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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41376590

十多年来，流行的用户界面框架 GTK 一直面临可定制性下降的问题，其中包括与 GTK4 的主题兼容性问题。 GTK 不再提供广泛的自定义选项，而是发展成为一个简化的工具包，需要额外的库（例如 libadwaita）。由于主要 GTK 发布的频率以及基于类的小部件行为的巨大变化，较小的开发团队很难适应。从积极的方面来说，GTK 确实通过使用自定义 CSS 文件提供了某种程度的样式控制，尽管设置它们有困难。与此同时，macOS 等竞争操作系统也提供了长期存在的强调色功能。最近，libcosmic 启用的新 xdg 门户允许从有限的选择中调整强调色。然而，关于 libcosmic 是否完全支持 xdg 门户的问题仍然存在。在测试 Cosmic Alpha 时，某些功能受到赞赏，例如多个显示器的独立工作区以及类似于 macOS 的一致键盘快捷键。然而，缺点包括日历显示选项的限制、标题栏的大小调整以及缺少鼠标光标主题定制器。总体而言，尽管提供了相对较小的美观改进，但用户对持续迁移到新 GTK 版本的需求表示沮丧。有些人已经转向 PopShell 等第三方扩展，以增强 Gnome 在更宽的宽高比显示器上的磁贴管理功能。此外，与之前的迭代相比，用户欣赏 Gnome 插件系统的灵活性和改进的性能。随着 Cosmic 即将发布，人们对这些插件的未来可用性和演变产生了担忧。最后，用户表示有兴趣看到网络配置工具和 WireGuard VPN 无缝集成的进一步进步。目前，人们对 NixOS 上运行的 Gnome 的满意度仍然很高，但人们对 Cosmic 潜在的磁贴管理改进的好奇心仍然存在。

I'm excited that they push Iced [1], a Rust-based cross-platform UI framework. Probably not the Rust framework which I would've betted on as the most promising one, but with the broad support and larger adoption I hope it will catapult it into the mainstream, we really need a good UI library that's not a web renderer. I was also quite excited about GPUI [2] but there seems to be very little activity in the repo for now (hard to judge though, I imagine they're just busy hacking on the editor).

I wanted to write a desktop app with Rust for a while and considered Tauri, Flutter (via rust-flutter-bridge) or a native framework like Iced, I think with the larger adoption it might make sense to go with Iced, though it's probably still much more experimental than frameworks like Flutter.

1: https://iced.rs/ 2: https://www.gpui.rs/

Mind going into a bit more depth on "scratch that itch"? I've been debating Iced vs GPUI, would love any deeper thoughts you have on the subject. Performance and UX are probably my largest concerns, fwiw.

Loungy and Helix-gpui were my inspirations to look into GPUI, so i'd love your thoughts :)

I spent months mulling over whether to go with iced, Dioxus, Tauri, Flutter, Yew, Slint, Egui, Relm4, Ribir, even ratatui.... and probably more I'm forgetting

iced wins by a landslide.

it's just hard to learn at first but mostly because you start "not thinking with portals" and struggle. 9 out of 10 times I was just holding it wrong when I struggled.

Did you review GPUI at all?

I'm also having this debate. Performance, stability and longevity are my biggest concerns. GPUI seems so focused on Performance that it's really attractive, but it's also a UI lib second to the App that it's written for, Zed. So i'm a bit flummoxed on if it's worth investing time and effort into.

Iced is my comparison, just not sure how the performance can compare to GPUI.

Discord chat, Expat licence, GitHub repository... perhaps we also need a good UI library that manifests a greater desire to cultivate user rights. I'd say that's just as important as technological advancement, if not more.

Can we stop with these drive-by comments on every project that uses a permissive open source license? You are certainly welcome to create your own UI framework under the GPL if you want. The contributors have chosen MIT and that is a perfectly valid decision.

Why should the choice of licence not be a fair concern to express in the comments? I'm not questioning the validity of the authors' decision per se, but the considerations and priorities behind it, and whether they ought to be different for a project of this type. I don't see how this side is less important or interesting to consider than the technical one (on which comments seem quite commonplace, and rightly so, in my view).

If my actual opinion interests you, I might lean towards the LGPL, rather than the GPL. I find both of them more beneficial than any of the MIT licences for a UI framework, but strong copyleft might do more to hamper widespread adoption and interest in the project, which seem an important factor as well.

> Why should the choice of licence not be a fair concern to express in the comments?

It's a valid concern, but consider that some persons put a lot of effort into making open source software and then share it to be nice, or for the public good.

So to people chime in and complain that it's not good enough can seem obnoxious and/or ungrateful.

In the time it takes to downvote this comment, you could duplicate the repository on your preferred hosting service and change the license! Be the change you wish to see in the world!

I think this is a very shallow take. I'm a GPL proponent and have worked on/released GPLed software for a good 20 years, now, and I think it's distasteful to judge how people choose to license the work that they do for free, and effectively "donate" to society.

I do wish more things were covered under licenses with strong "copyleft", but I don't begrudge anyone the ability to license their hard work however they please.

Why should that be distasteful?

Google gives us Chrome for free. Does that make it distasteful to question their decisions around using our data because they’ve made it free?

Individuals donating their time and effort to the public, whether that excludes for-profit use or not, is better than them not doing it.

At least I think that's what the person you replied to is trying to get at.

I assume this means accessibility is roughly zero. I'm sure it was a ton of fun for the engineers to write with something exciting and new, but the downsides of using a half-baked UI framework are significant.

I tried Halloy [1], an IRC client that's listed as the first showcase app on Iced's site. It's pretty, but it doesn't even support triple-click selection or context menus. There is no menubar on macOS.

Iced is very nice for an upstart UI framework - I don't want to minimize the amount of work that they've put into it, and how cool it is that they've gotten so far - but shipping a desktop environment based on it is shortsighted.

[1]: https://github.com/squidowl/halloy

Not text editing context menus like any native app.

As I said, Iced looks awesome. But it's also, as you said, experimental. Using an experimental library for a DE could be a huge mistake, no matter how promising the roadmap is. Ideally you'd wait for the project to ship some of the non-negotiable things on the roadmap (accessibility, system menus, RTL text, keyboard navigation...) before tying your fortunes to it.

I think native context menus are out of scope for iced and probably to be addressed upstream by winit. patches welcome.

at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I encourage you to try to use iced as a library first to see how powerful it is in terms of performance, ergonomics and overall just the quality of its design. hecrj is a prolific coder and I'm confident I'm not alone in this assessment. I'm pretty bullish on the path ahead for the library given those fundamentals, and I can't speak for the COSMIC team but I imagine that assessment probably overlaps with theirs.

You can definitely implement all of that in iced. The `text_editor` widget offers cut, copy, paste off-the-shelf and undo/redo would be a matter of keeping a stack of the "input changed" messages and popping off changes to undo/redo them.

The library is pretty low level so there's a bit of legwork that the developer needs to do in order to implement things that you get for free in, say, a browser. It's a tradeoff, but I think one that tends to provide more advantages than disadvantages.

Using a native toolkit built for Rust has massive productivity benefits when writing programs in Rust. Last I checked the GTK bindings for Rust were rough at best, I don't even know if they exist for QT.

The people using the DE don't care what programming language it's written in, so it's absurd to ask users to accept a rough/inferior/buggy/inaccessible system because an experimental UI library was more enjoyable for the developers.

They won't have to accept anything if the developer never writes code in the first place... this is a ridiculous argument. How do you think most open source desktop software gets made?

It seems super productive as well. Modern Rust is ergonomic. Take a look at some of the community PRs being merged in to Cosmic and you can see how good a developer experience it is. Compared to c/c++/qt/gtk it is a breath of fresh air.

Iced is also super themeable which is a really nice change compared to GTK. Check out https://cosmic-themes.org as an example!

GTK, frankly, has been going downhill when it comes to customization (including, but not limited to, themeing) for at least a decade now. Many GTK themes out there today do not support GTK4 (the page you linked to is confusing; even though it's the "GTK3/4 Themes" category, many don't support GTK4).

GTK has more and more become a stripped-down toolkit that requires you to write or use a "platform library" (like libadwaita) in order to do useful things. Judging by the deprecations in GTK4, as well as statements from GTK developers, GTK5 will be even more stripped-down. This just makes it harder for non-GNOME projects to use it.

On top of that, each major GTK release comes with drastic changes to how classes of widgets work, which for smaller teams could mean years of work to migrate to the new version. I don't begrudge the GTK developers their ability to make all of these sorts of changes; after all, I'm not paying them for any kind of support or feature set. But it's still frustrating for smaller teams that don't realistically have the ability to take on the maintenance burden of an entire UI toolkit.

I suppose I misspoke a little. GTK has a stylesheet that can be modified. In fact the Cosmic appearance settings has an option to apply the current Iced theme to GTK apps.

Gnome does not expose this at all (except for the built in dark mode) and they actively discourage any kind of theming. Gnome 47 will finally support accent colors, which they reluctantly implemented after it became a freedesktop standard and most distros were patching it in anyway.

If you theme apps without testing there is always the change that you break apps with complex or custom widgets. It is kind of sad seeing your app looking and behaving like crap due to some random them that the distro apply to all GTK-based apps without doing any testing or validation.

To me, this is a big argument as to why devs should be making heavy use of parameterized values their UIs, as opposed to hardcoding things. An app making as much use of parameterized values as possible will not only remain decent looking and usable under most themes (except for themes that are badly built — nothing can help there), but also play much more nicely with accessibility settings like font size, font weight, colorblindness modes, etc.

I will caveat this by saying I haven’t worked with GTK and don’t know how well-tooled it is in this regard. If GTK doesn’t offer any/many parameterized values, then that’s on GTK, not app devs. They’re pretty well supported in macOS/AppKit, iOS/UIKit, and Android/Compose though and should be a cornerstone of any modern UI framework.

That’s not a silver bullet.

You can have a logo for your app that is coloured green. Then the user is using an all-green theme that happens to match the shade of your image and the logo is basically invisible.

That’s just easiest counter-example I could come up with.

Totally true that it's not possible to catch all edge cases, but I don't think it's a strong enough reason to rule out user theming/customization altogether, plus as mentioned parameterization should be done anyway for good accessibility.

Which is why the approach iced/libcosmic is taking is great. It's mostly just changing colors and some border radius. As a user, I can make my GUI match my text editor/terminal and I'm happy. It's not like the old days of GTK2.x with pixbuf themes making everything crazy (although that was fun). After all this is desktop linux, people tend to gravitate to it because they want to be able to tweak things.

I mean even OSX has had accent colors for years, ffs.

It's not clear to me what are the real benefits though.

> It's mostly just changing colors and some border radius.

This can still break apps though, as it's impossible to test all possible color themes to see if the app has enough contrast with all of them.

> After all this is desktop linux, people tend to gravitate to it because they want to be able to tweak things.

This is what I particularly don't get though. Compared to GTK this seems to be more limited. Granted, GTK does not officially support custom style sheets and lately they have become harder to set, but the option is there and people have been making themes that completly change how some widgets look like. All of that seems fundamentally impossible here.

> I mean even OSX has had accent colors for years, ffs.

There is a xdg portal to set accent colors (from a limited testable set of colors) since some months. I wonder if libcosmic supports that or if you're forced to manually set a theme.

You can still do whatever you want in ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css, including importing other stylesheets. This also works for libadwaita apps. What the Gnome devs and the https://stopthemingmy.app/ people don't want is for Ubuntu or Manjaro to ship a themed/patched stylesheet in the system that breaks their apps, and they have gotten their way.

I tried it out about a week ago in a VM. I like what I'm seeing so far but the alpha state is very apparent. Simply trying to configure things is still quite buggy. Then, within 5 minutes, something happened that the whole desktop is broken, just get a mostly black screen. Even after rebooting, it was still broken with no obvious way to recover. I've tried dropping into rescue mode and updating all the packages but that still didn't fix things. I couldn't find any documentation about how to recover (not even a way to reset to default settings), and don't know what else to do other than wipe out the system and reinstall.

Besides that, there's still a lot of settings and functionality missing from the previous Gnome iteration. I believe they're slating for a release by the end of the year, which seems optimistic.

For me it has been running with minor issues and very few crashes for the last month as my daily driver on both my work (Fedora) and my private (Gentoo) laptop.

Pop!_OS has been my daily driver for three years and counting. I think its desktop enviroment is already fine, with a few annoyances (hiding the top bar requires GNOME Toolkit and doesn't work reliably).

I've been following the progress of Cosmic casually. To me it seems a slightly more [cohesive|streamlined|robust] version of the current desktop, which would be great.

Although it also seems like for non-early adopters like myself who just want to use something that works and gets out or their way is a long way off. Videos reviewing the alpha version say this fairly universally.

Unfortunately the one thing that will always keep me to Fedora is System76's disinterest in keeping the repositories somewhat up to date with the rest of the world. It boggles my mind why is there no Debian-based distro that are either bleeding edge or at the very least on par with Fedora's freshness in terms of updates.

There is Vanilla OS, which is based on Debian Sid, is immutable and rolling release.

As for freshness/pace of updates, it really is a matter of taste. Even though I've been using Debian stable in one form or another for nearly 25 years, and it's still my platform of choice for servers, when it comes to desktop, I find it hard to move away from ooensuse Tumbleweed, cause TW makes even Fedora feel old and stale.

Most of the bleeding edge stuff I want is in a Flatpack or Homebrew. It's definitely not ideal to have 3 separate ways to acquire software, but in practice I haven't run into many issues (Homebrew works surprisingly well on Linux!!)

> why is there no Debian-based distro that are either bleeding edge

Debian testing or sid are more or less that. Barring major upgrades (Plasma 6 is taking some time), most packages are kept quite up-to-date.

sid is more like cutting edge, no? Comparable to Fedora Rawhide.

But yeah, there are options! One shouldn't be afraid of being on the base distro.

What I would love to see in the Debian ecosystem is a "Slowroll" release, similar to OpenSuse's upcoming "Slowroll" option. Maybe take Sid and make include any Sid packages that have been in it and stable for at least 2 weeks, and release an update every 30 days or so. Do some additional testing, backport any critical security fixes... sounds like a lot of work but it would be a valuable option.

That is mostly what testing does, modulo the exact numbers/durations involved.

One reason people don't do snapshot-releases of testing is that such releases wouldn't get security support. And security support shouldn't wait 30 days.

Which is why I explicitly mentioned security stuff being backported. Maybe it wasn't clear enough, but yes, I agree that security updates need to be released faster in many cases, and need a special handeling. The amount of work involved in handeling security patches is probably why it hasn't happened yet.

Having packages land in that goldilocks zone of not cutting edge but not old either is particularly pertinent for multiplatform users. It can get annoying trying to keep everything pinned on macs and windows boxes to match distros that are slower to update.

I could totally see using something like Debian stable in a pure Linux environment with no newly-supported hardware being added, though.

I am currently running Cosmic in Fedora 40, dnf installed from a popular COPR (ryanabx/cosmic-epoch) and (*I*) have had no issues with an existing fedora install.

I've tried the Cosmic alpha and, while I like various things it does, I can't see myself using it as a daily driver yet:

- The clock doesn't show the weekday or the year and shows the month by name rather than by number,

- Can't make the stupendously oversized title bar smaller,

- Can't change the mouse cursor theme,

- I hate dynamic workspaces, I just want to open something on, say, workspace 3 and have it stay there.

However I do like some things it does:

- Independent workspaces per monitor, so if I switch workspaces on monitor 1 the workspace on monitor 2 stays the same. This is the big one which I miss in KDE, though I wonder if that means that Cosmic isn't EWMH compliant (as if it matters),

- (Mostly) sane keyboard shortcuts, where (almost) every DE-specific shortcut involves the Super (AKA Meta, AKA Mod4) key. I believe Apple's OSX also does something like this where all the desktop-level shortcuts involve the CMD key,

- If I move my cursor to a monitor with no open applications, hit the shortcut for the application launcher, and launch an application; then it opens that application on the monitor with the cursor. KDE (with Kwin) struggles with that, so I call that another win.

For reference I'm currently trying Cosmic on Tumbleweed, some of that stuff may differ between distros.

> - (Mostly) sane keyboard shortcuts, where (almost) every DE-specific shortcut involves the Super (AKA Meta, AKA Mod4) key.

Is this also enforced for apps? I'd switch back to linux in a heartbeat if I could do this. The use of `control` as both a UI and a terminal binding basically ruins the entire os for me.

On top of no special casing for the terminal, I find the meta key (as positioned on Mac keyboards, to the left/right of space) easier to reach than the standard Control position. That’s also addressed by replacing Caps Lock with Control, though (which I build my keyboards and remap laptops to).

> I wonder if that means that Cosmic isn't EWMH compliant (as if it matters),

AFAIK (i haven't checked) EWMH does have provision for multiple "fake root" windows to handle multiple virtual desktops in multiple monitors, but most window managers do not bother. I think i3 (or some other popular tiling WM for X11) does support those though.

I’ve recently switched over to nixos and hyprland and couldn’t be happier. Linux UIs are stagnating all all seem to be coalescing around GNOMEs styling which I don’t particularly for. Hyprland with nix breaths new life into linux for me.

I'm using the Cosmic alpha in Fedora and loving it. There are little bugs here and there, but nothing show stopping that I've seen. It's the first desktop that's been able to pry me away from KDE with tiling.

I'm looking around for a good Linux laptop. Any recommendations?

I didn't check anything out in person, but have looked at reviews of framework, system76, thinkpads and there hasn't been one where there haven't been serious complaints (e.g. bent parts in some framework 16s causing the whole thing to rattle.)

(Is an M1 Air with Asahi a good idea?)

M1 with Asahi is a very bad idea, unless you want to be wrestling your computer to barely work. Either get a Framework laptop, or one of the new Asus Zenbook S 16 laptops (I just got one, and it's really nice. Works on Arch Linux with some kernel patches, which can be gotten pretty easily via the linux-mainline-um5606 AUR package).

Maybe take another look at frameworks, they are by far some of the best laptops out there for computer people imo. Other than that, steer clear of system76. I've only bought one laptop from them a few years ago, but the build quality was astoundingly bad and after a year of use the battery couldn't last more than a couple hours.

They were still using rebranded Clevo laptops the last time I looked while their desktops are their own. There have been rumors they are working on their own laptops, but AFAIK nothing has materialized out of those.

So I'd say System76 is currently good for desktops. If you need a laptop them IMO frameworks are by far the best option right now. Modular laptops are great and makes problems like you've heard about super easy to remedy as you can just replace the parts easily yourself.

I’ll make it n=2. I was pretty disappointed by the build quality of my System 76 Galago. And it wasn’t very repair friendly either because parts are very difficult to get.

Make it three. I'm on the third battery for my darter pro: twice so far, the battery has swelled up and made the keyboard buckle. System76 support consists in selling me replacement batteries at a serious markup.

I've decided not to install the third battery, so I have more of a desktop now.

8 years ago I would have recommended one of Tuxedo's laptops, but unfortunately good laptops have become unfashionable as quality is getting sacrificed in the quest for being thin and small. You could try Slimbook, but they're also just Clevo resellers so it's more an 'everything works out of the box now' experience rather than 'the machine is great but patches for everything need to land in the kernel'.

I have it too and suspend / deep sleep doesn't work. Also haven't managed to get the fingerprint scanner authentication to work, and after waking up from hibernation the mic doesn't work anymore sometimes.

I just got a P14s Gen 5 AMD and it's amazing. Had a few issues but with firmware updates and some kernel param and TLP tweaks it's working perfectly. Well at least I haven't run into anything the last 3 days. Docking, undocking, sleep, graphics, etc.

I have a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition from work that came with Ubuntu 20.04 preinstalled. Basically a flawless experience. I've posted about it on here before, I guess the Windows SKUs are slightly different? People reported different results when installing Linux themselves on top of machines that shipped with Windows.

I have a ThinkPad 25 for personal use with Debian and that's great too. For machines that I use routinely I don't have time for any issues.

I have an old XPS from 7 years ago. Battery had to be replaced 4 times, and the build quality is shit. It also overheats and throttles really easily. Has that changed with newer models?

I love my Framework 13. The ability to upgrade and repair is great, and they manage to fit it in an envelope comparable to other non-repairable units. The build quality feels solid. It's not a mbp, but the aluminum chassis feels a lot more robust than many plastic competitors.

Dell XPS. The newest models inexplicably went to a touchscreen function row, but you can still get the 9315 from Dell for now. They have supported Ubuntu officially for years.

I manage a fleet of Thinkpads at work, all AMD for the most part.

W11 and AMD has been fun. We had to disaple CPU Power Management in Bios and disable fast reboot as systems would struggle to come out of sleep.

Multiple models had hardware issues, especially E series (which are desktop replacements for us). Many of the T series will have chassis intrusion just trigger constantly and require depot work to fix.

None of these are insurmountable but they cant be ignored. Still doesnt have me going to back to Dell's build quality and Intels heat issues. Most AMD laptops can run on power saver for 98% of our workloads and be fine.

Right. But im supporting these in a business environment with users that arent techy. Windows is basically needed. Privacy isnt even on the radar. And secuirty is handled via companies like crowdstrike.

Hardware generally is great. Biggest complaint is them swapping the fn and ctrl keys, but you can change that in bios.

Most common failure points have been

1. Usb-c going bad on e an l series.

2. Chassis intrusion going off on t x or p series. Which will halt boot and require the user to ack

Not the OP, but while my X1 Nano runs Linux beautifully, its CPU and battery life are disappointing and it’s a bit on the slow side when unplugged, because getting what little battery life it’s capable of requires putting it in throttled down low power mode. It also spins up its fan for almost nothing.

I love the form factor, feel, weight, screen, etc… it’s really just the CPU that is ill-fit for the machine. I wish I could swap it out for a low-voltage Ryzen or Snapdragon, which would probably add 4-6 hours of life on the same battery.

This also doesn’t seem to be fixed on the newer Nano’s, which last I knew for some incomprehensible reason make use of higher power Intel Core models instead of the low voltage U-class CPUs that suit it better.

The literally first google hit for L14 gen 5 in my filter bubble has a tldr of 'mixed bag'; granted, for an AMD SKU.

Would you recommend an Intel version?

I spent a couple of days exploring linux distributions after deciding to drop Windows at home. It was an interesting experience, seeing how each distro approaches augmenting GNOME for desktop integration. I really like PopOS, but with the transition away from GNOME and GNOME extensions breaking between versions I went with Fedora.

Looking forward to trying COSMIC out again in stable, the alpha was actually very good. Let's see how they approach extensibility, as the GNOME extension fragmentation ended up a reason for my choosing Fedora.

Also if you were considering installing linux for a family member, I found ZorinOS was very good for this

They are already making extensive use of extensibility. Much more of what is in Gnome itself is in plugins. Unlike in Gnome where all plugins are in the same JS process. Each plugin is its own process and uses Wayland to communicate. So you can have lots of complexity in a plugin, it can crash and not take down the rest.

I'm excited about Cosmic's potential to break open the Gnome / Plasma duopoly. Not sold on the visual design of the desktop yet, but maybe I'll come around once its out of Alpha.

As does the unnamed LXDE bird, and whatever mascots Cinnamon, MATE, Deepin, Pantheon, Budgie, and Enlightenment have.

EDIT: Almost forgot about Unity, which has arisen from the ashes.

Unity's (at least when I started using it with 14.04) UX, screen space usage and performance was so good. Global or locally integrated menu bar and making it searchable were great decisions. I'd much rather canonical had been successful with desktop & mobile consumer OS and upstart rather than with snappy

My current phone is a Volla 22 with Ubuntu Touch, it's pretty good (although the battery doesn't last me a day, sadly). To be honest, though, I kinda miss the scopes of the OG Ubuntu Touch.

To quote grand*4 parent:

> Gnome / Plasma duopoly

LXQt uses Qt but it's not KDE, Cinnamon, MATE,... use Gtk, but they're not GNOME. And Enlightenment uses EFL, so it isn't part of any Qt/Gtk duopoly.

Linus the guy who was against debugger and source control. He is dealing with long time C users working on a C project that just recently has allowed Rust, many work for companies that dont use Rust.

Meanwhile Oxide is building a whole datacenter infrastructure in rust including firelmware, network kernel models and store subsystems, hyperwiser userlabnds in or on Illumos. And say almost universially possitive things.

The people who make cosmic also sell laptops with Rust written firmware. Some of them also develop Redox OS, a Rust OS. They in general love it.

But I guess because mass adoption in Linux hasnt happen it will be impossible to create a new popular UI toolkit.

Gtfo.

I'd be much more excited if the community figured out a way to agree on a UI behavior so we don't have to rebuild the wheel eighteen different times. The desktop environment itself mostly disappears into the background when actually working. Stuff like scrolling curves and keybinding configuration should happen at a lower level than is currently possible in the floss ecosystem.

OK cool, but when a Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu 24.04 rather than 22.04? Even Mint has caught up by now.

EDIT: Well, this is indeed doubles as a 24.04 LTS alpha, as noted further down in TFA.

That’s not going to happen until desktop Cosmic is finished, I’m sure it will be a very recent 24.04 as well. It’s a package deal and you’ll have to wait until they’re both complete. I believe the goal is spring 2025

I had a look at COSMIC on Fedora [1]. It is fast, stable and usable, but feels little unfinished (it is an early version after all). It is not my cup of tea (maybe I am too comfortable with KDE Plasma 6), but I am glad that there's a new solid option for a desktop environment. And unlike other with DEs, where interest and development quickly fizzles out, this will probably last as it has the System76 backing.

One issue that I had is fractional scaling for Electron (and older X11) apps on Wayland (same issue with Gnome and most DEs). Apps are blurry. It seems that only KDE Plasma figured it out. Plasma has an option "Apply scaling themselves", which just works.

[1] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ryanabx/cosmic-epoch...

Installed it and on startup it immediately made a request to googleapis.com (142.251.36.106). We cannot be friends if you think this is in any way acceptable.

A quick look at their repos suggests it could be something to do with supporting Google accounts, e.g. calendars in GNOME Accounts, or maybe to retrieve fonts? Difficult to tell without reading the related code.

Absolutely agree. The same goes for features like wifi login portal detection. I would much prefer it to be user triggered, or at the very least, use a self hosted service or non-Google provider like Mozilla.

If so, I'm disappointed. I thought one of the big reasons S76 was building a new desktop was to do things differently from Gnome.

That said I'm a former employee and while I worked there they were very privacy focused. I don't see why that would change and I bet we'll see this solved.

I wish the project best of luck, though I feel that it is going to take them years in order to reach parity with KDE, which combined with Qt took decades to bring to its current feature set.

I hope they won't go for parity with KDE.

KDE is great, but it's enormous. If you like it, go for it. This is almost more for the OpenBox or perhaps Gnome folks. Minimalists. Curated, opinionated, fast (yes KDE is also fast)

I started with Cosmic on Pop! 22.04 which was fine but then I wanted to try KDE and installed it and stayed with it after I found it to more customizable as per my preferences.

At this point I feel like I probably should have just used Kubuntu instead and be up-to-date (Pop! is still stuck at 22.04). Everything works though and I am too lazy to risk issues / dealing with time spent on setting everything again.

In general, it seems like a bad idea to "start over from a clean slate" in Open Source software. More wood behind fewer arrows seems like the way to go, to avoid fragmentation, bike shedding and re-inventing wheels. But of the best things to happen to Node in the past few years was Bun and Deno. Node's pace of improvement has improved dramatically once it got some real competition to be inspired by.

While I like the Gnome desktop project, they do sometimes feel a little slow in their rate of innovation & their openness to innovation. Merge requests that everyone's pretty much on board with can be open for years. Maybe Cosmic desktop's “fork” (technically re-build) and a little competition will speed them up like Node was sped up by Bun and Deno!

been giving it a try for the last couple of days (switched from mate + xmonad). so far it seems pretty promising, bunch of small annoyances or missing features that will hopefully be fixed over time, but it works more smoothly than regolith (the other DE with integrated tiling support) did.

primary annoyances are the lack of stable workspaces (i3 has that issue too) and the inability to remove window title bars. most apparent missing features so far are the lack of a load monitor applet and the workspace pager not showing thumbnails of what is running on each desktop. also I couldn't figure out how to put launcher buttons on the panel but not sure if that's a missing feature or something I'm missing.

I've been daily driving it on arch since the day it released and it's quite usable, with minimal bugs for my needs.

I just wish they add an applet that integrates Google Calendar stuff in their calendar, so I can know if I have a meeting or something coming up at a glance.

I'm already using the PopOS window manager on NixOS, it works OK but I had to get a bit hacky to prevent hotkey collisions between it and Gnome. I bet that this will handle that for me, looking forward to trying it.

Since they have DPMS in "to do", I'll pass on this.

It's not easy these days to find a compositor that doesn't screw your power management in a little subtle way. Either your displays keep waking up all the freaking time, or they won't wake up at all when you need them to, or they get blank but backlight continues to blare from them.

What I liked about good ol' X was that the buck stopped with the X server, and if it was fixed there, it was fixed everywhere. Now you are in a maze of twisty little compositors, all different, all squabbling between themselves about this or that, and in the meantime nothing ever works.

I bet the moment Wayland gets to a point of stability where there will be like .01% left to do to reach the complete desktop productivity and entertainment nirvana, even across all the compositors, some bored whippersnapper will declare that this .01% requires a paradigm shift and a complete rebuild from the ground up, at which point everyone will jump ship to some... Zayland, declaring Wayland obsolete effective immediately, and we'll have another decade until fonts are not shit and the clipboard works again.

> Now you are in a maze of twisty little compositors, all different, all squabbling between themselves about this or that, and in the meantime nothing ever works.

I was about to mention that this is using wl_roots, like every other new Wayland compositor that isn't GNOME or KDE (and i remember reading some comment that even some KDE devs want to switch to wl_roots), but that was actually an assumption of mine (because it sounds like the sane(st) choice if you decide to make a new compositor) and turns out that, no, they're not using wl_roots but instead something called Smithay (which is not wl_roots bindings for Rust).

[0] https://github.com/Smithay/smithay

I don't want to be mean, instead I want to learn how such an announcement can be done better.

On my screen, the very first line (third sentence, but the first two are pretty short):

> COSMIC, our new desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros

After that, a link to the very page you linked. What more should a release post do?

The link to the page uses the text "has been released". It's not intuitive at all that clicking this text would bring you to a page to learn more about what Cosmic is. The text "COSMIC, our new desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros" could have been the clickable link instead.

well call me stupid, but I am running POP OS! 22.04 currently and can't quite really understand from their excitement web-page how I would try cosmic without a system re-install?

You can just install cosmic, and then switch from gnome to cosmic. Or you can use the cosmic apps under gnome as well. The instructions are in the cosmic epoch git repo. That will get you pretty close.

I am already using the Cosmic apps quite a bit.

I hope the theming system will be improved. Right now the only thing you can do is change the colors, padding and border radius. That's it. Flat UI design needs to die.

rust is sexy, but i prefer system76 invest to become apple in hardware(failures of hardware, noise, cheap easy to break plastic), not software(may be little software around kernel and drivers updates).

my laptop died with well known display dash gpu issue, and once upgrade failed so i had to follow some esoteric command line things in recovery.

afaik framework they started rust ui thing is not that may be wins idiomatic rust ui(qt slash gnome of rust). so guess there will be rewrite.

and yeah, i sorrow bying system76 while being in europe, better go was local msi or even mac pro.

Gnome looks good?

It's Rust based and brand new (more secure, less bagage, Wayland native, no fragile plugin system, etc). I'm really looking forward to it.

I love Gnome but I want (at least) quarter tiling, but rather have the flexible tiling KDE offers (where you drag windows into predefined areas and they snap, preferably windows always open where they are dragged once). I want speed, I want it to get out of my way. My current flow is: Open window, hit win + left arrow, open another, hit win + right arrow, have 2 windows together on ultra wide. I do the same on 2 or three other desktops. And then I start working.

Oh, something nicer than Network Manager would be nice, something simple with super simple WireGuard VPN integration, etc.

Currently I'm still very happy on (daily driver) Gnome on NixOS, but will surely check this out soon.

> I love Gnome but I want (at least) quarter tiling

This is what I've used Pop!'s Gnome extension (https://github.com/pop-os/shell) for in the past. I don't think it'll receive much love after Cosmic is released (after all, Gnome itself is being dropped) but if it still works for whatever version of Gnome you use, it may be worth checking out.

After using FancyZones on Windows, Gnome's lack of tiling management on my ultrawide has become a bit of an annoyance for me. Unfortunately, my copy of Pop Shell broke at some point.

> no fragile plugin system

While I don't like Gnome's tendency to slow down or crash, I do very much like the plugin system. Things like GSConnect and various smaller tweaks improve my Gnome experience a lot.

I hope Cosmic does expose some kind of plugin system, though hopefully one that's not as prone to lag and crashes.

The plugin system has many issue. A single failed plugin takes all of them down. And its not a stable interface, each version threatens to break many plugins.

Its absolutely annoying. You have configured something you like, next gnome version they are gone.

Cosmic plugins are their own processes (generally written in Rust) using very fast Wayland and be much more stable. In fact, a much larger amount of the functionality already lives in plugins. Its a game changer in the long term.

It's alpha. Of course not. But the fact that is has one at all, is an improvement over GNOME where the plugin "api" is just javascript injected into the main gnome shell process.

The main reason why System76 decided to build Cosmic in the first place was to avoid having to spend an inordinate amount of time (I heard 50%) fixing their extensions any time Gnome made a new release.

The fact that they were able to release this alpha of Cosmic DE in one year just goes to show how much better a use of time it is.

That's really nice, I'm using it now and it works well.

You probably know this already, but I'm saying it anyway (hope you don't mind): The intuitive keyboard shortcuts would be win-right-arrow (then) up arrow for the top right corner tiling, like Windows does quarter tiling.

Also, Gnome (half) tiling has the windows sliding, your extension jumps them, and requires extra button (ctrl) ootb.

Very small things, and I will for sure keep the extension installed and use it, thank you!

KDE can set windows to start at a location, or remember the last position. the only downside is some applications like steam do not differenciate. Every steam window is just steamwebhelper so I cannot remember my friend list position

it not being Gnome

Gnome comes with a lot of baggage both technical and organizational, this has lead to situations where Pop_OS! wasn't able to manage/change/improve things like they think they needed to do hence why they started to create Cosmic. Just be clear this was a business decision by system76 to some degree, not just some "I don't like it so I created something even if it doesn't make sense" decision.

it looks like Gnome because it's for people which had been using Gnome so far, but it's just similar not the same and likely will only diverge more over the next many years assuming it succeeds

Isn't the business decision exactly whats being questioned? Not saying it is a bad decision, but I did have the same question. Was it really necessary to write a completely new DE just to make some tweaks easier to implement? Would love to hear more details about this.

At first glance, it seems like a truly massive effort for a marginal improvement, that could have been made with a fraction of the cost. I'm probably wrong though, hopefully.

The situation between System76 and Gnome had become untenable. The modifications they wanted to make to the shell were too many and the Gnome devs don't want to support any of it.

I read somewhere that 50% of the development time on Pop_Os was spent simply un-breaking the Gnome shell extension between releases of GNOME.

Now they can put that time into creating what they actually want.

The problem was that the Gnome crowd is going increasingly in a different direction. Mutter already doesnt support a number of otherwise universal protocol. The way theming work is compelely changed. There are lots of other reason why staying with gnome was an increasing problem for them. All those reasons are only growing bigger.

So to support what they wanted and what they promise their costumers they would have to do increasingly more and more work, in direct oppositon the the gnome community. Essentially eventially forking it. And then they have to maintain a huge legacy codebase.

And they didnt wirte a completly new one. The compositor was already a project. So was Iced. They use lots of other existing project in the Rust ecosystem.

Now they are on their own, free to build what they want, rather then endlessly pushing a rock up a mountain. They can now make more fundamental changed that would never have been possible in Gnome. They are also free to build the community they want rather then deal with the Gnome community. This also makes them a player in the Wayland community, another voice that can push protocols.

I don’t know System 76’s business numbers but after owning of their devices I would much prefer if they worked on their hardware versus creating a desktop manager. This seems like a giant distraction away from their real business. And their devices definitely could improve a lot vs other brands.

Since they announced this I have been wondering how their engineering department can justify the investment to their finance department.

The only angle I see is that they believe having their own DE will help them sell more laptops. That seems like crazy assumption to me because if someone likes the DE they can just install it on their existing laptop or buy a non-System76 laptop and install it there.

I've only become interested in buying System76 hardware since they released the DE. Simply because I know it will be the best experience for it and the purchase will go towards funding development of Cosmic.

Well the company is own by a person who is invovled with both and he started the company to move forward the open ecosystem of software and hardware.

Could be invested better. Maybe, maybe not.

In terms of marketing, this certainy has gotten their name out there. Between PopOS and Cosmic they are becoming known globally in the whole linux world. Every single linux influencer has been reporting on this. PopOS is an often recommended distro.

Would it be better to buy google ads. Maybe in the short term. But the money would go towards their overall goal.

In the long term being the company know to be behind the best open hardware and open software projects seems like a better strategy.

System76 has always work on both software and hardware. The from the beginning have done much work in firmware and drivers, and increasingly up the stack. Creating PopOS as Ubuntu with up to date hardware support. And then increasingly listing to their users on what improvments they can make. This lead to early gnome extension and then the gnome shell.

At the same time they have invested a lot in hardware as well. Their own case, their own mechanical keyboards. They are doing thab because they want to make their own laptop eventually.

They want to be a more open Apple, with a great hardware and software story. It just a much longer path to get there.

What's wrong with their hardware? I bought a desktop from them and it's rock solid, literally frozen on me once and that was probably a gnome bug and nothing to do with the hardware.

I think if they can supply there hardware with a smooth and modern desktop they will have an amazing product.

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