System76's COSMIC Working On Drag & Drop, More Compositor Improvements

[MrCooper]

This! It's riddiculous how bad Qt support is in Gnome and how Gtk support is done well enough in KDE.

You do realize this is largely down to Qt & GTK themselves?

[Goddard]

I love the fact they are using rust, tiling, and doing custom work. I hate the fact it looks like a toddlers computer.

I know they are moving from Gnome to Cosmic, but I hope they find a new design.

[Goddard]

This! It's riddiculous how bad Qt support is in Gnome and how Gtk support is done well enough in KDE.

You can blame Gnome devs for that because in Plasma Gnome apps are styled and scaled really well.

[sophisticles]

Their aim is to get a good working product out but not to be a perfect product from day 1. Gnome and KDE have had 20 odd years to build all these features, Cosmic looks good but you just cant expect it to be fully feature compatible. I personally am eager to try out the finished product, though whenever it ends up hitting Fedora.

I hope for their sake this is in fact not the case.

Unlike Gnome and KDE where they are not selling anything and rely on donations, Suystem76 is selling custom Linux systems that target HPC workloads and they want to get institutional buyers, like labs and universities.

When the top of the line system costs 35 grand "good working product out but not to be a perfect product from day 1" is not acceptable.

They need to make use everything is absolutely perfect or don't ship it on their desktop, make it an optional download.

[sophisticles]

The screenshots look good, if derivative of existing desktops.

I hope for their sake that COSMIC is a stable, bug free product.

I also hope that it doesn't hurt their business, though I strongly suspect it will.

Hey System76 people, I know you guys have hated my previous suggestions and I have sworn not to give anymore business advice, so think of this as a stream of consciousness, maybe follow Ubuntu's example and offer two versions of PoP_OS + COSMIC, one will be the free one that everyone can download from your site, since you guys seem hell bent on doing that anyway.

This one will have no updates, the end user is on their own in that regard.

The other will be the Pro version that is part of the systems you sell, this version will include updates and support.

There needs to be some reason for people to buy one of your systems instead of building their own using your software.

[Quackdoc]

So now that I have actually had the time to read the blog post

• Theming works well, about as well as I expected. GTK and Cosmic apps all follow the same theme now, (though I use very little gtk apps)
• Cosmic store is fast as hell. Seriously the fastest app store linux has to offer. The UI is mediocre still. But I highly reccomend it over literally any other app store
• Super + click to move, no resize support using super yet
• Screenrecording reliably works, but you can't currently select the desktop to record
• Touchscreen works great on single/primary display devices like tablets laptops. Desktops that have multiple displays don't currently work because cosmic can't let you map the display yet (you can with a file iirc but I cant remeber how to do that)

cosmic-files I'm surprised didn't get much light here. This is the real MVP since the last blog post. The file manager "Mostly" works now. Drag and drop, cut, copy and paste. deleting files etc. It's the real MVP IMO.

[Quackdoc]

Indeed, no cosmic-viewer nor cosmic-monitor repo on their github yet. I guess they want to polish their existing apps and libcosmic before jumping on the next ones. I think cosmic-player will not be a prio though.

Cosmic player is using ffmpeg directly which is win some loose some. It does have decent perf unlike gstreamer based ones though so there is that going for it. I have encountered some bugs regarding negative timestamps but I havent really tested it too much. As for an image viewer. image viewers in rust are actually kinda hard because image-rs really isn't that great. Perhaps they could go with imagemagick based solution or something. Im not really too sure the best way forward for a rust native image viewer. But I do know that plenty of them suck. Oculante is pretty good though it's missing ICC support, cant handle images larger then the GPU's max texture size without resizing and only works in 8bit T.T

I love the fact they are using rust, tiling, and doing custom work. I hate the fact it looks like a toddlers computer.

I know they are moving from Gnome to Cosmic, but I hope they find a new design.

I doubt they will. I personally really like it, However if someone doesn't they can always just use cosmic-comp with their own apps and panels etc. Some work will need to be done (IE waybar workplace switcher doesn't quite work well on cosmic) But it has support for a good chunk of wlr protocols

...snip...

more absolutely dumb ideas tha's guaranteed to make a meme out of S76 if they were to actually implement it

[mmstick]

The screenshots look good, if derivative of existing desktops.

I hope for their sake that COSMIC is a stable, bug free product.

It will not be released unless it is free of bugs. Our QA team still exists, and they will be required to QC every pull request during the beta.
COSMIC is releasing with Pop!_OS 24.04, so it also will not be released unless COSMIC is working perfectly in our environment.

I also hope that it doesn't hurt their business, though I strongly suspect it will.

Because reasons that shall not be named?

Hey System76 people, I know you guys have hated my previous suggestions and I have sworn not to give anymore business advice, so think of this as a stream of consciousness, maybe follow Ubuntu's example and offer two versions of PoP_OS + COSMIC, one will be the free one that everyone can download from your site, since you guys seem hell bent on doing that anyway.

So your solution to improve the quality of Pop!_OS is to release, maintain, and support two completely different implementations of the desktop. Quadrupling the amount of work that is required to get any updates out. That's not even accounting for the fact that this would be a PR disaster for an open source project that would immediately cease interest in third parties contributing to or using it.

[rmfx]

Cosmic player is using ffmpeg directly which is win some loose some. It does have decent perf unlike gstreamer based ones though so there is that going for it. I have encountered some bugs regarding negative timestamps but I havent really tested it too much. As for an image viewer. image viewers in rust are actually kinda hard because image-rs really isn't that great. Perhaps they could go with imagemagick based solution or something. Im not really too sure the best way forward for a rust native image viewer. But I do know that plenty of them suck. Oculante is pretty good though it's missing ICC support, cant handle images larger then the GPU's max texture size without resizing and only works in 8bit T.T

They already use image-rs for cosmic background anyway, so they already settled on their image lib for now.
I agree it's far from prefect, but it does the minimum needed.

PS: why their types are Rgba and LumaA, keep it consitent guys. RGB, RGBA, L, LA

[sophisticles]

Because reasons that shall not be named?

You know the reasons already.

By releasing PoP_OS!+COSMIC as a free product that anyone can download and install on any system, you effectively eliminate any reason to buy a System76 computer.

Top of the line system is pushing 35 grand, if you source the parts yourself it can be built for about 10 grand less.

Since PoP_OS!+COSMIC can be downloaded for free, I can build the same system for 25 grand and get the same experience, there is nothing to entice me to spend an extra 10 grand on the same thing.

Further, if i am running an IT department and need to buy 10 of these system, the question i am asking is why spend an extra 100 grand when i have a graduate from an good engineering school on my staff that can build and administer the systems i need as part of his job.

This isn't hypothetical, this actually happened in one of the medical labs I was a manger for.

One of the MD/Ph.D researchers wanted a new computer for the work he was doing and when the other MD/Ph.D researchers heard about it they put in requests for one also.

Each computer cost over 50 grand, the requests were approved by the CTO, the PO went to accounting, which sent it to the CFO, who forwarded it to the CEO and I was in on the meeting when the shit hit the same.

The CEO asked why the CTO was approving a quarter of a million dollars in new computers for these researchers, one thing led to another and the CEO asked if our IT department was on vacation or somehow incapacitated.

Our CEO was a guy with a Doctorate in Chemical Engineering, very no nonsense, he didn't want to hear about support contracts, he made the It department build the computers in-house and support them themselves.

More importantly, any any problems that a person using a home brew system running PoP_OS!+COSMIC is not going to be blamed on them, they will go on forums like this or put up YouTube videos saying how PoP_OS!+COSMIC sucks or is buggy.

You never want to lose control of your flagship product, the thing that defines you, which in System76's case us PoP!_OS+COSMIC.

Once the clones start, please excuse the pun, popping up, it will be difficult to dissociate any problems with the clones from problems originating with PoP!_OS.

Worse case scenario?

System76 releases COSMIC, everyone loves it, they say it sets a new standard for desktops and it gets widespread adoption.

You have just cannibalized your potential client base.

Even worse?

Someone makes an exact clone of PoP called MoM!_OS, it gains popularity, then a serious bug is found and they blame upstream.

There is no upside for System76 to releasing COSMIC to general use.

They will regret it someday.

So your solution to improve the quality of Pop!_OS is to release, maintain, and support two completely different implementations of the desktop. Quadrupling the amount of work that is required to get any updates out. That's not even accounting for the fact that this would be a PR disaster for an open source project that would immediately cease interest in third parties contributing to or using it.

Where did i say release 2 completely different implementations?

You have the one code base, the only difference is that the Pro version will be preinstalled on System76 computers, this version will be allowed to connect to the official System76 update servers and will qualify for support.

The non-Pro version will not be able to connect to the official update servers and no support will be available.

At least give your sales people a differentiating characteristic they can use to explain to a prospective client why they should spend tens of thousands of dollars buying a computer from System76 rather than build it myself and save a boatload of money.

It's a tough economy with no hopes of improving anytime soon, inflation is up, liquidity is down, you see how the market is, if you want to get people to spend money you need to have something unique they can't get for free from you.