System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 2 Desktop Packages

[sophisticles]

You (or me) are probably missing the point. Cosmic DE is conceptually a completely new DE with new concepts of "How to use your desktop". Making a fork of a fork of a fork and working from there away to "the new thing" is probably harder than rethinking new from the beginning. Including the choosen language for it.

The minor problem with your claim is that they chose to make COSMIC look and feel very similar to Gnome, in many ways it's a Rust version of Gnome or what Gnome could be if the Gnome devs weren't jackasses.

[sophisticles]

If you need to lock your customers in cages then your product is shit.

Vendor-lock-in is in reality nothing but a digital cage.

COSMIC not being designed as a cage/lock-in speaks highly to its quality.

It's not that you are locking your customers into a cage, it's called creating a killer app that gives potential customers a reason to buy your product and it's a concept that transcends computers and has been around for decades.

Do you want a car with air suspension? If yes, then you have to buy either a Caddy or a Lincoln because that's the only ones that use that.

Back in the day, did you want to play Donkey Kong? If yes, you bought a Colecovision.

Did you want to play Super Mario Bros? You bought a SNES.

Do you want to use MS Office? You use Windows.

Do you want to use FCP? You buy a Mac.

Do you want a Big Mac? You go to McDonalds.

These guys are selling generic cases with AMD CPUs abd AMD GPUs, they offer nothing that you can't get someplace else at a lower price point.

Something like COSMIC could make their systems a preferred vendor for someone in the market for a Linux system.

As it stands now there's nothing stopping someone with more business sense from opening a competing business that sells systems with a choice of AMD or Intel and/or NVIDIA and installing any distro a customer wants with COSMIC.

It's a stupid thing for S76 to do.

[Quackdoc]

As it stands now there's nothing stopping someone with more business sense from opening a competing business that sells systems with a choice of AMD or Intel and/or NVIDIA and installing any distro a customer wants with COSMIC.

Cosmic is not a product being sold, it's a tool to make the product they are selling not suck. And it seems to be working quite well for them.

meanwhile if S76 did lock cosmic into PopOS, cosmic would not be good, as it would not have gotten nearly the amount of testing it has already.

[rmfx]

I am impressed they updated Iced to 0.13 already for this release. It seems like GUI toolkit updates are very solid and efficient.

However, I have a little grip with the round style, they should default to "slightly round" settings, because it's much more successful visually, and because the full rounded style is not yet really convincing. Rounding widgets too much, everywhere, makes the UI look broken and unpolished. It's fine to get some fully rounded shapes where it makes sense, but not as far as cosmic does currently. For example, drop down menus with a round shape inside is really ugly.
Round shapes should be used where there are no rectangular shapes very nearby that contradicts with the flow, and a computer UI layout is by nature rectangular, so the rounded shapes should be used with taste, only where they make sense.
The other way around, the switches could stay rounded even when style is set to not round, because they look their best fully rounded. That's what many other UIs do, and for a reason.

I know this is an alpha, so no pressure on the feedback for visual coherence, but I wish the next version has some more.

[SophiaS]

The minor problem with your claim is that they chose to make COSMIC look and feel very similar to Gnome, in many ways it's a Rust version of Gnome or what Gnome could be if the Gnome devs weren't jackasses.

OTOH it is not intended to reinvent every wheel again, AFAICS. So yes, I like the way it goes. It is both end user friendly and costumizable. As far as i can tell for now the direction I see. (And yes, it is buggy and a lot of things missing yet.)

[ahrs]

I'd love to try it out and help with testing, but sadly there's no Ubuntu build. Of all distros to miss.

I find it hard to believe that when Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu. They must have an APT repository somewhere, no?

[Quackdoc]

It's also worth noting that for anyone who doesn't like the cosmic-de. Cosmic comp is also just a good compositor and window manager in general, and you can run your own DE on it

For instance here is waybar and xfce4-panel working on it

https://files.catbox.moe/zoq69b.png

EDIT: It does say sway, but I needed to fool it to get xfce4-panel working for some reason, hence me using the cosmic-screenshot app from the cosmic protocols examples https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-pro...-screencopy.rs

[geerge]

The minor problem with your claim is that they chose to make COSMIC look and feel very similar to Gnome, in many ways it's a Rust version of Gnome or what Gnome could be if the Gnome devs weren't jackasses.

Sounds like a win to me.

[cb88]

This claim is disingenuous.

They could get away from Gnome by forking Gnome as has been done before, adopting any of the dozen other desktops, such as Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE, Deepin, Plasma, there's lots of options other than writing a De from scratch.

But they decided to create a unique DE from scratch, in a language that no other De uses.

Even if we grant that they didn't initially start out with the goal of selling more systems, they are still missing a golden opportunity.

In theory these people are adults running a business, not some hippie high school kids chasing some dumb ideology.

Highly doubt... the point was that they were wasting more time trying to interact with gnome (who also controls GTK and a buttload of other libraries that all have major issues that need resolving) than... just writing this whole desktop from scratch.

I do strongly dislike the gnomeisms that persist in Cosmic though.

[cb88]

It's not that you are locking your customers into a cage, it's called creating a killer app that gives potential customers a reason to buy your product and it's a concept that transcends computers and has been around for decades.

Do you want a car with air suspension? If yes, then you have to buy either a Caddy or a Lincoln because that's the only ones that use that.

Back in the day, did you want to play Donkey Kong? If yes, you bought a Colecovision.

Did you want to play Super Mario Bros? You bought a SNES.

Do you want to use MS Office? You use Windows.

Do you want to use FCP? You buy a Mac.

Do you want a Big Mac? You go to McDonalds.

These guys are selling generic cases with AMD CPUs abd AMD GPUs, they offer nothing that you can't get someplace else at a lower price point.

Something like COSMIC could make their systems a preferred vendor for someone in the market for a Linux system.

As it stands now there's nothing stopping someone with more business sense from opening a competing business that sells systems with a choice of AMD or Intel and/or NVIDIA and installing any distro a customer wants with COSMIC.

It's a stupid thing for S76 to do.

Except... a desktop will never be a "killer app" its is a thing that should provide many services neatly and cleanly without fuss or pomp.... and certainly shouldn't be pimping itself in my face as if it were going to slice and dice for me.

Literally KDE1 ... was and is a killer desktop. 90% Everything since then has largely just been throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks and ending up will a bloated pile of poo.