COSMIC Desktop Alpha 3 Released With More Enhancements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: COSMIC Desktop Alpha 3 Released With More Enhancements

As a nice Halloween treat for Linux desktop users, System76 has published their third alpha version of the Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-Alpha-3

[cutterjohn]

Coder Radio podcast, Michael Dominick(sp) recently installed it out of necessity(something about a bloody mary and a macbook pro and apple store and accidental damage) and mentioned that it did NOT crash much for him, and Chris chimed in that it had been pretty stablkle for him as well... I'm going to have to take my other extra SSD and install this on it and try it out...

It sounds interesting, even beyond that it's written in Rust...

[McCarthee]

I know we're still early in development, but I've gotta say I'm not a big fan of the default theming. Hopefully it's fully customizable. Pretty ugly tbh.

[cutterjohn]

I know we're still early in development, but I've gotta say I'm not a big fan of the default theming. Hopefully it's fully customizable. Pretty ugly tbh.

Mr. Dominick did mention that they were quite 'opinionated'...

EDIT: now that I've written the above Im really tired of the over use of opionated... it seems that every DE that I hear discussed nowadays is described as 'opinionated' as an excuse for not looking more closely? It's just beginning to grind my gears... especially since many of those systems (DEs) offer a good variety of customizability(*cough* excepting GUHnome *cough*)... (hey we had to put that hard G in there for no real reason...)

[Daktyl198]

Nah, I agree. As much as I absolutely love the project, the main reason I don't use it day to day is actually the fact that I don't like it's looks that much. A large portion of the theming is very... "programmer art". And that's not counting the fact that many parts of the desktop aren't necessarily consistent. Or worse, are consistent when they should actually be different!

I know they're going for a Gnome-styled look to be familiar to existing users of their OS, but if so they really should actually go full-on Gnome HIG since it's had time to mature and looks good (subjectively). I personally would have preferred a Plasma styled desktop, but it is what it is.

[Gabbb]

I have tried Cosmic recently & I think it's going to be huge. It's much much less resource heavy than Gnome/KDE, compositing performance is the same as with good WLR window managers & it has sensible defaults without extensions. Plus it has vertical bar, good tiling, etc.. options!

[rmfx]

And I personally think it looks beautiful.
It’s homogeneous, sober, good color palette, they need more polish but it’s in alpha stage, so I forgive them.
The most important features are stability, speed and consistency, and they’re nailing it.

[Quackdoc]

I can't say much about the release cycles since I am perpetually on -git via pkgbuilds on arch, but here is more or less the current status on what I think I have posted since last time, for the major applications I think people will care about.

*Some Libcosmic applications constantly freeze on me for 30s before becomming usable again, I have yet to report this but plan on doing so soon. I have been doing a lot of bug reporting for various applications and got bogged down. This one is fairly bad.

*Cosmic player - It's the fastest and most performant gstreamer player I've ever used. Make sure you instal the gstva packages, NOT the gstreamer-vaapi packages. They are two separate implementations and gst-va (va264 for instance) is far faster then the vaapi stuff https://files.catbox.moe/tn2rcd.mp4
sadly, it is still gstreamer and you get the usual gstreamer shittery but it also uses playbin under the hood which is even worse, IE. no multitrack mp4 (gstreamer issue), You cannot handle videos that have separate video audio sub tracks (playbin issue) which means no YT-DLP support unless you want to stick with the mp4 files. Im currently experiencing a bug when I swap back and forth between tracks, where sometimes it just dies. maybe a gstreamer issue, but I think this one is a playbin issue. it also has a bug where seeking is broken, fixed upstream in iced_video_player.

It's a shame they used gstreamer, but easy to understand why, ffmpeg is a mess, and ffmpeg rust bindings are even worse, Really wish we had a proper native rust library, really wish the dreams of rust-av weren't dashed T.T perhaps iced_video_player will allow custom pipelines to better handle multitrack and split file stuff so we can have proper yt-dlp support. For now, you can hack it using subfile=https://audio-track, but that doesn't give you a third option which is needed for actual subs.

*Cosmic files - It's fine, it uses gio for things like network mounting and removable devices, but it's optional, simply uninstall that piece of trash, and cosmic-files just won't use it. It uses image-rs for thumbnails when it can, and falls back to system thumbnailer. It also uses image-rs for the system preview. This sadly means that things like avif and jxl support are inferior compared to other file managers. Worth noting that image-rs has recently shown that they may be willing to add a new policy that would allow jxl to be added to image-rs.

*cosmic-bg - basic image background for wayland using layers, but well, it does the job and does now support jxl.

*Cosmic-idle - kinda sucks for now, wayland-pipewire-idle-inhibit doesn't seem to work for some reason, I just disabled auto idle.

I think that's about it. I haven't tested things like orca or anything. Touch support is still not really supported in cosmic apps, but you can bind touch to specific displays, not exposed in settings, but it does work. I use it to play games on now daily without using gamescope, Waydroid is still mostly broken so it still needs cage.

[varikonniemi]

They are aiming for a stable release by the end of the year? That's setting themselves up for failure. They should be aiming for a feature-complete beta release series. And let it marinate for a couple months before declaring stable release.

[ahrs]

So for all the beef between GNOME about not adding Accessibility support, they seem to be doing that anyway. All compositors should care about accessibility because it matters not just for people with impairments but is also important for testing and automation use-cases. We need more support for libei so people can build out all the automation and testing tools people are used to on X11.