Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered

System76 has been developing the Rust-based COSMIC desktop for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution but its usage won't be artificially limited to that in-house distro. Among other distributions that have been looking toward packaging it, interest is currently being evaluated in creating a Fedora special interest group (SIG) for the COSMIC desktop environment...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-COSMIC-SIG-Interest

[nadro]

At now I'm using Silverblue and it works really good, however COSMIC looks really interesting, so will be nice to have Cosmic spin.

[grung]

There are high hopes for Cosmic as far as I can see. However It took so long for KDE,Gnome and Cinnamon to get where they are now, how can Cosmic compete with them after few years of development.

Ubuntu tried same thing with Unity and at the end they went back to Gnome.

[mxan]

Unity and Cosmic aren’t really comparable. Unity was just a replacement for GNOME Shell, and it was built in Clutter just like GNOME Shell is. It also required quite a few patches to GTK - ever wondered why Unity never showed up on any distro other than Ubuntu?

All the “Unity” apps were just the standard GNOME 3 apps, of course also with downstream patches. Canonical switched back to upstream GNOME + a few extensions because there just wasn’t any justifiable reason to keep maintaining Unity and all the hacks it needed. There was also no easy way to port it to Wayland *or* Mir - Unity depended on Compiz and was heavily X11-oriented. Unity 8 - the ground-up rewrite in Qt - never really went anywhere, though it does live on today as Lomiri and is still heavily buggy :P

Cosmic, on the other hand, is a brand new codebase, it doesn’t use anything from GNOME.

[misuzu]

COSMIC is almost a thing in NixOS too: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/259641

[V1tol]

There are high hopes for Cosmic as far as I can see. However It took so long for KDE,Gnome and Cinnamon to get where they are now, how can Cosmic compete with them after few years of development.

And that's why it can. It doesn't have all that legacy baggage like maintaining both Wayland and X11 implementations.

Ubuntu tried same thing with Unity and at the end they went back to Gnome.

Unity was very popular back in the days. I even used it then (now I prefer KDE). And then they decided to go Google style and kill successful product. Ubuntu with GNOME is useless as a distro - you can get better GNOME literally anywhere else.

[hf_139]

Did the GNOME RedHat employees, who seethed immensely about COSMIC when it got first announced, already make a comment about that?

[bash2bash]

does COSMIC have a proper desktop environment with icons on the desktop? or is it like fake GNOME that has none?

[Daktyl198]

There are high hopes for Cosmic as far as I can see. However It took so long for KDE,Gnome and Cinnamon to get where they are now, how can Cosmic compete with them after few years of development.

Ubuntu tried same thing with Unity and at the end they went back to Gnome.

KDE, Gnome, and Cinnamon all had to work things out (like specifications) as they went along. COSMIC is benefiting from the fact that most of the issues have been worked out, and there are 10 different reference implementations they can look to for inspiration.

Plus, those 3 that you mentioned are maintaining gigantic codebases with separate codepaths for X11 and Wayland, while Cosmic is Wayland-only. Those 3 are trying to "port" existing features in their codebase to Wayland while adding as little code as possible, and it's causing issues. Meanwhile, other wayland-only window managers have proven that you can have an extremely stable and fully featured compositor in a very small amount of developer time. The only thing lacking with those is the "environment" part of a desktop environment, so things like a settings app, themes, etc. That's where most of Cosmic's development effort is going, to the panels and the apps because the compositor work is probably mostly done and ready for their 1.0 release.

[muncrief]

I will never understand the attraction of black and white desktops as Windows 11 and so many Linux DEs have embraced. I mean my goodness, why would you want the only two desktop colors to be dirty black or gray? It's like preferring an old black and white TV instead of a modern color one. But at least with Linux we still have the choice of a few full color desktops, whereas with Windows 11 there is no choice other than light or dark mode.