System76 Now Planning For COSMIC Desktop Alpha Release In Late May

[RejectModernity]

GNOMonkeys are mad that system76 are done with their shit lmao. Good luck to System76, will definitely try their new DE.

[sharpjs]

I remain super excited by COSMIC. As a dev who really likes Rust, I hope it is easy to get into writing apps for this platform.

[mmstick]

The screenshot misses the context that a year or so earlier System76 had been asked if they wanted to contribute to improved accessibility and according to some people their response had been along the lines that they didn't have the resources. A few months later and they have resources for both accessibility and a whole desktop.

System76 has its own rights what it wants to do with its resources, so we can't complain, but people who dealt with them on an engineering level can validly have bitter experiences.

That is simply not true at all. System76 had been sponsoring GNOME for years prior to the decision to create COSMIC. We even hosted an open source free desktop conference in Denver. Our UX architect was heavily involved with GNOME's weekly design discussions. I'm confused what you expected a team of two or three Pop developers to do at that time. All of whom were already tied up by working on infrastructure projects for Pop!_OS and System76, maintaining packages, responding to issue reports, community engagement, writing patches here and there, and custom feature work from customer feature requests. Work on gnome shell extensions was a full time job in itself. We had already submitted quite a few patches to GTK and other GNOME projects.

The decision to work on COSMIC didn't happen "a few months later". The plans for COSMIC started after it was clear what direction GNOME was going with libadwaita and gnome-shell, and where we wanted to be from our own UX research. Thanks to the success of the Thelio desktop, Launch keyboard, the HP Dev One deal, and overall volume of hardware sales during the pandemic, there was enough to assemble a team of experts for the COSMIC project. It's not a large team by any means, but we have more than enough collective skills and experience to do this.

people who dealt with them on an engineering level can validly have bitter experience

You mean the Purism libadwaita developer? Not a valid experience at all. Intentionally sought to cause discourse with us, and wrote up a hit piece afterwards while calling themselves the victim.

[andyprough]

What delays? Have you not noticed how much progress has been made? COSMIC's development is well ahead of schedule. The compositor began development two years ago, and the libcosmic toolkit started a year and a half ago. We were initially planning on releasing Alpha 1 without the core applications, but application development is progressing so quickly that we decided it'd be a waste to cut an alpha without them. So instead of releasing Alpha 1, we are skipping it to go straight to Alpha 2. The planned schedule to release end of summer is still the same. This only affects the release of the first alpha ISO.

Also, you would have to be intentionally lying to claim that System76 is reinventing everything from the ground up. The UI library that libcosmic is based on was already developed by the iced-rs developers long before we decided to use it to build COSMIC's platform toolkit. The windowing library was already developed by the Rust windowing group. The software renderer, tiny_skia, was already developed long prior. The wgpu renderer was created by the gfx-rs team. Accessibility functionality was developed by AccessKit's developers who are now sponsored to integrate it in GNOME. Software localization is performed by the fluent library from the Project Fluent team. I'm confused where you think System76 is doing everything from scratch. Many of the pieces already existed in the Rust ecosystem. We brought the glue and filled in the gaps with a unique design.

Sounds pretty cool and also smart to use available pieces. I guess the screenshot of the Gnome dev conversation above is incorrect then, claiming that you are writing accessibility from scratch.

I saw a good interview with your CEO Carl Richell recently, talking about the decision to build Cosmic. He had some good reasons for going that route, mostly around ensuring support for your particular hardware with your particular customers: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=EBefrrM4pis

[loganj]

i hope it will not look like gnome with that interface that looks like its for visual impaired people

[sophisticles]

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.

If the System76 people did that then good for them!

PoP_OS is not like other distros, these people are in the business of selling complete systems feature a Linux based OS and I for one am on the record with advising them to make it harder for COSMIC to run on other distros.

In fact, I think they made a mistake from the get go when they decided to based their distro on Ubuntu, I would have started with LFS and created a custom branded distro from that and I would have made COSMIC exclusive to their clients.

But they have a right to run their business as they see fit.

[sophisticles]

Here the official opinion of GNOME developers.

FeLZYptVQAAeCs3.jpg

The Gnome developers have nothing to brag about.

These are the people that had a memory leak for 10 years, that they at first denied it existed, then they claimed it was fixed and finally after a decade they got their act together.

They are also the people that will refuse a patch submission unless the author uses either 2 or 8 indentations because anything else they consider "disrespectful" akin to someone walking into your house with muddy shows after you have just mopped the floors.

I'm not kidding, look at their submission guidelines.

[tildearrow]

For once... good tab padding! (at least)

[You-]

That is simply not true at all ... I'm confused what you expected a team of two or three Pop developers to do at that time.

You missed what I wrote about this: "System76 has its own rights what it wants to do with its resources, so we can't complain". I am not complaining. I dont think I even have a right to complain here, you had your resources and chose where they best worked. However another developer working in a collaborative manner might have different goals and expectations.

You are reading malice where none was intended.

You mean the Purism libadwaita developer? Not a valid experience at all. Intentionally sought to cause discourse with us, and wrote up a hit piece afterwards while calling themselves the victim.

No, I am saying it is legitimately possible for two people working together to rub themselves the wrong way. I would even expand to say it happens more with technically gifted people.

Once again, I did not attribute blame. I chose to leave it at engineers being able to have a bitter experience. That could be due to the fault of one party, the other, or neither, but it happens in collaborative and competitive environments. Humans are not robots.

[andyprough]

The Gnome developers have nothing to brag about.

These are the people that had a memory leak for 10 years, that they at first denied it existed, then they claimed it was fixed and finally after a decade they got their act together.

They are also the people that will refuse a patch submission unless the author uses either 2 or 8 indentations because anything else they consider "disrespectful" akin to someone walking into your house with muddy shows after you have just mopped the floors.

I'm not kidding, look at their submission guidelines.

I think someone once said, "But they have a right to run their business as they see fit." That should apply to Gnome as well. Their project, their indentation rules, their bug fixing timetable. We have plenty of other options for those of us who don't like Gnome, unlike your favorite, Windows, where you literaly have zero options.