COSMIC Alpha 4 Released For System76's Rust-Based Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: COSMIC Alpha 4 Released For System76's Rust-Based Desktop

System76 today released the newest development/testing version of their Rust-based desktop environment designed for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Alpha-4-Released

[Errinwright]

The one desktop to rule them all.

[anarki2]

The fact that you can try this out with just a simple `dnf install` on Fedora is commendable.

[woddy]

They're already struggling with memory leaks...eh! Rust! 🤣

[rabcor]

Looks very apple-like, like if you took macos gui and gnome and mushed them together. I hate it lol.

[V1tol]

They're already struggling with memory leaks...eh! Rust! 🤣

Yea, that's disgusting. Better give me segfaults and vulnerabilities please.

[Quackdoc]

Cosmic media player is gstreamer based, which may sound bad at first glance, gstreamer's new gst-va plugins for vaapi, is NOT to be mistaken with gst-vaapi, they are far more efficient and performant then the old gst-vaapi ones, and much more reliable, making gstreamer based players which use it (which should be most newish players) fairly performant. Im still having issues with start time and ram usage for cosmic apps, but the issues themselves have been greatly alleviated.

Cosmic-bg now has support for jxl, cosmic-files currently doesn't but it wont be hard to add. (though cosmic files does support external thumbnails so this only effects preview) Touchscreen now properly rotates with the display which is nice.

Cosmic is shaping up quite nicely, still encountering issues, but nothing has outright broken for me for a while now.

I now run cosmic on all my devices bar my tablet. one fedora laptop, one artix laptop, and my arch desktop are all currently running cosmic.

Cosmic apps still have really bad touch support tho, it's a low priority, but it will be amazing when it's solved.

[rmfx]

I can’t wait when the first pop-os pure cosmic de with zero gnome software installed will be released, to see how light they will reach.

[Quackdoc]

I can’t wait when the first pop-os pure cosmic de with zero gnome software installed will be released, to see how light they will reach.

hmmm, I'm a little far out from what is needed for a "pure DE" for instance, do you include browser in that? firefox+chrome need gtk for instance.

Cosmic doesn't currently have a dedicated gallery app or music app either. I'm not really sure what all else is needed. I wonder if there could be a checklist somewhere.

[Zakmeister]

Looks very apple-like, like if you took macos gui and gnome and mushed them together. I hate it lol.

It’s still the most functional desktop experience out of windows/gnome/kde/mac. The tiling is class and that’s coming from someone who’s never even used a tiling window manager before.