System76 Now Planning For COSMIC Desktop Alpha Release In Late May

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76 Now Planning For COSMIC Desktop Alpha Release In Late May

System76 had been planning an initial alpha release of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to debut at the end of Q1 (March), but now they are delaying the first alpha to May for allowing time to wrap up feature work on their new desktop apps...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-COSMIC-Alpha-May

[hedonist]

Im so excited for COSMIC, i think extending the deadline to finish the core apps was a smart move.

[clippy]

At a glance, I am surprised how much like GNOME some of these screenshots look. If someone told me these are from a 3rd-party Adwaita theme for Plasma, I would not have questioned it. Not saying this is a bad thing, but I thought COSMIC was created in large part because System76 is unhappy with GNOME. I also wonder if the quicker and smoother than anticipated development process has anything to do with using Rust from the start. I think someone the Asahi team made similar comments: Using Rust is much more complicated at the beginning, but really pays off once a project starts growing.

[V1tol]

Not saying this is a bad thing, but I thought COSMIC was created in large part because System76 is unhappy with GNOME.

They were not happy with GNOME internals (framework architecture, developer team attitude), not with how it looks. And that says a lot about GNOME that guys decided that using Rust to write their DE is much simpler to do than coping with all that crap.

[bug77]

Hopefully once this gets into better shape Michael can take do a comparative, looking at what this offers ootb compared to other major DEs, how many resources it uses...
I'm happy with Plasma, but I would definitely check out what Rust+"from scratch" is able to do.

[timofonic]

Really nice news! I really hope they create their innovative ecosystem after alpha, not needing GTK apps. I hope Rust will improve many bugs and developers concentrate on usability and features too.

[Alexmitter]

They were not happy with GNOME internals (framework architecture, developer team attitude), not with how it looks. And that says a lot about GNOME that guys decided that using Rust to write their DE is much simpler to do than coping with all that crap.

You can ask Richard Hughes what a pleasure it is to work with System76. How they discredited fwupd to not look like absolute clowns to develop their in house solution instead of using the already established standard just so users have a harder time using other distros than their own on their hardware.

[hf_139]

Here the official opinion of GNOME developers.

FeLZYptVQAAeCs3.jpg

[bug77]

You can ask Richard Hughes what a pleasure it is to work with System76. How they discredited fwupd to not look like absolute clowns to develop their in house solution instead of using the already established standard just so users have a harder time using other distros than their own on their hardware.

It's all explained pretty clear over here: https://github.com/pop-os/firmware-manager

It looks to me like they needed the option to distribute firmware updates via their own channel and fwupd was an either/or option.
Either way, I'm not sure how not using one particular piece of software is an argument that System76 is hard to work with.

[rmfx]

They also started cosmic-player.
I was surprised to see that. I thought they would leave that up to mpv or vlc or at least use libmpv
in the background but they write their own player from ffmpeg dep.
Can’t wait to see cosmic-viewer too. Images viewers are an important part of a DE.

Good thing they delayed if it means more polish, more complete, more stable on release day.