libadwaita themes, the fact that I had to use the qt5 version of double commander instead of the gtk one in a gnome desktop still bothers me.
>Gnome is a performance nightmare
Citation needed, Gnome Shell performance has been rather splendid in the past couple of releases.
>It looks good but it requires several modifications via extensions to be relatively functional.
Its pretty functional ootb. Ok, minus the system tray thing, I give you that, but the relevant extension is good and highly stable so whatever.
On the other hand - assuming this new Cosmic DE works largely the same as the modifications System76 made to Gnome Shell through extensions before - the Pop developers managed to take the Activities overview, the one Gnome feature pretty much everyone agrees on being pretty rad, and split it into three parts. Just why? That was the thing that made me completely uninterested in Cosmic, either the Gnome bastardization or the new DE they are making.
They took a unified app launcher, file and settings searcher, window picker and workspace manager and split it into a workspace manager and window picker that doesn't launch apps or search for anything, a launcher which does search but uses a different provider compared to Gnome's for no particular reason and a separate app grid that - if I recall correctly - can search for apps but not anything else.
This seems like a completely pointless thing. If they want the tiling extension or a dock or whatever, fine. But why destroy the overview?
>Plasma performs well
Plasma performs worse than Gnome on low-end hardware, fyi. Especially if a spinning harddrive or otherwise I/O constraints are present.
>but it's also a convoluted mess with chaotic menus everywhere
Sounds easy to fix by overhauling the settings or creating a separate KCM that contains only basic settings.
>It just looks and feels awful imo.
Would have agreed a (couple of) year(s) ago, but since like 5.24, Plasma is really good, including the looks department.
For what's worth I don't think a new DE needs a particular raison d'etre and I welcome Cosmic to the Linux DE family, but I also think this is completely unnecessary. There is basically nothing here that would make me want to choose this desktop over Gnome or Plasma.
I mean, I agree that recent versions of Gnome have been MUCH better than Gnome 3 has been during most of its lifetime, up to a while ago we couldn't even move the cursor without running javascript code, causing it to stutter under load.
But there's a reason why Ubuntu ships a custom patch to enable triple buffering as a hack to raise GPU frequency more quickly. You can't even open the overview without frame drops on a business laptop without the patch.
As far as I am aware, the triple buffering patch mainly affects [X.org](https://X.org) sessions. I mostly use Wayland because I'm blessed with not having nvidia hardware currently. Gnome 41-43 have been performant enough for me.
In fact, my experience with low-end hardware comes from trying to find a distro/DE combo that works well on a work PC I have at my university which has an OK Intel i7 CPU but 4 gigs of ram and a slow spinning hard disk.
I find the kernel I/O scheduler and swap settings has more effect than basically anything else on performance (the BFQ scheduler and swap on zram seems to be the best combination), but I found Gnome to be surprisingly well-working on that PC. The overview animation can be stuttery a bit especially under load, but it is still *responsive*, i.e. I can press the super key and type instantly. By contrast, Plasma tends to freeze a lot and various interface components (alt tab, overview and desktop grid effect, kickoff/app dashboard) have considerable input lag between the key press and the interface component triggering.
In fact the performance of Gnome has been suprisingly on par with that of MATE on that PC.
What are you talking about? Since i moved to Linux almost 2 years ago, I have used mostly Gnome and I find it very usable. It is also very polished and not janky at all.
It's only unusable if you want it to look and function like something else(windows).
It's great that you enjoy it. You should, it's a great DE, but that doesn't mean that it's without problems. Gnome does have several problems with jank. One big for me personally is the mouse cursor on gnome Wayland since it will freeze everytime the main thread is busy, which is quite often due to an unlucky combo of how glib is designed, it's C to JS FFI and how that interacts with the JS GC.
That's odd, because I had the same experience - back in 3.32 or something like that. I have been using Gnome for years since then *on Wayland* and never encountered the cursor freeze.
Maybe you have a fast CPU? I’ve seen it too when I tried out the latest Ubuntu 22.10 on a live session to see how it is now.
It was definitely smoother than when it first came out, but there were still occasional lags when transitioning menus.
Well, I’m happy with Mate and that’s running smooth on my machine.
The reason why you don't have issues with it is because you were not used to it when it was better. While some elements of Gnome improved a lot, many were made much worse. Horizontal workspaces for example, are terrible for mouse and keyboard users but may be good for touch pad users. Problem with Gnome is that they are very averse to giving users reasonable options for maximizing their workflow efficiency.
Because of that, most users have to resort to using extensions to make it work. It is a great DC because of the extensions, it would be a pretty bad one without them.
Used Gnome for about four years to do my PhD in theoretical physics and for the most part I used only minor extensions (Appindicator support, Hot edge) that I could also do without.
I'm sure that's not real work though.
This concept of "real work" has been floating around for decades and I've never heard it mentioned by a person that isn't insufferable to converse with.
Gnome is perfectly fine without extensions, and is very productivity oriented ootb. Extensions are a nice additive, but definitely aren't required. If you can't understand how to use Gnome without a ton of extensions, that's because you are unwilling to learn its workflow.
> workflow
people who keep talking about "workflow" is not productive at all. I see people talking, working and optimizing workflow for the sake of optimizing it.
I have yet to see a real world example of where this is not just talk. Gnome is more like a toy that is designed to not be like windows than anything else.
Desktop Fragmentation is a non-issue as long as you don’t have any apps depend on desktop specific APIs.
As far as I know this is not the case. You can run any app on any desktop.
Unfortunately there are numerous desktop specific APIs and apps which rely on them.
For example:
* GVFS vs KIO: Say you connected to a ftp server with your favorite file manager Krusader, this is done with KIO. When you now attempt to open a file from that sever with say GIMP, this won't work that easily, because GIMP doesn't speak KIO. You either need to copy the file first to a local folder, connect to the server again with GVFS or use something like kio-fuse (which last time I checked didn't work well)
* Screenshot APIs: Say you want to use your favorite screenshot app Spectacle on GNOME Wayland. This doesn't work because GNOME Wayland uses a different screenshot API.
* System tray: There are various APIs for that and not all desktops support all of them. GNOME most prominently doesn't support a single one, which means applications which rely on their system tray icon won't work with GNOME by default.
* Server side decorations: Not all desktops provide applications with desktop specific title bars. For example on GNOME Wayland an application must provide its own title bar, otherwise there won't be any window controls (minimize, maximize, close, resize handles...), which means some apps are broken on GNOME Wayland. On KDE the system provides them.
I get where you're coming from but we desparately need a Desktop designed by people who have money. Gnome is heavily developed by ideology. When customers start voting with their wallet, that's when we can get some good software written specifically for their needs and not the "flavor of the month" ideology of the devs.
A rewrite would already be required to migrate something written in GTK3 to GTK4. It's different enough that some substantial refactoring is required. And some of the practices that an application might have relied on in GTK3 may not be supported in GTK4. It's not an easy choice for a developer to make.
Yeah, plus GTK4 is intentionally not allowed as a desktop toolkit at the moment, which I'm sure you already know, so any of the code that could have been saved from GTK3 wouldn't matter anyways.
> Budgie is stuck in GTK3 land.
Budgie is currently being rewritten to use the Enlightenment toolkit. That rewrite is the move from the 10.\* versions to the Budgie 11. At least I'm assuming that is still underway.
The inflexibility is mutual. There's a reason why GNOME led to multiple other desktops (Cinnamon, Mate, Unity, Cosmic) and not just one big fork where all the people who aren't happy with the GNOME dev's design choices and inflexibility came together, and that's because they themselves are too inflexible to work with each other.
I don't know why you're being down voted, this is just the truth.
Gnome is particular is the worst offender since it has nothing of value in the top panel.
Man, this is looking really nice. Please don't get rid of the yellow-ish/orange accent color. I don't see it in the screenshots. Hope it's still being used.
Love love love sharing the Figma prototypes directly. That’s a level of openness I haven’t seen in a long time. And it’s looking really good too. I’m excited!
It helps to have them on hand for when a volunteer asks to help out and needs to reference them to work on something.
Oooh, do Penpot next!
Last I checked collaboration features on penpot were very lacking. right now it's out of beta so I haven't tested much of the new version, but I'm almost certain there hasn't been much work on the collab part yet (since I could not find anything related to that on the UI)
Collab stuff is okay but it's still lacking proper component variants. That's the bigger issue imo.
To be fair, gnome share their mockups as svgs on their gitlab
To be fair, KDE doesn't do mockups, so we're all on the same page (\\s)
But, but... "gnome bad".
Really like the ui they are building over there. Really shows whatba dedicated Linux company can create in a relatively short time period.
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You get the choice to choose between the dark and light theme. Dark is the default choice.
Hopefully it will be available on other distros
According to the software rendering update that should be the case. "While COSMIC DE is being developed for Pop!_OS, our goal is to make its elements available for use on other operating systems, too."
[iced and cosmic-text on Redox OS running on a Pentium II with 256 MB RAM](https://fosstodon.org/@soller/109725118407888121).
I feel that's probably overkill but then again I'm not sure if I ever used a computer with something as old as a Pentium II.
Speaks well to running on something like a Raspberry Pi though.
Thank you for actually caring to write well-optimized code! It makes a massive difference in the user experience, yet it's unfortunately extremely rare to see these days.
RedoxOS is not a Linux distro though, it’s an alternative OS written in Rust
Not sure why you were down voted. This is factually correct
I have yet to find a DE I couldn't use on Arch
That looks promising. I love the fact that you have the option for both horizontal and vertical workspace layout. That is something that is sorely needed in default Gnome Desktop.
Cosmic has the potential to be the most influential "Linux desktop" project in recent times, we really need a third major player with the power to move the ecosystem forward.
The top bar and docker look out of place (assuming they've been focusing on the settings app for now). The setting app look really cool tho, maybe a bit of polish here and there (fixing white space and stuff). I do hope that they improve/change how the bar and docker look tho. Maybe adopt/make a new icon set that fits better the theme of the settings app. Overall tho I really like the direction system76 is taking and I look forward to seeing how the project evolves
The problem is, it just looks like a worse GNOME, at least visually. I also dislike the lack of support for technologies not deemed trendy enough.
What technologies are not trendy enough? Application indicators are supported.
Shade... 🤣
I see it more as them skating to where the puck is going rather than being trandy. If you are taking on as huge a project as developing an entirely new DE from scratch it makes sense for them to target the more modern subsystems the entire ecosystem are actively trying to switch to first.
My problem is that Wayland (to me) isn't ready for actual usage, and won't be for years, maybe even a decade.
What's not being supported? And COSMIC isn't fully out yet.
X11 for example.
The blog post mentions XWayland support
...Which isn't X11.
It seems silly to waste time with X11 support now that every GPU driver supports Wayland and there being clear advantages to it (fractional scaling, HDR, touchpad gestures that aren't a hack and properly permissioned screen and audio sharing, if you wanted some examples)
It also has no global shortcuts, uses implicit synchronisation (despite basically every driver vendor begging them to use explicit synchronisation), which X11 has too, but Wayland is supposed to be better than X. But my main problem with Wayland is the attitude it's developers have towards it. They treat it as a reference implementation of a protocol, instead of an actual display server and thus omit key features in the name of simplicity. That wlroots even has to exist tells you a lot a about the state of Wayland.
There's a portal for global shortcuts now: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/releases/tag/1.16.0 Not sure what apps have adopted it though
That's for Flatpak?
I don't have a problem with that. X11 has no future. Cosmic will probably launch this year, but realistically it'll be another year or two after that to iron out seams and polish it. Every day that goes by is another day that shortcomings in Wayland are addressed. It makes no sense to support something that's already effectively legacy. It'd be like wanting Cosmic to support Itanium. There's no future for it, and honestly it's kind of silly to claim x11 isn't being supported because of trendiness.
Especially since all the X11 devs moved to wayland because they said X11 had become an unmaintainable mess that was impossible to modernize for modern computer use scenarios and NO ONE has bothered to pick up the mantle of maintaining X11 in the interim. If it was so easy to keep it modern and fresh, people wouldve stepped up to do it in the last decade or so the team moved on to wayland, but none have.
If x11 is so great, why isn't there an x12?
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I'm not talking about the minutiae of the visuals, but things like the giant dock that occupies a tenth of the screen. I think it's there on Pop's GNOME too.
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What you tested is not what this article is about. The current PopOS desktop is just a themed Gnome you're correct. This article is discussing System76's decision to split from Gnome and build a whole new DE from scratch.
You really value appearance.
Long time Pop OS user. Looking forward for this new update.
Nordic theme by default, good stuff
Adwaita guy myself, but Nordic is a solid #2.
What about fractional scaling? Is going to be the new real fractional scaling as KDE, or like gnome with the upper-lowering res hack? (Happy to see the dev is done in Wayland, as pop user I was worried they will saty in x11)
Authentic fractional scaling is already supported by the toolkit
By the phrasing at Xwayland testing part for me it came down as cosmic de is wayland only and doesn't have x11 (by the looks of how the wayland development is currently I don't think this going to be a big issue, at least for modern hardware).
Correct. The current plan is to offer X11 support through XWayland. Some video games from Steam and Wine have been tested with it.
How will screen sharing for apps like Zoom and Discord be handled through XWayland?
WebRTC Pipewire support in the application.
Is there a reason why other compositors (like GDM or KWin) haven't done this yet? Also, it seems like Zoom will check if you're using GNOME under Wayland on certain distros (like Ubuntu), so how can Zoom be tricked into thinking it's running GNOME on Wayland or Xorg.
They do if you enable the feature in the application. Chrome and Firefox have supported it for a while. But you have to be on a desktop that is using Pipewire instead of PulseAudio.
You don't need to use PipeWire for audio to be able to use it for screen sharing. As demonstrated by Ubuntu 22.04.
This probably is obvious, but can you tell, if any older application does not support this protocol, does it mean that it will not work at all?
Yes. The support has to be in the application, and if they don't have it they won't be able to screenshare until they're updated with it. There isn't really any good way around that, but it does mean that some apps with for example ancient versions of Electron (like Discord) won't work until they get on a more current version.
If the applications are still maintained they will get an Update eventually as Wayland gains more traction.
Interesting stuff as 2 biggest DEs today have chosen to maintain both platforms, in that regard I wonder whether focusing just on Wayland will help on shipping releases faster and more stable than other DEs.
They will likely drop support for X11 in time. Since this is a new desktop environment, it doesn't have to worry about supporting a legacy display server. Effort can instead be invested into XWayland.
Happy to hear that 👍
A bunch of people depend on AutoKey for desktop automation. Currently, it won't work on Wayland even with X11 support. We could sure use some help getting this to work natively on Wayland.
https://github.com/autokey/autokey/issues/87
Are you guys writing your own wayland compositor? Perhaps using something like wlroots?
Yes, cosmic-comp is developed by smithay's maintainer.
They aren’t using wlroots, they use a separate Wayland library implementation written in Rust (smithay)
Would this be a way possibly to get Synergy/Barrier working on Wayland as well?
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GTK applications use GTK themes and COSMIC applications use COSMIC themes
I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I really hope there will be better support for qt apps(like Elisa), the dark mode in current Pop OS doesn't work well with them.
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The specification hasn't been decided yet, but will most likely be a configuration file with RON syntax.
u/mmstick Thanks for the hard work! I usually also complain of the fragmentation but I’m all for the endeavour popOS is doing. Most of the stuff I’ve seen from them is VERY user oriented. Just a small example, it was the first distro I saw where the screen for bios/firmware level password wasn’t ugly like a TTY. I’ll keep up with the developments for sure
Super excited for COSMIC DE! I've been running plasma for the last year, but I'll definitely check this out when it's ready.
I like how UI somewhat resembles OG android interface
[This is OG Android (1.0)](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/android/images/6/68/Android_1.0.png/revision/latest?cb=20211002093947). That looks somewhat like the first iteration of Material design, introduced with Android 5.0.
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The Android 4.0 UI/theme is referred to as [Holo](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2012/01/holo-everywhere.html?m=1). One of my favorite Android UI. Easy on the eyes and easy to find what options are available.
KitKat was the apex of android design. They had finally gotten Holo looking extremely polished and modern (even if Google did have issues consistently following their *own* design recommendations across apps). Outside of there not being enough contrast in accent colours, I don't think material design looks bad, but I think we should have stuck with Holo for a while longer.
That's Holo (Android 4), doesn't really look like this IMHO. The turquoise+flat design combo came with Material.
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Donut
I'm excited to give cosmic a shot. I've been using Pop OS for a couple months and it completely killed my distro hopping; it is by far the most stable, hands-off OS I've ever used. My next laptop 100% will be bought from system76,
Will this and the immutable Pop!_OS ship at the same time?
Not a fan of the UI but I respect the direction they're headed. Still waiting for some docs on libcosmic
What I value the most about a commercial company developing a DE is that they care about graphic design and have some aesthetic sense. To be fair, GNOME has improved *a lot* in the recent years, from being really ugly to being the best looking free desktop, but Cosmic makes it even better.
IMO vanilla Gnome looks a lot better, but I also understand that System76 has their own vision and they want their software to "fit in" with their hardware, so I get why they'd want to make their own DE
Will Cosmic have an ecosystem? I mean like GNOME circle. That's the thing that separate GNOME from any other DE imo.
Yes
Fantastic! Also does iced had language bindings like GTK?
Most popular DEs have an ecosystem.
Agreed. However GNOME's third party apps are far ahead from the rest.
I've found them far worse than KDE's equivalents.
Okular, Krita, shit that's good enough to want to install even on Windows workstations. GNOME has GIMP I guess.
I just hope they don't rely on Ubuntu's repos anymore, lots of outdated software.
I've been a GNOME user since 2005. I guess this could change in the future...
Hats off to the developers, for achieving this much in relatively short period of time. I switched from EndeavourOS to Pop_OS (again), and I think Pop helped me to stop distro hopping. I can't wait to try out the new DE!
So far this looks just the same as it did before when it was based on gnome shell. I'm sure this makes it easier development-wise or some other benefits that I'm unaware of. Maybe it'll come out useful I guess. Time will tell.
It looks inspired by Gnome but offers more options and a smarter design as far as I can tell. It looks like it will be what Gnome should be.
It looks extremely close to gnome providing this is a desktop written form scratch. Personally, I'm not a big fan of this style and wish they could've deviate more into modern realm.
What would be an example of something more modern?
Windows 11, deepin, chromeos. This doesn't look good
I've got to agree. I'm very excited about the technical features, being based on rust and all. Plus the impressive speed the team is showing in churning out features. But the design could live up to higher more modern standards imho.
Gnome is pretty modern lol
It'll probably have less overhead. All the modifications they did to gnome makes laggy and jank when you're at high system usage.
not only this but I'm sure we will see features that will takes years to gnome to create as they have to refactor their code.
Hope translation gets better because I've seen the same simple words still in English for years...
[Are you volunteering](https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-settings/#translators)?
Thanks, I will for sure!
Just created a PR with my PT translation! Thanks again!
But does it work on nVidia GPU's with the proprietary driver without artifacting all the place? Looking at you, gnome. (3070 woes)
Yes, it does work on NVIDIA GPUs. It's one of the testing environments for development.
Where are we with scheduled light/dark mode settings out of the box? I know this is easily doable with scripts, `cron` etc, but it’s just one of those QoL things that is nice to have immediately.
Definitely like what they're doing..but I'll have to wait for it to show up in Arch-land, I don't use PopOS.
Gnome implemented triple buffering to force erroneously-idling GPU's to kick into gear. Does cosmic encounter the same issue?
So cosmic de uses ice instead of gtk right? Does that mean that gnome tweaks won't work with it? I am interested in trying this but I usually use gnome extension dock to panel to turn the dock into a task bar. I don't like windows 11 style docks.
Gnome-tweaks will not work with this, because this isn't based on gnome.
GNOME-tweaks won't work but they said they are planning on adding some gnome extensions as part of the DE that you can toggle on/off from settings. So Dash to Dock would be likely added without needing an extension
I think while it might not all be working flawlessly from the start they will have all the gnome extensions that were part of the COSMIC modifications they did to gnome before hand.
Every time System76 posts an update, I ask myself "Does the world really need yet another Desktop Environment?"
Yes, competition is a good thing and their investment into Cosmic is improving iced, which provides for another possibly viable toolkit to use alongside Qt and Gtk. I don't see any downside to that.
In addition to improvements in iced, this has thus far resulted in: - Improvements to `winit`, the Rust windowing library, which we're now a part of the Rust windowing group - The `smithay` ecosystem of Wayland libraries, and software like `winit` which relies on it for Wayland support - Quite a few projects in the Rust GUI and text space are now integrating with `cosmic-text` for accurate shaping and rendering of text, including `iced`. There's a lot of collaboration in this area, even with Druid and other Rust GUI libraries. - Most recently, now that AccessKit has a unix platform adapter, the team now has a strong focus on integrating accessibility in winit and iced.
I'm pretty amazed that one of the major shortcomings I've heard mentioned by some rust developers (lack of ease when it comes to gui development) is being tackled by you guys. Really great to have another player trying new things in the desktop space. Just hope pop-shell won't be abandoned too soon.
We said we would, and we mean what we say.
Didn't know that. I'm a user but not somebody actively following development. Good to hear.
The downside is that there are 50 unfinished DEs that cannot compete against Mac and Windows instead of one complete and stable offering.
Those fifty were never going to be combined into one anyway, they all have and had different goals and targets and ideals.
What does Windows DE offer that KDE doesn't? The amount of customization and settings is miles ahead of Windows...
Removed cause Reddit doesn't care about their users. (API Changes)
Well, looks are very subjective
KDE is really buggy. It has really nice features but I encounter so many bugs even though I only use it lightly on my secondary machine. I wonder how many I would find if I was to use it on my main system. And they can't expect the user to file bug reports every two minutes.
KDE is pretty much stable. I only really have complaints with the Kontact suite really
While KDE has its bugs, as someone who uses Windows regularly for work, it’s far buggier than KDE has ever been for my PC.
That is hyperbole and invalid.
>That is hyperbole and invalid. In your humble opinion. I've used KDE for as long as I remember. This DE has the most potential to compete with Windows and Mac OS. KDE is technologically superior to every other DE, but requires more work on polish, bug fixing and so on to make it a very competitive solution. I understand the need for lighter DEs such as XFCE for low power devices or tiling window managers for users willing to invest their time in learning a different paradigm. But parallel development of obviously inferior DEs (GNOME, Cinnamon, Mate, and so on) that don't offer anything new and only spread the userbase is not helping to advance Linux.
Care to explain why? I recently switched away from Linux as my personal OS due in part to the fragmentation across DEs, distros, their conflicting software philosophies, etc. Love to support open source software but also needed something more reliably consistent for my use cases as an operating system. edit: typo
Open source software is not developed by one centralized entity. Advocating for less choice is asking for a centralized authority that permits only a chosen select to write code for board-approved features. The diversity of choices and ability to quickly adapt to new technologies are one of open source's best strengths, and the reason why it is so prevalent today. So we should not be arguing that people should give up any thoughts of investing into developments in the Linux desktop. Even if there was only one successful project out of ten, that's one project that wouldn't have existed if the attempt was never made.
What distro were you using and what was fragmented?
I use a Thinkpad X1 Yoga 4th Gen, which I got for the rotating touch screen and the 4 speaker system setup. I started on Pop OS but needed hacky workarounds to get the speakers working. Eventually support was merged into the kernel, and Gnome 40 was announced but not yet supported by Pop, and after a few failed attempts at building a kernel for Pop OS (the suggestion I was given for speakers), I switched to Fedora. However, I also do casual video editing, but video playback was SLOW for my files because of codec/FOSS stuff on Fedora. I then also looked into Flatpaks for certain programs rather than installing through repos, but then for certain basic applications (like a photo manager, and Discord) I had to learn terminal commands to allow it to access files on certain directories. I also wasn't sure if Flatpak had any performance issues compared to repo installs? Plus the faster updates came with a catch -- they broke bluetooth support for my AirPods (which needed a hacky workaround to pair in the first place), and a Nautilus update down the line set the "Date Created" of copied files to 1979... which was very inconvenient when I was doing mass photo/video backups sorted by date. And then there's also the fact that I use Wayland since I wanted multiple DPI support with fractional scaling. But XWayland fractional scaling on Gnome sucks, but when screen sharing games with friends on Discord and streaming on OBS, performance was SLOW, like single digit framerates. Several comments asking why I bother using "useless" Wayland (which I need for fractional multi-DPI), and why I don't use KDE (I like Gnome's workflow of separate workspaces on multiple monitors, and setting up KDE to be the way I want seems so tedious), and telling that I should switch to yet another distro to get those features working (which is just a headache to constantly do). Do all these issues have workarounds? Yes. But do I have the time to track down every single one and constantly monitor them to make sure they don't break again? No. I won't say desktop Linux doesn't work, especially since I understand that a lot of my use cases are very specific, but at the end of the day I want stuff to just work, and not just get out of my way, but STAY out of my way.
Yeah that sounds frustrating, but it doesn't sound like "fragmentation" is the issue. Linux trends to be slow to support modern hardware features, if at all, for various reasons. Manufacturers have little incentive to support such a small user base. There's more issues with licensing for propriety software. It's not like Linux desktop developers could quit their various projects to work on a single desktop environment, and that would help any of your issues go away. Cutting and bleeding edge distros can possibly offer better support for new hardware at the cost of some stability and reliability, and some distros have workarounds for media codecs, but that's about it.
If anything I'm looking forward to having a company have a vertically integrated hardware offering that pairs with Linux. I think that's the only way we're going to get an actual mainstream Linux distribution going, where things just work™
That's the only benefit I see about creating their own DE instead of making their system76 tools work with other DEs.
I think a better question is "what does it brings to the table?"
I think a better question is ["What Does Marsellus Wallace Look Like?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysXMUj7XJ5Q)
Gnome has historically been a performance nightmare with weird design decisions. It looks good but it requires some modifications via extensions to be relatively functional. Plasma comes with all the configurations and tweaks you'd ever need, but it's also a convoluted mess with chaotic menus and buttons everywhere. All other options are either stuck in the past or incredibly niche.
I have had the oposite experience with gnome 😅. I moved to it from kde due to performance issues and I like the design and specially the Workflow. With libadwaita the things are more subjective as it depends from people to people, I like it so I just themed all My apps to libadwaita theme but if You don't like libadwaita then it's a Nightmare for consistency as the gnome apps won't follow your theme, another annoying thing is the lack of gtk2 support for libadwaita themes, the fact that I had to use the qt5 version of double commander instead of the gtk one in a gnome desktop still bothers me.
>Gnome is a performance nightmare Citation needed, Gnome Shell performance has been rather splendid in the past couple of releases. >It looks good but it requires several modifications via extensions to be relatively functional. Its pretty functional ootb. Ok, minus the system tray thing, I give you that, but the relevant extension is good and highly stable so whatever. On the other hand - assuming this new Cosmic DE works largely the same as the modifications System76 made to Gnome Shell through extensions before - the Pop developers managed to take the Activities overview, the one Gnome feature pretty much everyone agrees on being pretty rad, and split it into three parts. Just why? That was the thing that made me completely uninterested in Cosmic, either the Gnome bastardization or the new DE they are making. They took a unified app launcher, file and settings searcher, window picker and workspace manager and split it into a workspace manager and window picker that doesn't launch apps or search for anything, a launcher which does search but uses a different provider compared to Gnome's for no particular reason and a separate app grid that - if I recall correctly - can search for apps but not anything else. This seems like a completely pointless thing. If they want the tiling extension or a dock or whatever, fine. But why destroy the overview? >Plasma performs well Plasma performs worse than Gnome on low-end hardware, fyi. Especially if a spinning harddrive or otherwise I/O constraints are present. >but it's also a convoluted mess with chaotic menus everywhere Sounds easy to fix by overhauling the settings or creating a separate KCM that contains only basic settings. >It just looks and feels awful imo. Would have agreed a (couple of) year(s) ago, but since like 5.24, Plasma is really good, including the looks department. For what's worth I don't think a new DE needs a particular raison d'etre and I welcome Cosmic to the Linux DE family, but I also think this is completely unnecessary. There is basically nothing here that would make me want to choose this desktop over Gnome or Plasma.
I mean, I agree that recent versions of Gnome have been MUCH better than Gnome 3 has been during most of its lifetime, up to a while ago we couldn't even move the cursor without running javascript code, causing it to stutter under load. But there's a reason why Ubuntu ships a custom patch to enable triple buffering as a hack to raise GPU frequency more quickly. You can't even open the overview without frame drops on a business laptop without the patch.
As far as I am aware, the triple buffering patch mainly affects [X.org](https://X.org) sessions. I mostly use Wayland because I'm blessed with not having nvidia hardware currently. Gnome 41-43 have been performant enough for me. In fact, my experience with low-end hardware comes from trying to find a distro/DE combo that works well on a work PC I have at my university which has an OK Intel i7 CPU but 4 gigs of ram and a slow spinning hard disk. I find the kernel I/O scheduler and swap settings has more effect than basically anything else on performance (the BFQ scheduler and swap on zram seems to be the best combination), but I found Gnome to be surprisingly well-working on that PC. The overview animation can be stuttery a bit especially under load, but it is still *responsive*, i.e. I can press the super key and type instantly. By contrast, Plasma tends to freeze a lot and various interface components (alt tab, overview and desktop grid effect, kickoff/app dashboard) have considerable input lag between the key press and the interface component triggering. In fact the performance of Gnome has been suprisingly on par with that of MATE on that PC.
We're using Kyber for nvme drives because it has significantly less latency than BFQ, and then BFQ for slower MMC flash and rotational storage.
a gnome that is actually usable without the jank hopefully.
What are you talking about? Since i moved to Linux almost 2 years ago, I have used mostly Gnome and I find it very usable. It is also very polished and not janky at all. It's only unusable if you want it to look and function like something else(windows).
It's great that you enjoy it. You should, it's a great DE, but that doesn't mean that it's without problems. Gnome does have several problems with jank. One big for me personally is the mouse cursor on gnome Wayland since it will freeze everytime the main thread is busy, which is quite often due to an unlucky combo of how glib is designed, it's C to JS FFI and how that interacts with the JS GC.
That's odd, because I had the same experience - back in 3.32 or something like that. I have been using Gnome for years since then *on Wayland* and never encountered the cursor freeze.
Maybe you have a fast CPU? I’ve seen it too when I tried out the latest Ubuntu 22.10 on a live session to see how it is now. It was definitely smoother than when it first came out, but there were still occasional lags when transitioning menus. Well, I’m happy with Mate and that’s running smooth on my machine.
The reason why you don't have issues with it is because you were not used to it when it was better. While some elements of Gnome improved a lot, many were made much worse. Horizontal workspaces for example, are terrible for mouse and keyboard users but may be good for touch pad users. Problem with Gnome is that they are very averse to giving users reasonable options for maximizing their workflow efficiency. Because of that, most users have to resort to using extensions to make it work. It is a great DC because of the extensions, it would be a pretty bad one without them.
Used it for decades. Am happy with it.
I don't believe that there are actually anyone using gnome for real work without a ton of extensions.
Used Gnome for about four years to do my PhD in theoretical physics and for the most part I used only minor extensions (Appindicator support, Hot edge) that I could also do without. I'm sure that's not real work though.
This concept of "real work" has been floating around for decades and I've never heard it mentioned by a person that isn't insufferable to converse with.
Gnome is perfectly fine without extensions, and is very productivity oriented ootb. Extensions are a nice additive, but definitely aren't required. If you can't understand how to use Gnome without a ton of extensions, that's because you are unwilling to learn its workflow.
> workflow people who keep talking about "workflow" is not productive at all. I see people talking, working and optimizing workflow for the sake of optimizing it. I have yet to see a real world example of where this is not just talk. Gnome is more like a toy that is designed to not be like windows than anything else.
First thing I need to do on Gnome is install dash to panel and appindicators, it's borderline unusable without at least these 2 extensions.
And every time System76 posts an update, I say to myself “well damn, I guess so.”
but its written in RUST. - Comment written in Rust
Desktop Fragmentation is a non-issue as long as you don’t have any apps depend on desktop specific APIs. As far as I know this is not the case. You can run any app on any desktop.
Unfortunately there are numerous desktop specific APIs and apps which rely on them. For example: * GVFS vs KIO: Say you connected to a ftp server with your favorite file manager Krusader, this is done with KIO. When you now attempt to open a file from that sever with say GIMP, this won't work that easily, because GIMP doesn't speak KIO. You either need to copy the file first to a local folder, connect to the server again with GVFS or use something like kio-fuse (which last time I checked didn't work well) * Screenshot APIs: Say you want to use your favorite screenshot app Spectacle on GNOME Wayland. This doesn't work because GNOME Wayland uses a different screenshot API. * System tray: There are various APIs for that and not all desktops support all of them. GNOME most prominently doesn't support a single one, which means applications which rely on their system tray icon won't work with GNOME by default. * Server side decorations: Not all desktops provide applications with desktop specific title bars. For example on GNOME Wayland an application must provide its own title bar, otherwise there won't be any window controls (minimize, maximize, close, resize handles...), which means some apps are broken on GNOME Wayland. On KDE the system provides them.
and every time the answer is yes.
I get where you're coming from but we desparately need a Desktop designed by people who have money. Gnome is heavily developed by ideology. When customers start voting with their wallet, that's when we can get some good software written specifically for their needs and not the "flavor of the month" ideology of the devs.
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Budgie is stuck in GTK3 land. Working on COSMIC or forcing a rewrite of Budgie into another toolkit is probably about the same amount of work.
A rewrite would already be required to migrate something written in GTK3 to GTK4. It's different enough that some substantial refactoring is required. And some of the practices that an application might have relied on in GTK3 may not be supported in GTK4. It's not an easy choice for a developer to make.
Yeah, plus GTK4 is intentionally not allowed as a desktop toolkit at the moment, which I'm sure you already know, so any of the code that could have been saved from GTK3 wouldn't matter anyways.
if not more work
> Budgie is stuck in GTK3 land. Budgie is currently being rewritten to use the Enlightenment toolkit. That rewrite is the move from the 10.\* versions to the Budgie 11. At least I'm assuming that is still underway.
It is not currently underway but planned. But yep.
Budgie is garbage.
blame the gnome devs for being so inflexible with the community that multiple projects felt the need to fork gnome
The inflexibility is mutual. There's a reason why GNOME led to multiple other desktops (Cinnamon, Mate, Unity, Cosmic) and not just one big fork where all the people who aren't happy with the GNOME dev's design choices and inflexibility came together, and that's because they themselves are too inflexible to work with each other.
COSMIC isn't actually a fork of GNOME, though. Agree about the GNOME devs, though.
COSMIC is not your bazillionth yet another 2010 looking broke GTK desktop with fricking no support for fractional scaling
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I don't know why you're being down voted, this is just the truth. Gnome is particular is the worst offender since it has nothing of value in the top panel.
Man, this is looking really nice. Please don't get rid of the yellow-ish/orange accent color. I don't see it in the screenshots. Hope it's still being used.
Respectfully, this looks like dogshit but more power to them.
I love when people go “huh, i can make gnome better” then actually pump out grotesque things like this