System76's COSMIC Desktop Nearing Alpha Release

[Malsabku]

I think there are too many GNOME-based desktops out there right now

Budgie, MATE, COSMIC, Cinnamon

I'm sure some of them will die in the next time. The first one will be MATE, because it won't make the transition to Wayland.

[timofonic]

I think there are too many GNOME-based desktops out there right now

Budgie, MATE, COSMIC, Cinnamon

I'm sure some of them will die in the next time. The first one will be MATE, because it won't make the transition to Wayland.

Except COSMIC isn't GNOME-based nor uses GTK at all.

It's a Rust project using Rust stuff, including toolkit.

[szymon_g]

Install Pop!_OS, run `sudo apt-manage add popdev:master`, `sudo apt update`, then `sudo apt install cosmic-session`, followed by enabling Wayland in GDM's config file, and then rebooting.

any chance to install it on the standard lts ubuntu?

[royce]

I LOVED Windows ME. I know, I know, that's not the Windows version people are supposed to like, but back then my family had this PII Win98SE PC and it ran great when I upgraded it to ME.

Ah, I had a Duron 700 PC at the time that was crashy as fuck with Win98SE. Wouldn't shut down, would bluescreen, explorer would just freeze up and nothing would load, WindowsME was a lightyear ahead in stabilty. I loved it.

[Malsabku]

any chance to install it on the standard lts ubuntu?

There is no official way, until there is no maintainer in Debian or someone who creates an according Ubuntu flavour.

But of course you can add the repos of PopOS and then install it on Ubuntu..on your own risk.

[Estranged1906]

In a way I feel sorry for System76, the screenshots look OK, kind of like Gnome or Budgie but regardless of how good it looks or how good it functions, in the end it won't make them a lick of good, if the reason for this DE is to sell more systems.

I fully agree with you. From a business perspective, it would have made more sense to just focus on hardware quality, value for money, and marketing. Linux users tend to know what they want anyway and are quite opinionated about stuff like desktop environment, release schedule and package manager. So just slap on Ubuntu LTS and additionally test if your system also works with Fedora, OpenSUSE and Debian. (Arch users can figure it out themselves.)

[Anux]

I'm gonna try their april release if it ships with cosmic. Let's see if it can beat my xfce setup.

I fully agree with you. From a business perspective, it would have made more sense to just focus on hardware quality, value for money, and marketing. Linux users tend to know what they want anyway and are quite opinionated about stuff like desktop environment, release schedule and package manager.

You can get the same hardware cheaper if you don't want to use their PopOS anyway. For their customers having hardware and software maintained and tuned by one entity is probably the biggest selling point. And if they think that they can offer a better experience with cosmic then there seems to be a business opportunity as well.

[fulalas]

Install Pop!_OS, run `sudo apt-manage add popdev:master`, `sudo apt update`, then `sudo apt install cosmic-session`, followed by enabling Wayland in GDM's config file, and then rebooting.

Thanks! I did that. Here's my initial feedback:

Editor:
1. opening a 535 KB HTML results in 190 MB of RAM being taked, and when I close its tab, the memory isn't released -- Geany, in comparison, takes only 52 MB of RAM
2. overall performance is not on par with Geany
3. doesn't save the last folder
4. when browsing a file, it doesn't allow double-click

File manager:
1. doesn't show the mounted devices on the side panel
2. doesn't have About option to check its version
3. keyboard navigation is very, very limited
4. failed to open an executable using double click
5. no drag and drop
6. copy & paste is only available through the menu, but it doesn't work anyway
7. right click shows this really simple context menu that doesn't include even 'open with...' or 'open in terminal':



Various:
1. screenshot shows a notification, but clicking on it doesn't do anything
2. double lines in the network pop-over


3. odd notification rendering


I like the performance when opening applications. At least compared to GNOME the difference is night and day.

All the best!

[mdedetrich]

Why though, Ubuntu is an excellent base as well and they let you decide if you want to install any Snap or Flatpak support.

I would argue Arch is a much better base compared to Ubuntu. I think if System76 started from scratch today knowing that they just want a base distro that they can heavily customize they would have gone with Arch. The main reason they are using Ubuntu now is that originally their systems just came preinstalled with stock Ubuntu and changing the base distro now would likely be too much for them (they would have to maintain 2 distros). Wouldn't be surprised if they do it at some point in the future when they are big enough to support it.

Or they could go with something more esoteric like NixOS with a nice GUI for editing the nix conf file/s. but yeah aside from light customization I don't think Ubuntu is best used as a base OS for a whole host of technical reasons.

[StarterX4]

When I've tried Cosmic on Arch like a month ago, the panels were like turned off (in some settings? Dunno), was like just the window manager is just working with that session, though was able to search for apps with Super key.

A huge flaw - I couldn't resize no window, just maximize and unmaximize.