Budgie 10.8 Linux Desktop Released

[Mez']

Isn't COSMIC more of a mix of KDE and GNOME?

Cosmic in its initial form looks like Gnome with the flexibility of Budgie. Or some sort of Gnome who would be unlocked by open-minded developers. Basically what any sane person dreams of. At least if they don't feel confortable with the QT look & feel.
It gives away a similar feeling to Unity, a DE that is made for users to tailor to their own workflow, hence being more efficient. Contrary to Gnome who is enforced onto users with little to no possibility of adapting it to your own needs. Some people like to be told what to do and obey when told "this is the way", and they are likely to use Fedora and Gnome, but others have a clear idea of how they are the most efficient, and they want to adapt their DE tool to that. It's not possible with Gnome since it's a locked environment.
COSMIC will be a great mix of best practices. With Budgie, they are truly thought out to empower the users, and that's why seeing them being both so actively developed is really promising.

[Mez']

I gave Budgie a try for a couple years because I wanted a modern but lightweight DE. I stopped using it mostly because of very inconsistent bugs. Sometimes I'd have to wait 1+ minutes for the desktop to load, other times it worked instantly. Sometimes pressing the power button would do nothing, other times it would prompt for shutdown. I have a script to download random wallpapers; sometimes it would show the downloaded one, sometimes it'd show the cached one. It had a weird mashup of its own settings tools and GNOME's. Over time, it seemed like fewer and fewer of those settings would work.
What really got me to stop using it was broken dependencies due to (from what I recall) an outdated version of mutter as well as scaling suddenly not working anymore

I was using Arch, where perhaps it doesn't have a paid maintainer, so it's understandable that my experience doesn't reflect what it's supposed to be. But, I'm now using Cinnamon, another distro-specific DE, and that works perfectly fine. It's not as lightweight as I'd prefer and I also would like it to be a little more Wayland-ready, but it's good enough for now. So far my only real gripe with Cinnamon is how much performance absolutely tanks when you turn on taskbar thumbnails. Otherwise it works fine.

I don't think it was due to an outdated version of Mutter. At least if talking about them forking Mutter 43 and sticking to it to make sure their GTK apps would keep working, or something like that.
It was a choice that came from one of the many breakage issues caused by Gnome devs, and it indeed creates a dependencies conflict if using both Budgie and Gnome alongside. But it's a necessary departure away from future Gnome as they will distance themselvers from anything Gnome/GTK. There are a few Budgie blog posts somewhere explaining all of this.

[Mez']

This is exactly why I keep coming back to KDE, even on hardware that didn't play well with it. One of those little things is the option to configure "2 fingers, button 3". I got accustomed to open links in a new tab using the middle button (or button 3) of a mouse. In a touchpad I just tap with 2 fingers. Whenever I end using anything that isn't KDE, I instantly miss this. Also KDE offers more teaks to adapt it to MY workflow, not the workflow some young punk thinks looks cool. Now get off my lawn.

KDE is not the only DE to have that mindset and plenty of options, but in general I agree with the end of your comment, and I said something very similar a couple posts before.

[Mez']

I want to like Budgie, I really do, it's slick, I remember it "feeling" fast and responsive but to me the small little things that it fails at just prove to me that the developers should stick with their days jobs, which I'm assuming is something along the lines of delivering pizzas as an Uber Eats driver.

To me, you're describing exactly Gnome devs here.
Joshua Strobl or Ikey Doherty have 100x the talent of any Gnome dev, in each toe. And this is just because at the core, they start by trying to understand their users. Gnome devs don't give a f* about their users.

[Mez']

This is very subjective and depends on personal expectations based on acquired habits, doesn't it?
Like, I've been using different Linux distributions as only desktop on my laptops for two decades now (and mainly Gnome for 10 years) and I still can't get used to Windows when I have to use it at work.

Literally, it gets in the way whatever I try to do, whether it's switching windows, trying to see the overview (neither the Win key or moving the pointer to the upper left corner work), or my... oh.. my... trying to drag a window without grabbing it by its border, especially when it is out of the screen.
It still lacks a decent, featureful and fast shell with GNU Readline capabilities (git-bash is a pain in the ass). And oh... the last time I tried to install a printer on Windows 11 for a friend, it took me hours and a lot of crap coming with the drivers. I could go on but I will only add that it is damn slow, although that's in part due to all the antiviruses and spywares installed by the company.

Who wants to use upper left corner? Seriously, so much travelling with the mouse (you need to bring it back towards center to pick your windows after that)!
Then, in 2023, keyboard shortcuts are just for nerds and devs. In 2023, what we want is touchpad gestures, we are getting more and more used to touchscreens, swipes, taps, zooms, and the mouse is getting old compared to the possibilities of these.

Why am I saying this?
Because it is a 3-finger swipe on both! My only gripe is that it is 3-finger swipe down on Gnome whereas on Windows it's a 3-finger swipe... up, if memory serves (I don't work on Windows at the moment). And I could not configure it so as to make it consistent across.
Of course, I wouldn't expect anything to be configurable on Gnome, but at least I expected that on Windows.

How on earth can you not make such a simple thing customizable? Some people have fine motor issues and swipes will be easier a certain way, or it just makes more sense to them.