System76's COSMIC Desktop Nearing Alpha Release

[ssokolow]

YES!!!

Because System76 is a company that has employees that are working for salaries, benefits, etc and it's an absurd business practice to give away your competitive advantage for free.

They want to try to make money around the GPL, fine, there is nothing that says they have to help people that didn't lift a finger to help them develop the software screw them over.

I don't disagree. I was just asking for clarification.

[royce]

I would argue Arch is a much better base compared to Ubuntu.

For an enthusiast, maybe, yes. But there's a reason businesses go with vendors like Red Hat, Canonical or even Debian that: a stable base with high predictability and lower ongoing maintenance. Rolling releases just aren't good for the enterprise.

[Anux]

For an enthusiast, maybe, yes. But there's a reason businesses go with vendors like Red Hat, Canonical or even Debian that: a stable base with high predictability and lower ongoing maintenance. Rolling releases just aren't good for the enterprise.

Yes, what's also a big point for ubuntu as a base is: huge software repro and the biggest support from closed source companies. As a user, that's what gives you the most benefits.

If I compare Arch to Ubuntu there are million little stones in my way to get the software I want running flawlessly while in Ubuntu you add a PPA from the author and are ready to go.

[mdedetrich]

If I compare Arch to Ubuntu there are million little stones in my way to get the software I want running flawlessly while in Ubuntu you add a PPA from the author and are ready to go.

I said using Arch as a base which is not the same as just using Arch by itself. The distro sitting ontop of arch would automate all of these "million little stones" that you complain about in the same way that CacheOS/EndevourOS/Manjaro does for Arch.

[Anux]

I said using Arch as a base which is not the same as just using Arch. The distro sitting ontop of arch would automate all of these "million little stones" that you complain about in the same way that CacheOS/EndevourOS/Manjaro does for Arch.

I wonder how this would be possible? Will they precompile everything from AUR (and what's not in there from source) and offer it in a repro? What about the proprietary stuff? And what about things like wine?
Clearly your mentioned distros don't solve those problems either and suffer from the same disadvantages for end users.

I don't see arch as an end user distro nor as a base for one. It might work in a very restricted environment like steam box but not for general purpose. Or lets say it might be possible but its endless more work than the same thing with Ubuntu (or any other big distro).

[mdedetrich]

I wonder how this would be possible? Will they precompile everything from AUR (and what's not in there from source) and offer it in a repro? What about the proprietary stuff? And what about things like wine?

They have to do this anyways for PopOS, everything custom they have to build as part of their own custom PPA's. It wouldn't be any different for Arch, and for the packages that are not custom built they can use the stable Arch repo's.

The whole point of Arch btw is that unlike Debian/Ubuntu, its ridiculously easy to build packages out of source.

Clearly your mentioned distros don't solve those problems either and suffer from the same disadvantages for end users.

I don't know what you are implying with your quote but they do clearly more or less solve these issues

[sophisticles]

Also, iirc, as they want their Cosmic DE to be easy for them to brand and theme etc to their liking, they will make it also very easy for any other SI to do the same. That is part of the nature of the market, they chose OS not to get rich, but for some ideological reasons. 76 is because of 1776.

This right here is their biggest issue, ideology and business do not mix.

There is one purpose to a business, to make as much money as you legally can, everything else is secondary.

[Quackdoc]

This right here is their biggest issue, ideology and business do not mix.

There is one purpose to a business, to make as much money as you legally can, everything else is secondary.

anyone who thinks that you can't mix ideology and business is a fool, You can get paid for doing what you love, you can get paid for helping other people. There is a difference between being successful and being solely driven by profit

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.
...

Release the source to everything, including COSMIC if you must, but do not release any binaries let anyone that wants to offer COSMIC figure out how to build it themselves.

As of right now you have a bunch of parasites that are just waiting to play these guys for chumps, as soon as COSMIC is released there will be projects using it without any financial benefit to System76.

I just don't know.

DE is a significant part of many issues. Right now linux has no semi-decent DE, so they haven't even arrived at a minimum bar. also cosmic is really easy to build. it's just rust for 90% of it. Being closed source won't help anything.

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

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

old cosmic is, new cosmic is not

[rmfx]

This right here is their biggest issue, ideology and business do not mix.

There is one purpose to a business, to make as much money as you legally can, everything else is secondary.

Lol go say that to Apple 20 years ago.
An other business lesson from Sofisticules that’s amazingly off…

[logical]

GNOME at the launch of Fedora 39 crashed regularly and took the whole system down with it (making the wayland compositor hand off applications and not crashing them, is not a priority to GNOMEs RedHat developers). Not even mentioning its one-click RCE exploit of the time.
If COSMIC manages to not crash all five minutes, it is already more stable than the utter cancerous crap that is GNOME.
There is no excuse to use GNOME in the year 2024. Just use something else. GNOME and GTK became a burden and need to be stomped out for good.

Sigh, more anti-Gnome drivel on Phoronix forums. You don't like it, I get that. Guess what though? You aren't the world, not even close. Use what you like. I just don't get the need of folks on this forum to constantly crap on Gnome, a desktop they obviously don't actually use. It's juvenile.

And yes, Fedora Gnome 39 had issues. The problem affected both wayland and X11 sessions. Haven't seen such a problem in many, many releases. It's been fixed for a while now. Get over it.