System76 Adding XWayland Support & Other Improvements To Its COSMIC DE

[deusexmachina]

Personally, what I have against Cosmic isn't Cosmic itself, nor is it against creating yet another DE, it's more about spending resources of a small hardware company on writing a piece of software we already have plenty of alternatives for. System76 is a hardware company and they should focus on the core of their business before spreading into other areas. They still don't offer any laptop with an AMD dGPU, they still don't offer laptops with 1st class build quality, there are other areas in the stack they can help building like HDR, Prime optimizations, screen-to-gpu multiplexer, fractional scaling, etc. I used to be a loyal System76 user before switching to MSI; I just couldn't resist the far better build quality.

It is a shame that a huge number of internet comments are way more sane than the entire paid board and staff of a company with regard to how it should operate. This isn't Apple/M$ we're talking about; this is supposed enthusiast-built hardware made for enthusiasts that easily gets beaten by Lenovo for its same purpose... Perhaps because they have some collective cultural mental block? Crazy.

[deusexmachina]

Why are these people wasting so much time and money? Tying a UX experience to hardware in a FOSS business model makes no sense, unless you're microsoft or apple. Just focus on decent hardware which we don't have yet! Each of us wants different UX anyway; I wouldn't use theirs as I use tiling WMs. Their hardware doesn't even beat a modern Thinkpad, so I'm going with a modern Thinkpad for Linux until then. They should just join teams with frame.work and pool their money and fix a few basic things: suspend to ram that is 10x less energy efficient than apple instead of 100x less. Or just matching the next T14 that will have RDNA3 and USB4 in March-ish this year, which is way better overall than any frame.work or system76 will be. Or give some money to Project X so we can understand how far off we are from a corebooted Ryzen!

[sarmad]

Why people feel like arguing for/against gnome vs cosmic..?
Let both side do their stuff and let's see in the long term who was right...
And I'm someone who would love a unique gnu/linux os so don't try to convince me about how joining force is better than fork.. it's just that these forum wars are useless.

Personally, what I have against Cosmic isn't Cosmic itself, nor is it against creating yet another DE, it's more about spending resources of a small hardware company on writing a piece of software we already have plenty of alternatives for. System76 is a hardware company and they should focus on the core of their business before spreading into other areas. They still don't offer any laptop with an AMD dGPU, they still don't offer laptops with 1st class build quality, there are other areas in the stack they can help building like HDR, Prime optimizations, screen-to-gpu multiplexer, fractional scaling, etc. I used to be a loyal System76 user before switching to MSI; I just couldn't resist the far better build quality.

[ssokolow]

Sorry if I'm being blunt, but from that screenshot it doesn't seem any different from the ui principles that Gnome already uses (CSD's hamburger menus, etc). So I don't understand what was their problem with Gnome in the first place?
If Cosmic or that new toolkit they're developing doesn't offer anything new or extraordinary that other desktops/toolkits don't already offer, then I don't understand the point of this whole endeavour and I think it just adds to the Linux desktop fragmentation.

GNOME developers whined about distro maintainers theming their desktop and adding by-default extensions (eg. stopthemingmy.app) and incrementally made it harder to do so while telling distros "ship stock GNOME or GTFO", so System76 GTFO'd.

(Speaking of stopthemingmy.app, if I didn't already feel it was too much work to hammer the Bottles UI into a shape I like, its developers signing that open letter certainly would make me look elsewhere for the functionality I need. I'm glad they offer an easy to use ^{Don't Use This App} Please Don't Theme badge though. It's a great hint that the app probably uses libadwaita.)

[bug77]

Sorry if I'm being blunt, but from that screenshot it doesn't seem any different from the ui principles that Gnome already uses (CSD's hamburger menus, etc). So I don't understand what was their problem with Gnome in the first place?
If Cosmic or that new toolkit they're developing doesn't offer anything new or extraordinary that other desktops/toolkits don't already offer, then I don't understand the point of this whole endeavour and I think it just adds to the Linux desktop fragmentation.

I'm guessing they didn't want the attitude and needed something they can fix themselves if need be.

[piotrj3]

I wouldn't be suprised if long term it would be one of the most stable DEs around. You have commercial support, and you have it written in language pretty much (in practical meaning) preventing all memory issues and a lot of logic ones. Because it is modern it doesn't have to carry a lot of old garbage, and system76 is company aimed at average users not at server space like Red hat.

Iced toolkit also supports Vulkan rendering what is nice.

[rmfx]

Why people feel like arguing for/against gnome vs cosmic..?
Let both side do their stuff and let's see in the long term who was right...
And I'm someone who would love a unique gnu/linux os so don't try to convince me about how joining force is better than fork.. it's just that these forum wars are useless.

[Leprechaunius]

I couldn't care less about their own DE. Why won't they fix the major issues? First add SecureBoot support to PopOS, then go play with your crayons...

[Nozo]

Sorry if I'm being blunt, but from that screenshot it doesn't seem any different from the ui principles that Gnome already uses (CSD's hamburger menus, etc). So I don't understand what was their problem with Gnome in the first place?
If Cosmic or that new toolkit they're developing doesn't offer anything new or extraordinary that other desktops/toolkits don't already offer, then I don't understand the point of this whole endeavour and I think it just adds to the Linux desktop fragmentation.

No one is stopping Pop_OS! and his team from creating their own toolkit and DE, and these projects have every right to exist, It's like a BSD variant makes its own toolkit tomorrow and others will complain that it's going to fragment the Linux desktop ecosystem (even though those systems aren't Linux despite they share most of the same technologies).

[Artim]

I'm pretty sure that was sarcasm..

One can only hope...