Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered

[muncrief]

Cosmic already has pretty advanced theme capabilities, that are easy to configure yourself rather than having to download a theme. One dev made a very red "Doom" theme for himself. Looks like this: https://fosstodon.org/@soller/111222802911852892

Oh, I didn't know that Daktyl198. It's awesome that they actually created built in tools for changing theme colors. I spent years off and on creating my custom blue theme for XFCE, first for GTK2, and then GTK3, and man was it ever a pain. And sooner or later I'm going to have to convert it to GTK4, which I'm certainly not looking forward to. But it's quite unique and beautiful, to me at least, and I can't imagine my workstation and media server desktop without it. Here's a picture: https://mega.nz/file/1f5SDBjC#jtMSXE...ka5UACHN3eU8C0

[You-]

https://nitter.privacydev.net/jeremy...838910390272#m

Thank you for this, which supports that I said:

1. Neither developer has (from what I know) ever worked for or even consulted for Red Hat.
2. The concern was over funding for a very specific issue which System76 were now going to fund for its own product, but previously had decided not to fund it as a communal effort.

I dont think System76 employees have ever been in a public feud with Red Hat employees, so trying to set up this specific david Vs goliath seems weird.

There was a tussle for influence, but it was between them and the (I suspect) much smaller Purism along with its sub-contractors, maybe with a few independent volunteers. In the end the latter showed up with (rather, started off with) code (including libhandy and Libadwaita) while the former made demands of the latter to code the features they wanted.

(that wasnt the only reason. They had a different reading of the usability study that was done a few years ago. They concluded different things, which lead to developments in Pop Shell and cosmic shell extensions, such as vertical workspaces amongst others.)

It is good that System76 decided to go their own way as they now stand on their own two feet and as they develop their own software and there is no reason for bad will to develop as there is no social contract that is assumed.

(incidentally after that call by Gnome Foundation for further focus on Accessibility, AFAIK Endless Foundation funded gnome for some work and Red Hat started to employ a number of people to work on the issue. System76 decided to rely on AccessKit, which may get broder support as I have since seen mention of it being use elsewhere as well, so they may have made a good choice.)

[Quackdoc]

Thank you for this, which supports that I said:

1. Neither developer has (from what I know) ever worked for or even consulted for Red Hat.
2. The concern was over funding for a very specific issue which System76 were now going to fund for its own product, but previously had decided not to fund it as a communal effort.

I dont think System76 employees have ever been in a public feud with Red Hat employees, so trying to set up this specific david Vs goliath seems weird.

There was a tussle for influence, but it was between them and the (I suspect) much smaller Purism along with its sub-contractors, maybe with a few independent volunteers. In the end the latter showed up with (rather, started off with) code (including libhandy and Libadwaita) while the former made demands of the latter to code the features they wanted.

(that wasnt the only reason. They had a different reading of the usability study that was done a few years ago. They concluded different things, which lead to developments in Pop Shell and cosmic shell extensions, such as vertical workspaces amongst others.)

It is good that System76 decided to go their own way as they now stand on their own two feet and as they develop their own software and there is no reason for bad will to develop as there is no social contract that is assumed.

(incidentally after that call by Gnome Foundation for further focus on Accessibility, AFAIK Endless Foundation funded gnome for some work and Red Hat started to employ a number of people to work on the issue. System76 decided to rely on AccessKit, which may get broder support as I have since seen mention of it being use elsewhere as well, so they may have made a good choice.)

indeed. Some purism devs, core gnome devs, and iirc a few other. I think the closest "RHEL" drama was LVFS stuff, but I can't remeber if LVFS is a rhel project or just funded (perhaps partially) by rhel,

[botipua22]

https://nitter.privacydev.net/jeremy...838910390272#m

throwback to when alice was still alexander

[Myownfriend]

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

Gnome and Redhat aren't the same thing.

[Doomer]

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?

reminder that the stock market isn't the real economy, infinite growth, milking everyone to the bone until they die isn't the only way to do business.
system76 has been about openness and sharing since day one, they earned respect thank to their stance and they do contribute to the whole linux ecosystem when they can (I do think cosmic de is also a net positive, gnome/gtk has been hostile towards users for too long).
sure they could get sponsorships with spyware companies like dell, hp, lenovo and others are doing and bloat their OS with inane bullshit but they don't and I glad some businesses still have a backbone and don't bend the knee when presented with "easy money" by selling their users to the highest bidder.

[Myownfriend]

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

That's a very good point. When Mutter first started, it was a compositing window manager that ran atop Xorg and was never created to work with any other backends so it took time to split things out into X11-specific code, Wayland specific code, and common code. That's still happening to some extent. If you look at Bilal Elmoussaoui's work over the past year, he's been doing a lot of clean-up including moving more X11 code into X11 specific files to help get Mutter to the point that it can be compiled without X11 support. Some of his other work recently has included getting rid of duplicate functionality between Cogl and Clutter that isn't needed anymore now that Clutter is developed within Mutter. This has resulted in thousands of lines of code being removed and fewer dependencies.

This is all the kind of stuff that needs to be done when a project has been around for awhile, has seen a bunch of changes, and needs to support multiple backends. Hell, it doesn't require much code but Mutter still supports EGLStreams while projects like KDE have dropped support as soon as Nvidia joined everyone else and started supporting GBM.

[Daktyl198]

Oh, I didn't know that Daktyl198. It's awesome that they actually created built in tools for changing theme colors. I spent years off and on creating my custom blue theme for XFCE, first for GTK2, and then GTK3, and man was it ever a pain. And sooner or later I'm going to have to convert it to GTK4, which I'm certainly not looking forward to. But it's quite unique and beautiful, to me at least, and I can't imagine my workstation and media server desktop without it. Here's a picture: https://mega.nz/file/1f5SDBjC#jtMSXE...ka5UACHN3eU8C0

Well, that's the best I think I've ever seen XFCE look... so you've hit it out of the park! Looks better than 99% of themes I've seen, and reminds me of one of the reasons I liked Windows 8.1 far more than other versions, despite it's obvious flaws. You could make your windows sooo vibrant and colorful.

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).

I've run it and, honestly, it's was hardly usable. But not really for reasons you might think. The compositor works perfectly, and core apps like the notes and terminal work so good that I actually use them on KDE. It's just things like getting the settings panel working, making the launcher work better, adding more applets to the panels. When I ran it, it was basically like running a basic Window Manager like Sway or Wayfire, but with two only semi-usable bars on the top and bottom. But I also last ran it over a month ago, and this post states that they've done a ton more settings work.

[dkasak]

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

Link? I vaguely remember there being a disagreement about contributions or communications ( or something ) between Gnome and System76 people. I don't remember anything about Redhat being involved. I don't remember anyone "seething immensely" ... I think that's a description I'd reserve for trolls in Phoronix forums.

[mSparks]

lol, getting devs to work on wayland compositors is pretty much the linux equivalent of convincing windows users to delete their system32 folder.