System76 Adding XWayland Support & Other Improvements To Its COSMIC DE

[ssokolow]

My condolences, it must be really painful to you to be at this site unless by a lucky coincidence its ui toolkit strictly matches your system theme.

Nahh. Firefox fits in on my KDE desktop pretty well... ironic given that it's less "native" than the GTK apps I've more or less completely kicked out of my desktop as GNOME-isms slowly leak their way into GTK apps that don't want to be GNOME apps.

(For example, I still need to survey alternatives to Deluge-GTK for my torrent client, since GTK's drop-shadow CSDs result in a giant black border on context menus when I toggle off compositing without restarting the app, and it's much harder than it should be to find the right ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css incantation to banish them... the old "Only end users should theme my app... ignore the fact that end users are likely to lack the knowledge to do so and give up.")

Seriously though, there's a difference between a website and a desktop application... especially when I avoid web-tech apps for bloat-reduction reasons. (CSD is the biggest problem I have with GNOME. I don't want to fight for something as simple as window frames to be consistent and reliably functional in an environment where compositing comes and goes, and for titlebars to have my KWin button customizations and the full set of KWin context menu entries.)

I did recently write a userstyle for Wikipedia, though, to crunch away all that gratuitous whitespace in their new theme.

[sarmad]

the issue is that there is no good solution for S76 for a DE, and as a company, who actually wants to sell products, half assing it like all the other environments isn't cutting it. all the other DEs have issues, cosmic will have issues too, no doubt. but S76 is no longer just a hardware company, they sell a product, and there is nothing that fits what their definition of a good OOB experience

Does it fit their definition of good OOB experience that connecting an external screen is problematic because the HDMI port is hooked to the dGPU rather than the iGPU? Or does it fit their good OOB experience that the fan continuously goes on and off when the CPU load is constant? Or does it fit their good OOB experience that the keyboard flexes more than kids' toys?

[Artim]

Exactly, someone clearly has no clue where the $$$$ are coming in. Redhat gets almost all of its money from server, desktop is an afterthought for them which is why they are happy with a somewhat usable desktop that minimizes their developers time.

On the other had, almost all of System76's money is directly correlated to their desktop end users. If end users complain about some usability issue, System76 takes this seriously because it hits their bottom line. Redhat couldn't care, at best it would create some ticket with lowest priority where maybe some day a dev on a bored Friday afternoon will look at it, or endlessly argue on the internet trying to justify why no change is needed like what they are doing with explicit sync changes in the graphics stack.

Sure, that must be the reason why GNOME is the default in so many distributions and runs so much better than anything S76 has ever created...

[mdedetrich]

Gnome is not user friendly for many. A lot of choices they do is kinda questionable, and recent changes (like compiler flags on Fedora) show that they care way more about developers activly debugging entire system (in companies like Facebook) instead of average user that will only lose performance from that. Red Hat primary product RHEL is server oriented linux, IBM isn't user oriented company, Canonical when it is kinda user oriented, but i would like to see more alternatives in user oriented.

Exactly, someone clearly has no clue where the $$$$ are coming in. Redhat gets almost all of its money from server, desktop is an afterthought for them which is why they are happy with a somewhat usable desktop that minimizes their developers time.

On the other had, almost all of System76's money is directly correlated to their desktop end users. If end users complain about some usability issue, System76 takes this seriously because it hits their bottom line. Redhat couldn't care, at best it would create some ticket with lowest priority where maybe some day a dev on a bored Friday afternoon will look at it, or endlessly argue on the internet trying to justify why no change is needed like what they are doing with explicit sync changes in the graphics stack.

[Artim]

If thats the truth then the situation is far worse, they are actually failing at their goals.

In any case this is besides the point, System76's main target is standard desktop users. Those users had issues with the usability/UI with Gnome which is why System76 has tweaked Gnome so much, Gnome doesn't want that so System76 is making their own desktop.

You get casualty wrong. The problems exist because the Cosmic GNOME is a horrible Frankenstein monster out of a terrible software shop and mostly bad extensions. Switch to gnome-vanilla and you already got only half as many problems. Added to that is their obvious lack in quality management. Their main priority seems to be being the first ones putting out a new kernel release or some other component, not unproblematic Updates.

[piotrj3]

That's funny. Because basically all of that is already being fulfilled by GNOME. Commercial support by an arguably much larger company (Red Hat, part of IBM, plus Canonical) and also being supported by many distributions, the language is basically irrelevant if you know what you are doing (with the arguments the Rust fanboys come with the whole Linux kernel would have to be a complete security desaster, but to mention like at least 90 % of all software), and the "one garbage" it needs to carry with it is only for the time being. They are already planning to have it ship with only Wayland and XWayland, or even without XWayland. That future doesn't seem that far fetched and by then it simply would stop shipping that old stuff.

And thanks to GSK, which is available with GTK4, you can choose from a variety of rendering backends: OpenGL, some strange other OpenGL implementation, Cairo, llvmpipe and Vulkan.

Gnome is not user friendly for many. A lot of choices they do is kinda questionable, and recent changes (like compiler flags on Fedora) show that they care way more about developers activly debugging entire system (in companies like Facebook) instead of average user that will only lose performance from that. Red Hat primary product RHEL is server oriented linux, IBM isn't user oriented company, Canonical when it is kinda user oriented, but i would like to see more alternatives in user oriented.

[mdedetrich]

This couldn't be further away from the truth. Good luck trying next time.

If thats the truth then the situation is far worse, they are actually failing at their goals.

In any case this is besides the point, System76's main target is standard desktop users. Those users had issues with the usability/UI with Gnome which is why System76 has tweaked Gnome so much, Gnome doesn't want that so System76 is making their own desktop.

[Artim]

Not really, Redhat/Gnome's top priority is for their developers and for server and not general user desktop, thats not even their target market and also their commercial support.

This couldn't be further away from the truth. Good luck trying next time.

[mdedetrich]

I wish I could say the same, however I regulairly run into issues with KDE bugs. it wound up pushing me back to sway, issues where the screen FPS would plummet to the fps an mpv video is running (24hz here is painful) screen recording that uses xdg portals + pipewire breaking, and more. and using KDE's issue tracker hurts my head.

I think we have different use cases but I definitely agree with KDE's issue tracker. I really wish OS projects would move either to Github or to Gitlab already

[Quackdoc]

Agreed, although I disagree with the KDE part, hasn't been buggy for me at all (but do note that I don't use Wayland yet, thats a separate problem)

I wish I could say the same, however I regulairly run into issues with KDE bugs. it wound up pushing me back to sway, issues where the screen FPS would plummet to the fps an mpv video is running (24hz here is painful) screen recording that uses xdg portals + pipewire breaking, and more. and using KDE's issue tracker hurts my head.