Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

A better GNOME than GNOME. It will be interesting to see if they approve this.

[sophisticles]

Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered

Shocking development, never in a million years could have predicted this development over and over again.

This is why I keep saying that the System76 folks should make COSMIC closed source and only available to their customers, at least for a short time.

They have spent nearly 2 years writing a new DE, from a fresh code base and you already have people that are salivating at the chance to use their work without any financial benefit to the creators.

If any System76 people happen upon this thread, seriously consider not releasing COSMIC as open source, at least initially.

Give your company a chance to benefit from this new DE, if you see a sales bump that you can attribute to this new DE, then ride the wave of interest, if there is no sales bump, then release it under any license you see fit to.

Unless of course COSMIC is not the clean sheet design we think it is, if it relies on GPL'd code, then you have to do what you have to do.

But to me it's ridiculous to give away what may be the only competitive advantage you have.

What if you release it as GPL'd code, Fedora does create a spin and some other company starts up in your state offering systems configured similar to yours but with Fedora COSMIC and they offer better warranties and lower prices and your sales plummet?

[Vorpal]

So, what is the point of a "spin" specifically? I don't use Fedora so I'm a bit clueless here. On distros I used in recent years (Arch and Debian mostly) I just install the relevant packages for the DE I want.

Debian even has some checkboxes in the installer for what desktop environment(s) you want to install I believe.

(Arch of course is Arch and just dumps you into a shell and let's you figure it out yourself, which suits me perfectly.)

So yeah, what is the point of Fedora spins or Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Kubuntu? Seems a bit pointless to me.

[Quackdoc]

Shocking development, never in a million years could have predicted this development over and over again.

This is why I keep saying that the System76 folks should make COSMIC closed source and only available to their customers, at least for a short time.

They have spent nearly 2 years writing a new DE, from a fresh code base and you already have people that are salivating at the chance to use their work without any financial benefit to the creators.

If any System76 people happen upon this thread, seriously consider not releasing COSMIC as open source, at least initially.

Give your company a chance to benefit from this new DE, if you see a sales bump that you can attribute to this new DE, then ride the wave of interest, if there is no sales bump, then release it under any license you see fit to.

Unless of course COSMIC is not the clean sheet design we think it is, if it relies on GPL'd code, then you have to do what you have to do.

But to me it's ridiculous to give away what may be the only competitive advantage you have.

What if you release it as GPL'd code, Fedora does create a spin and some other company starts up in your state offering systems configured similar to yours but with Fedora COSMIC and they offer better warranties and lower prices and your sales plummet?

literally no one cares except you lmao

[Quackdoc]

So, what is the point of a "spin" specifically? I don't use Fedora so I'm a bit clueless here. On distros I used in recent years (Arch and Debian mostly) I just install the relevant packages for the DE I want.

Debian even has some checkboxes in the installer for what desktop environment(s) you want to install I believe.

(Arch of course is Arch and just dumps you into a shell and let's you figure it out yourself, which suits me perfectly.)

So yeah, what is the point of Fedora spins or Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Kubuntu? Seems a bit pointless to me.

Spins are nice for the sake of simplicity, im not sure how fedora is now, but being able to install offline with a non massive ISO is quite nice

[Vorpal]

Spins are nice for the sake of simplicity, im not sure how fedora is now, but being able to install offline with a non massive ISO is quite nice

Ah, I can't remember the last time I used an offline installer for a distro. Must have been in 2009 or so probably.

But not everyone has fast Internet, so it might make sense for some to download an ISO first so you don't have to wait while it downloads during the install. I would have expected that to be treated as a niche use case by most distros these days though. That it is supported I guess is nice for those who needs it.

[Quackdoc]

Ah, I can't remember the last time I used an offline installer for a distro. Must have been in 2009 or so probably.

But not everyone has fast Internet, so it might make sense for some to download an ISO first so you don't have to wait while it downloads during the install. I would have expected that to be treated as a niche use case by most distros these days though. That it is supported I guess is nice for those who needs it.

it's also nice for businesses if you install a lot of PCs I suppose. I could think of a couple other uses.

[CommunityMember]

So, what is the point of a "spin" specifically? I don't use Fedora so I'm a bit clueless here. On distros I used in recent years (Arch and Debian mostly) I just install the relevant packages for the DE I want.

Another advantage (for some) is that a spin includes a "live" ISO, so you can boot and run it without installation and decide if you like the experience rather than having to install that additional DE (along with bringing in all of its dependencies) on a system just to try it out.

[You-]

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

AFAIK it was a contributor who had and has never worked for Red Hat and his seething was along the lines of when Gnome was soliciting support for similar work, they had explicitly asked System76 to contribute but they hadnt been responsive (for whatever reason, there can be very good reasons for this such as funding shortfalls etc), but now were going to have to do even more of the same independently.

One thing I do notice though that the hopes and dreams expressed in these forums (and on reddit) do not jive well with the single video I have seen of Cosmic running. It is pre-alpha so it has a long way to go so no shade on it or System76, but I wonder what do those people see. They seem to love that it has "more options than gnome" when even less have actually been implemented (though test settings like corner radius has been implemented).

I understand the hope that once fully implemented, it will be more featureful. It will be interesting to see where it ends up. But people suggest it is already there, which it isnt (as shown by being called pre-alpha by its own developers).

[You-]

They have spent nearly 2 years writing a new DE, from a fresh code base and you already have people that are salivating at the chance to use their work without any financial benefit to the creators.

you do realise this is how opensource works? Without it System76 could only ever have been a Windows laptop reseller.

They still have first mover and integrator advantage. They know the code, they have the developers, they also have the laptops and desktops they primarily target it towards so they can make sure it works exceedingly well there and then anyone else gets best of the rest. Its like the Apple advantage - their OS only runs on a handful of systems so they can focus and integrate better instead of designing for a multitude of hardware and situations that they may not even be aware of exists.