System76's COSMIC Desktop Working Toward Its Alpha Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76's COSMIC Desktop Working Toward Its Alpha Release

The System76 crew has put out a new blog post outlining the work ahead toward their upcoming alpha release of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment and in turn the Pop!_OS 24.04 release expected to happen "over the summer"...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Alpha-Roadmap

[mppix]

Great to see that Linux will not run out of DEs any time soon..

[bash2bash]

I wish COSMIC became a Fedora spin, because GNOME is horrible, it doesn't even have desktop icons! The future looks bright with COSMIC.

[Eudyptula]

The Cosmos Desktop looks like it could become a middleway between KDE Plasma and Gnome. Whereas Gnome did not at all meet expectations, lacks both features and customization and its workflow being inefficient and limited - I hope Cosmos can bridge that gap. Gnome mostly look well-designed, although the experience is far from polished when you consider the need for extensions and the weird behaviour some of their apps have.

I don't see myself using a Debian/Ubuntu-based distro or any DE other than KDE Plasma, but it's nice to have options. Pop!_OS could be something to recommend to novice users, I just wish it wasn't Ubuntu-based. Ubuntu doesn't deserve its current ubiquity, in my opinion. Considering all the shenanigans Canonical have pulled I'm surprised so many distros fork from it. I wonder if in a parallel universe distros like Mint and Pop!_OS are based on "Arch LTS" and KDE Plasma was the default DE.

Perhaps we'll see EndeavourOS or Fedora with Cosmos Desktop in the future?

I wish COSMIC became a Fedora spin, because GNOME is horrible, it doesn't even have desktop icons! The future looks bright with COSMIC.

Honestly, I'm shocked by the lack of basic functionality in Gnome (if only people touched the grass on the other side of the hill). You improve it slightly with extensions, but that also makes it fragile, glitchy and buggy. Even then, it still feels like 30 % of what a DE should be.

I used to think Gnome look and feel more polished and smooth and had all the essential features, just less customization. This being many people's first meet and greet with Linux worries me.

This is my main reason for being excited about Cosmos, even though I will still likely use KDE Plasma. I honestly think Cosmos can become a great influence on the Linux eco system. Looking at the quality work they do over there, it's looking good.

Make the DE run well on Arch or Fedora and we have (hopefully) what Gnome should and could have been.

[mmstick]

Screenshots of our current COSMIC applications: COSMIC Files, Terminal, Editor, and Settings.

https://fosstodon.org/@soller/111733526892594130

COSMIC Terminal's text rendering is quite a bit faster than GNOME Terminal. Displays 850,000 lines in 0.2 seconds, whereas GNOME Terminal needed around 6.9 seconds.

https://fosstodon.org/@soller/111738835466981648

[Hibbelharry]

I wish COSMIC became a Fedora spin, because GNOME is horrible, it doesn't even have desktop icons! The future looks bright with COSMIC.

Many years ago I used to use desktop icons, too. Then I noticed that most of the time most of them are hidden behind windows and not reachable without dragging windows around. Then I turned them desktop icons off completely and never looked back. There are some smarter and faster ways to access the same stuff, you just need to give change a chance. In Gnome you can mostly hit the super key, type the first two letters and hit enter, which is very convenient. In Windows the same strategy mostly works, but Startmenu search is a bit more clumsy and slower.

[mmstick]

From all the things they could copy from gnome UI they decided to replicate the horrible, humongous tablet-first window title bar? Why? Do they have metrics that show people like it or they just went the gnome way and decided to ignore more than a decade of hate about this particular awful choice and did it anyways?
It's a deal-breaker for me, not that I matter to them in any way but it's a shame I won't be able to use this DE if it's not possible to change it to a sane size

You're mistaking the header bar for a title bar. That is not what it is. This saves space by eliminating the title bar and integrating window controls directly into the application. I'd also add that we will eventually have interface density settings in COSMIC Settings so that you can reduce or increase the amount of padding between elements in libcosmic applications.

[fluke]

I've been trying this desktop on and off for the last month or so and the improvements are continuous and great. It's very very close to being a daily driver. In fact you could daily drive it now if you were used to KDE crashing components every once in a while.

[sophisticles]

I can't wait for the first official, stable build to be released.

I really hope the System76 people put it in high gear and have it ready soon.

[Daktyl198]

COSMIC Terminal's text rendering is quite a bit faster than GNOME Terminal. Displays 850,000 lines in 0.2 seconds, whereas GNOME Terminal needed around 6.9 seconds.

https://fosstodon.org/@soller/111738835466981648

To be fair to Gnome Terminal, COSMIC's terminal is lacking some rendering features that GT supports. Though, not as many as you'd expect after looking at the actual blog post.

That being said, I'm very much looking forward to COSMIC releasing. I currently run Garuda KDE but I'm thinking about reinstalling to a pure Arch system with COSMIC when it hits 1.0. The team is building exactly the style of DE that I want.