System76 Releases Pop!_OS 21.04 With New COSMIC Desktop

[JackLilhammers]

Not to try to start another desktop war here, but as a very long-time Linux user, KDE had its heyday in 1.x - 3.x days. Ever since then it has only been a perpertually buggy mess. I would let it die already. I hate how it's in so bad shape with no end in sight, it's like watching an old friend with so much promise live a life of suffering.

Don't you think that this is a very personal opinion?
Kde's market share is comparable to Gnome's. A project does not stand on the podium of any market by being a perpetually buggy mess.
Also, decades old projects are not easily let die

[daedaluz]

Switching to KDE and contributing to it would be more profitable than forking GNOME and trying to make it better.

Not to try to start another desktop war here, but as a very long-time Linux user, KDE had its heyday in 1.x - 3.x days. Ever since then it has only been a perpertually buggy mess. I would let it die already. I hate how it's in so bad shape with no end in sight, it's like watching an old friend with so much promise live a life of suffering.

[CochainComplex]

hw-probe statistics

wm

https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_de

Distro

https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_family

[Danielsan]

Why?
PopOS is designed to be good to use with any media/engineering/programming software that works on Linux.

This may be true only if you work with one application at the time, work with more than one application simultaneously and Gnome/Pop start to reveal all their limitations...

[Danielsan]

Thank you for your thoughts. Yes I'm satisfied.

[...]

my I asked what your prefered Distro+WM is?

My pleasure!

I am totally fine with XFCE4, despite its age, XFCE4 looks (for me) more cohesive, modern, and consistent than MATE. XFCE4 is extremely modular, the way (and the ease) I organized my dual monitor setup with XFCE is pretty impossible to achieve with Gnome.

Someone may argue that KDE for that stuff is better, I wouldn't not argue about that, however from my experience KDE has an horrible design flaw, it uses that naughty nested options "a la" Win that bothering me too much.

For my personal vision every application/DE that has configuration settings more that one click away is defective by design. Based on that assumption Win and KDE are defective by design, with both you may open twenty dialogs before to get at the very last option; whereas with Gnome, XFCE4, MacOS or Elementary, for instance, everything is pretty reachable with one or two mouse clicks maximum.

[Nth_man]

[...] By the way, there's also BlueSystems strongly supporting Kde

Yes, if anyone else wants to look, the list of supporters has been growing lately.

About the future, the text "paid contractors and employees" can be looked for in this interview.

[skeevy420]

Not sure why you added "mouse" in there... :P

All BSing aside, it really isn't that bad on smaller screens with a touch/gesture pad. Scale it up and change input devices and it isn't as user friendly. That's where KDE, Mate, and other environments shine. At least that's how it is for me.

[JackLilhammers]

I just wanted to add that Kubuntu has KDE software and "commercial backing and support for free", too.

It's KDE software that comes preinstalled in several computers (with excellent results).

You're right, I said that badly. What I really meant is that commercial support for Gnome is way bigger than for Kde.
Byt the way, there's also BlueSystems strongly supporting Kde

[Nth_man]

has commercial backing and support for free.

I just wanted to add that Kubuntu has KDE software and "commercial backing and support for free", too.

It's KDE software that comes preinstalled in several computers (with excellent results).

[JackLilhammers]

* KDE lacks an equivalent to Gnome's powerful activities view. It gives you a window spread effect, but whoever added that feature clearly doesn't know what Gnome users use the activities view for. You can spread the windows but you can't do something as simple as dragging a window to a different monitor or a different workspace.

Parachute is a Kwin script that mimics quite well Gnome activities. Of course activities has been developed for way more time and is far more polished.

* There is some consistency issues where some windows appear differently because they use GTK or something (ex: lacking the shadow). I believe this has been improved since I last used KDE, but not sure if it's perfect now. I still remember how ugly Chrome looked on KDE compared to Gnome.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd say that Kde handles "alien" apps better than Gnome. At least the configuration options are already in System Settings.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#GTK_application_appearance

* KDE is written in Qt, and I think you won't get as much third party apps written in Qt compared to the C-based, language-bindings-rich GTK.

That may be the case if you focus on Linux, but if you look at the whole desktop market there are way more projects using Qt than Gtk.
You can get an idea by searching Qt and Gtk on github and gitlab, the proportion is close to 10:1

Therefore, I would say System76's decision to base COSMIC on Gnome is the right decision despite the shortcomings of Gnome.

I'd be happy if System76 decided to use Kde, because it would be great for Kde (more devs), great for the users (better UX), and great for the whole ecosystem (more competition for Gnome).
That said, Gnome (or some sort of fork) is a smart choice from an economic point of view, because it's developed by Red Hat mostly, with some help from Canonical, and contributions by others, so any distro using Gnome basically has commercial backing and support for free.