System76 Developing "COSMIC" Desktop Environment For Pop!_OS

[ms178]

I don't get it what people love about the GNOME desktop, the performance improvements only made it usable somewhat recently. I find the workflow KDE provides more intuitive and effective for my purposes. Of course KDE still has a lot of its own problems, stability and lack of innovation in the compositor and its render backend come to my mind (which I care about), but from the design philosophy, it is more sound and doesn't force its way of doing things on to the user. Some Gnome-derivatives like Budgie are fine with me, too. Maybe I was simply not willing to invest too much time to get it customized to how I wanted it to be.

I am curious if System76 wants to go into the direction of correcting some of GNOME's deliberate design choices...

[Myownfriend]

Gnome did a great job making app search, workspace management, and app launcher to be in one place. And here we have good folk from system86 wants to seperate them into three different button.

Personally that's one of this things I don't like about Gnome. While I like the idea of workspaces and the expose-like window fly-out thing, and think they make sense to put in the same space, I don't really use them. Sometimes I stream and I use my second monitor for everything being streamed. I really hate that Gnome temporary causes all of the windows to re-position on my stream monitor when I bring up the application launcher on my OBS/chat monitor.

[ThoreauHD]

Used to use kde before all the weird plasmid things hit, then switched to cinnamon. I don't need popping out things and 4d puzzles. Just want to be able to launch a damn app and move shit around without hunting for it. Perhaps that's what S76's aim is here, which would be welcome.

[nazar-pc]

Hm, I have no DE as such for a long time, just Qtile + some components I need and this looked relatively interesting until it turned out to be just an extension with all of the usual GNOME drawbacks. Well, maybe next time...

[sarmad]

I prefer Gnome's unified activities view, but the other aspects of Cosmic are nice and promising. Glad they give you the option to pin the dock to any side rather than forcing a single configuration on all users like Gnome does, and also glad they are sticking to vertical workspaces. I hope they pay good attention to multi monitor setups as well; I hate how Gnome treats external monitors as not part of the workspace.

[fafreeman]

even though i like gnome 40 and the horizontal workspaces, i think gnome can fix a lot of their problems with application management if they allowed the dock to be shown on the desktop. i'm even running the gnome 40 git version of dash to dock. of all the complaints, it solves most of them. and seeing how system76 reported slightly over 50% of their users run dash to dock, its really telling how its a "feature" that gnome shouldn't be dragging their feet over.

recently gnome came out with that mock up and its funny seeing the top bar moving to the bottom to "fix" the application menu. bring back a windows style "task bar." puzzles me because they don't have to go to such lengths. they can just allow the dock that's already there to be shown on the desktop... look no matter what gnome is going to either look like windows or mac. top bar = mac. bottom bar = windows. gnome should just deal with it and embrace it has a mac inspired feel. rather than trying to reinvent the wheel that causes them to make things more difficult in the name of "gnome philosophy" all to hide the fact its trying to be something else.

you can be your own thing even if you are inspired by something else. there is only so many ideas out there for UI design. its like being mad that nothing has superseded the wheel.

[codewiz]

Amazing how many people don't read the links around here

Which link? I couldn't find any mention of it being an extension in the blog post. Source code is also not available on System76's github.

[DKJones]

Sounds interesting. I've always wanted to try Pop OS because it looks beautiful, but GNOME...

[Hans Bull]

I stopped reading at "GNOME-based"

[lumks]

Wasnt it the KDE Project who wanted something like this: Providing the technology to build whatever desktop on top of its technology without fragmenting the project?
Years later the community is at this point, but it is GNOME, not KDE, with desktops like:Ubuntu Shell, Endless Shell, PHOSH, and now COSMIC that are extensions, where every single one of them also contributes to GNOME upstream. It's nice to see the community finally comming together, while still keep an own identity.