A lot of shallow "but the buttons!" comments here... no need to be so negative.
This is the first alpha release of a full new desktop environment, built on a new GUI toolkit (based on Iced) and a new Wayland compositor, together with a suite of applications, all built from scratch in Rust .... give it some time.
Most interesting to me is the integrated tiling support.
I've been on i3/sway for many years, but a lean, lightweight and fast DE with tiling as a core feature and full proper keyboard navigation support everywhere might get me to switch. There are times where you really miss a proper DE over the hacky patchwork that a custom setup with a niche Wayland compositor entails.
It is sort of dumb but at this point I’ve bounced back and forth between i3 and sway long enough that I’m vaguely tired of them but also totally reliant on the key binds.
But if I’m going to switch to a DE… I mean, I already have a fine customized window manager setup. The point of a DE is that it doesn’t need to be customized much and comes with all the bells, most of the whistle pre-installed.
All that is to say, if new really interested in this as long as they ship it with a built in “i3-like key binds” option.
I will say, the integrated tiling and being able to also break out is nice imo. I actually like the gnome based cosmic enhancements that Pop has done in the past and have been following the COSMIC development with a lot of interest. I wouldn't mind seeing a relatively simple app... maybe Calculator, with libCOSMIC so I can have an idea of a getting started level of such an app with Rust. It's harder to start with more complex apps as an example to look at or work from.
I agree that it could use some more polish. I'd also like to see the bulk of the icons (re)generated from a primary and secondary accent color as well. They look out of place as you may tweak the colors. A unimenu and kde theme generation are also things I'd like to see sooner than later.
The integrated tiling is THE killer feature for me using Pop OS.
I used i3 plenty back in the day, but these days I just don't have the time to fiddle with the config. Pop OS tiling works perfectly out of the box if you don't need anything fancy.
Yes, I'm using Hyprland at the moment but it's got a chaotic community and it's still pretty buggy (though heading in the right direction), but I'd love an advanced tiling Wayland WM that is less "hobbyish" as my daily driver.
I knew someone would recommend sway which is why I added the word "advanced". I used sway for a couple years before moving to Hyprland because Sway hasn't moved much. There are things that I need that Sway doesn't do, like disabling Xwayland scaling, and proper screen and window sharing.
Gnome with animations completely turned off + the pop shell extension is a great experience. And for when you have to, you can still log into sway from GDM.
did they need to build all that?
I'm all for them doing something new, especially integrated tiling support. But it seems they have taken on way too much for a small company.
As an owner of a System76 laptop I'm really conflicted on this stuff.
On the one hand, I'm glad to see developer attention given to the Linux desktop. I use and like GNOME well enough, but it's great to see competition and innovation.
On the other... I guess when I buy System76, I'm effectively paying a markup to subsidize development of these side projects (I'll never use pop_OS for example).
As somebody who's looking to just buy a computer, it makes justifying the expense of System76 a little more difficult. There are other Clevo rebadgers, after all.
There isn't a fixed number of Linux users. Your economic model for this is misguided.
System76 seems to want to sell to engineers, researchers and data scientists. The competition here is a MacBook with the typical Unix ecosystem or a Windows laptop with WSL.
So this allows them to take control of the total user experience and increase their customer base.
Their target audience is people who want and need a Unix based environment, are power users, but don't want to play around too much.
So this investment is intended to sell more laptops. I think they have a fair shot at making this pay for itself and they have a small but reasonable opportunity to grow exponentially and become a player of a seriously different size.
I would assume people on HN could appreciate the ambition.
Alpha release is how people remember you. Virtually no one interested in a clear ui will check it again just in case it got buttons. People are tired of this ui fad and speak out cause it’s probably important for them.
That's ridiculous. I wouldn't consider running this in alpha regardless of what it looks like, so you can get I'll be checking back in when it hits its first stable release to actually give it a try.
I see a slightly restyled Mate desktop environment. Nothing really new, some marginal advantage like a tiny bit more visible window focus. Scrollbars still invisible. Buttons even harder to distinguish from not-buttons, and not clear how a disabled button can look when everything is so graywashed. Generally, looks like another designers take on style, not usability.
I feel like as the computer literacy of the people making decisions in tech companies has gone up, the care that's being invested into actually making good user interfaces has gone down. This applies to Macs, Windows, and also to Linux desktop environments.
Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more on aesthetics. People used to care about making sure buttons are recognizable and differentiated with icons, colors, and clear labels. Now it's just text. People used to make sure windows had clear, visible borders, and the active window was clearly identifiable. Now it's just a shadow, and if you have a dark user interface, you can't even see the shadow. People used to make sure scrollable areas where clearly identifiable, now you have to just guess at what is scrollable.
From the screenshots, this looks like the same low-contrast, low-usability, but visually pretty design approach most modern desktop environments have adopted.
It's unfortunate that this seems to be the direction we're going in.
I think people learned the wrong lessons from Apple. They thought that Mac products were successful because of their aesthetics, but in reality it's because they were the only products that tried to be usable.
> Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more on aesthetics.
I'm going to make an argument I don't fully agree with, but I think is worth discussing: the dramatic increase in digital literacy affords us the ability to focus on aesthetics more now. When no one knew how to use a computer or what it could do, everything needed to be extremely descriptive and often needed a metaphor back to the "real world." This isn't (as) true anymore.
That is objectively true, but I still think it's a bad decision. Computer-literate people may not depend on good user interfaces, but they still benefit from them.
a classic market irony example is keyboards.. Every single user here has a keyboard, yet keyboards on a mass scale are cheap and badly designed, with no end in sight.
Much like user interfaces: by careful study of how people use them and not by aping what the most "successful" keyboards are doing.
Anyone who has used a mechanical keyboard can tell you that there is much room for improvement. Rubber dome keyboards are cheap to manufacture and adequate when new but wear out quickly, and most people don't treat them like a wear item. Meanwhile, mechanical keyboards provide a superior typing experience that decreases hand fatigue and can easily last 20+ years with no maintenance.
And don't get me started on layouts. QWERTY is ubiquitous but is a piece of tech debt that has hung around for over a century. Studies have been done and layouts have been produced that are much more efficient and produce less hand fatigue, but none have taken hold because of the sheer momentum that QWERTY has.
Want to see an easy place where there's room for improvement? Why are the rows on every keyboard you've ever used staggered so bizarrely? Because on a typewriter, mechanical limitations meant that there had to be room for the linkages. But inexplicably, we continue to manufacture keyboards that preserve this fossilized layout. Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.
Modern mechanical keyboards are overpriced rgb widgets for the most part. And god forbid you’re any literate in switches, lubing, etc, it becomes impossible to just get a keyboard. I’ve returned two m. keyboards and am absolutely fine with kv-300h (cheap island scissors with no bells or whistles). I have two, one from 2017, another from 2024. No difference.
I think the market rewards cheap keyboards because most people don't use desktop computers, most people do almost all of their computing on mobile phones. Some people use laptops for work, which they swap out about every 2 years, so the longevity of the keyboard doesn't matter to them.
I've seen coworkers using 65% or less mechanical keyboards and I have no idea how they get anything done. They always seemed like a cosmetic item to me, though they seem more portable if you're connecting it to a laptop. I use a full mechanical keyboard with keypad and regularly use home, del, pg up/up keys and appreciate having the arrow keys in their own little area. I use a few of the F-keys too. To each their own, but I personally find these tiny keyboards to be far less useful than a full sized keyboard
> Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.
I'm curious why. It never occurred to me that this would be a source of discomfort. If I look at how I have my hands on the keyboard, they are angled anyway - my torso is wider than the keyboard center, elbows rest on the arm rests, so the hands then kinda meet in the middle angled. It doesn't look like an orthogonal layout would be particularly advantagenous.
Otherwise, I think keyboards are a case of "good enough" and high transition costs compared to the benefits. I'm a software dev, so certainly above average in the amount of typing I do. But I can't even type with all ten fingers, yet it never seemed like a bottleneck. I can't "outtype" my thought anyway.
Look at Kinesis 2/360, Glove 80, Keyboardio Model 100. I've used most of them for extended periods of time and would not touch a staggered keyboard with a stick.
Another angle for optimization would be QWERTY itself.
The real lesson they need to learn is to add the right UI components. Apple did that right. There gradually added and styled tab bars, sidebars, etc. It didn't come on day one. If they can do that maybe we get a framework that actually adds components necessary to build good desktop applications.
Cosmic has a huge opportunity to make a desktop toolkit that doesn't suck. With proper components that you need for modern applications. I tried reaching out to the team on LinkedIn, but I guess it just goes into the LinkedIn spam. If they can nail the component library on their rust framework, I believe Linux Desktop applications might finally take off. But so far it doesn't seem like I could catch their interested.
Much as those things sound nice, I feel like the GP in that a DE is very much a user-focused tool, knowing it has nice developer-friendly internals is a distant second to having a good interface.
I ran MATE for years because I thought the GNOME3 rug-pull redesign was a major step backward. MATE has not really evolved a ton since it was forked from GNOME 2, so I honestly don't see the similarity between Cosmic and MATE. If anything, Cosmic looks to me more like "GNOME 3, but behaves even _more_ like MacOS."
If you like real buttons and scollbars, KDE is very nice these days and is MUCH more stable than it used to be.
If you ignore the fact that it looks much better than Mate, maybe.
The sentiment of "looks don't matter" seems to be very common among Linux users. Or maybe they don't see the difference, but it would be like not seeing the difference between a beaten Lada car and a modern Toyota Camry.
A built in mac-like dock, completely different styling on components, no weird bottom window bar, no windows-like application menu, customized theme engine, built in window tiling. Just a few little differences.
The claim is Mate can do almost everything this DE does, so switching to yet another wannabe Mac DE isn't worth the hassle. (I'd be interested had they broke away from this ubiquitous Mac mimicry.)
KDE is fully based on graphics accelerated drawing, it is expected AFAIK. MATE is mostly software-rendered unless extended with Compiz.
Basically, yeah. They can all be made to look and feel identical to each other, and their functionalities are supersets of MacOS launcher functionality set.
as someone currently running a mate desktop with xmonad as the window manager, this is pretty much everything i want in a desktop environment. mate is showing its age a bit and has some rough edges and glitches, so if a modern, active project is taking over the mantle I'm perfectly happy to embrace it.
I have been following Cosmic since it's inception and Pop_Os! as well. For context, I was very against the Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 transition at the time because it destroyed so many useful and (at the time) did not replace them with an alternative. System76 is very hit-and-miss with their hardware (it's often pretty bad) but they are getting better at software over time.
As a Linux user or a developer, Cosmic is not something I can touch right now. I'm super excited for the future of it and they are making a lot of waves. They are giving Gnome the kick they need in making a functional desktop for real users. The fact that Gnome still comes out of the box with no real solution for multitasking (dock, bar, something) other than to randomly hit the super key or jam your mouse into a corner is insane. Every distro and 99% of users are installing some kind of multitasking aid (you don't count if you're using a tiling window manager)
I don't know all the specifics, but they also seem to be putting a realistic alternative to some of the plans, protocols, etc. Right now we have Gnome and KDE. KDE mostly does their own stuff and works with the FreeDesktop groups. Gnome works with them too, but more in a way of "here is what Gnome is doing you'll follow suite" kind of way. Having Cosmic as an option for people who want things closer to Gnome than KDE but don't want to deal with the "Gnome problems" will be good.
Look at how the icons at the bottom have almost zero margin to the overly rounded sides.
Why is it so hard for anyone outside of Apple to make a visually appealing GUI? It just requires a little bit of taste and sense of aesthetics. I am baffled that this hasn't happened yet. The closest thing so far is probably ElementaryOS.
My whole issue with the COSMIC thing has been that it seems to be designed by developers. Not designers. At every corner they make baffling choices. The speed and functionality are great. The design not so much.
I'm hoping this UI matures and allows for customization so that I can get it where I want it.
Yeah I think the HN crowd easily underestimates the amount of specialized talent and effort that goes into a good design. Much like good software, good design blends in so well that users don't realize how hard it was to make.
Apple spends billions on design, even inventing many of the core paradigms that have since become foundational. Apple still frustrates me with a lot of their choices, but let's not pretend just anyone can match their design prowess.
Care and craft. A lot of software engineers think that “done” means functional. And not “feels right”.
That and unless a software engineer has specifically practiced implementing pixel perfect designs from a great designer, then they don’t spot the errors. The design will feel wrong but they don’t know why.
'Pixel perfect' designs are stupid, qnd responsible for backwards steps in font scaling. GUIs should be reflowable, not 'pixel perfect'. Dumbass 'pixel perfect' designs are the reason you can't resize the fucking System Preferences window.
They're also shitty for accessibility. If you're significantly visually impaired but still inclined to rely on your remaining vision, you'll find that (a) macOS doesn't let you jack the fonts up big enough and (b) when you actually do get large enough text just by jacking up the scale of the whole Ui, all kinds of text fields are truncated and some windows some even fit properly on your screen.
I'm aware that 'pixel perfect' doesn't strictly mean 'totally fixed layout'. That's not really relevant here.
You can't have, for instance, consistent alignments down to the pixel level, on systems with arbitrary DPI emulation, e.g., when you set DPI manually to something other than 96 in Xorg. This is where the usual caveats for 'fractional scaling' come in (because you have to render at a higher resolution and then scale it down), why such scaling often results in blurry text, why HiDPI displays are required for the normal scaling on macOS, etc. Such changes come in part in pursuit of enabling 'pixel perfect design' on the desktop, and they suck.
Commenters on this site will frequently point out things that are apparently misaligned by a single pixel. What is their complaint, if not that the UI element in question fails to be pixel perfect?
Whether the System Preferences pane must have a fixed size in order to achieve 'pixel perfection' is perhaps debatable. That such inflexibility makes pixel alignment easier is obvious. You think Apple have some other, better reason for System Settings being completely unresizable? What is it?
The point was that unless an engineer has practiced implementing designs exactly, they often miss the details and don’t _see_ the details they’ve missed.
I say this as someone who used to not see the details, and then worked at a company where it was expected that we implement designs exactly. Ever since then I can’t _not_ see UI design details.
It’s like shopping for a car, once you’re biased towards a specific model you see it everywhere.
I think it requires a combination of things: a good taste, a sense of visual design and programming. The first two is more of art form.
Most of the developers on these projects are really good at programming but its rare to get a good combination mentioned above AND willing to work on open source over multiple years consistently.
Update: Also someone in the decision making hierarchy needs to have a keen sense of design. Example: Steve Jobs learnt calligraphy and even though he did not actually designed it he would certainly veto and pass feedback to the developers.
People are just used to how Apple GUIs look like. I could do the same thing, look at the macOS dock and exclaim that it's ugly because the bottom margin is noticeably larger than the top margin. It's all a matter of taste.
I'm looking right now at my mac's dock (on the left side) and see clear misaligned stuff. I think it's because of the black dot that tells when the app is opened or not, but the right margin is smaller than the left margin, and the dot is not even centered in the left margin, is close to the left edge, looking even bad if you notice.
Only software has the culture of sharing. Not other engineering. And certainly not design. Consequently, the open-source mentality pervades software: lots of good stuff is available. Lacking this culture, people with design sensibilities work on design in proprietary spaces and comment in public but do not make open-source software.
Some people think this is because it's hard to contribute as designers, but I think it's just that designers are brought up in a proprietary school of thought. It's just like some cultures have recipe-sharing and others have the notion of 'secret recipe'.
To my people there is no 'secret recipe': if you ask, you shall receive. But others hold this notion dear. This cultural divide pervades occupations and makes some incapable of sharing.
Microsoft attempted the same thing with Windows 11 and it turned out to be a functional disaster. All platforms have their own legacy default workflows that regular customers are used to, that cannot be screwed with for "aesthetics".
I have no admittedly no understanding of aesthetics. Is the ideal big margins and this is far away from it, or is this close to the ideal with minimal margins? From a functional standpoints margins around a dock would be a waste of space, no?
The problem isn't that margins should have a specific size but that the design as a whole should feel cohesive. It's the balance of padding, margin, font sizes, and text alignment that is all wrong. Not just one specific thing, but the whole thing. Nothing lines up vertically. There are too many and too few borders. Some invisible borders take up space and others don't.
Big margins and tons of whitespace is fashionable. Good design doesn't need to be fashionable, but it does need internal consistency. A Mac-style dock with big rounded corners needs some space to breathe. If you don't want to sacrifice that screen space then maybe it's better to go for a more angular design.
It seems Linux is stuck in two worlds, never the Twain shall meet:
1. Engineers who are great at code, bad at UI and UX (unless your tastes are 1990s-2000s styles, you do you, but watch your market share always be niche. Reeducating the populace to see the superiority of your preferences compared to Apple is never going to happen.)
2. Engineers who are great at UI and UX but sloppy at fundamentals - take elementaryOS. Looks gorgeous, but every new release takes a complete reinstall, which is the most user-unfriendly way of doing a basic distribution task.
I’ve just learned to accept that Linux on the desktop is never going to happen.
It's more granular than that. Engineers who are good at UI are often really bad at UX. Very often with Linux the UX has been sacrificed to some snazzy new look (Gnome 3 and Unity) with horrible UX. Meanwhile UX is quite seriously good in environments that look plain, such as XFCE.
But using KDE, Gnome, XFCE or Mate and then popping into the modern Windows' hellscape shows that actually Linux on the Desktop is already here and pretty damned good.
I installed EOS on my dad's old computer. He is stuck on an old version because he is not technical enough to do a re-install. I pretty much swore it off after that issue.
Seems like the ideal is for group 2 to be producing the DE and working in concert with group 1 who's responsible for the distro. How exactly to arrive at this result is another question.
I see nothing really "different" or "better" here, in terms of visuals or ease of use.
To that end... I don't see the point in imitating a desktop experience that is pretty stagnant and moving in the wrong direction (macOS; I'm a user myself) when there are the decades that preceded Y2K that could be mined for much more usable an interesting desktop experiences. There's BeOS, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST various windowing managers, OS/2, Windows 9x, the list goes on...
I still use Mac System 7.x from the mid-1990s which with a few choice extensions is basically equivalent to modern macOS windowing experience. And of course that goes back to the early 1980s with the prior System software and even the late 1970s with Apple Lisa development.
It looks nice, and it looks familiar. That's important. You don't sway people with a UI that's too far from their experiences. And people like eye candy. If you ever have to build a demo, first make sure it looks good. The first impression counts, unfortunately.
It depends on where you’re coming from. If you despise all the shallow visual-design oriented fashions of recent-ish times that have generally been degrading the UX, then it doesn’t actually make for a good first impression.
I'm really astounded that macOS window management is so bad. For a company lauded for their UX decisions, how can they accept the current full screen/splitting workflow as "good enough"?
All the devs I know that work on Mac just have the windows casually thrown around and as a windows user with FancyZones I don’t know why but it bothers me so
I can't blame your colleagues, in that macOS just doesn't provide good window management tools.
But for my part, at least, I typically 'tile' my windows by hand into thirds on my ultrawide monitor with Rectangle, then switch windows exclusively via fuzzy filtering across all windows rather than Command-Tab between apps. (I do occasionally still use Command-`, though.)
I have a theory about this "Jobs-ism" (And now that he's dead, "Ives-ism"
---
Nobody was seemingly capable to say no to either jobs or ives.
Jobs was a visionary for a lot of UX items - however, and this is my opinion-- He was heavily left handed (in thinking and physically) - thus a lot of his UX items are from A) position of supreme leader and B) his physical UX with all things come from a left-handed perspective, which is fantastic for certain things, poor for others)
and with Ive -- his over-powering desire to be the HW minimalist wreaked havoc on consumer wallets.
If he wasnt such a jerk about refusing a lanyard hook on the iphone - he cost consumer *billions* in cases, screens, etc.
Apples outright evil stance on connectors, and forcing their designs upon the consumers costs billions in wasted time, money, hardware, resources, angst etc...
I fn hate jonny ive's design decisions around the fragility of the iphones design for aesthetic.
Sure it has "gorilla glass" -- but a physical design that ensures that a single drop of the device kills it.
Then the decision to put inert glass panel on the REAR of the phone?
---
Had Ive ever stepped into any mall in Asia before and around the time the iphone came out he would have noticed the vast market for chotchky-lanyards that were sold in every cell store.
Those lanyard were *important* and there were so many stylings.
Basically - the folks at apple appear to have never been able to say "yeah, but" -- and no matter what anyone says - the market shows that they could not.
How many trillions of resources are in the trash because of aesthetic designs, and how many wasted human conscious hours due to frustratingly obtuse UX interaction have had.
There hasnt been an super-productive-revolutionary UX interactions that I feel macOS has given me?
(and I know its a cheap fn shot -- but for a visionary, releasing a touch only phone day-one without copy paste shows that UX was NOT the primary facto operandai -- but a profit operandai...
Ill die on my hill that jobs wasnt as truly a UX master as history writes himself to be. (Breakout anyone?)
I'm not sure of the sources behind your claim about macOS, but I can tell you it is incorrect.
There are a lot of advanced window management available in macOS. Exposé/Mission Control, Spaces, tiling, etc. though it's debatable which of these have been successful and which have not.
A lot of us like boring and "like the past". I leave the experimental stuff to the younglings. Show me something with more utility or a new paradigm and I'm more than willing to give it a go. As it is cosmic desktop is fine and works well for me and has for a couple of years
Believe it or not there are apps that run under System 7 that have no modern equivalents, or their modern counterparts are objectively worse. The vector apps I use on System 7 (Canvas, artWORKS, FreeHand, Expression) run rings round Figma in many important ways.
All of the Linux desktop environments feel like thin skins compared to what we had in the past.
I keep hoping somebody will implement OS/2's Workplace Shell for Linux. Rexx would be nice too but I suspect most people would rather stick with a scripting language they already know.
People keep forgetting Wish still exists and many Open Source GUI apps are scriptable with guile.
And the reality is that Linux desktop environments are skins. The widget toolkit is almost always a separate project. This is becoming even more pronounced with eg Wayland where the compositor just hands the client a surface to render its UI on and knows absolutely nothing about widgets or fonts (not that people have been seriously using those features of X11 for a while anyway.)
And honestly this is preferable. It looks hideous but it's much more pleasant to use. CWM doesn't have many features but the few it does have (such as the regex window title search) I so dearly miss on much nicer looking UIs (like OSX on my work computer.)
I don't know how to summarize WPS with words, but I can testify to the fact that the combination of WorkPlace Shell + ThinkPad X61 TrackPoint is the strongest mind-computer synergy I've ever experienced and the only computer interface I can use fully ambidextrously.
screens only appear on page 120+ of the pdf - and its talking about the coding of the actual UI elements...
Interesting history - but feed that to an LLM to grok - not a human (Sadly, some technical writer prolly almost committed suicide writing that by deadline)
--- but my other points still stand on the stat of Desktop UX (Specifically experience) -- when it comes to re-envisioning the actal X part of a destop UI/UX -- so little vision is happening (it would seem -- Im sure there are a flurry of dark-web eastern EU Bulgarian Hackers (looking at you Ivo) that could pull off a better new idea given some attention from real TechBro Money)
My understanding is that the point of developing cosmic is to enable distros and users to address UI issues in the first place, since GNOME is too limiting.
Agreed, it seems the "big deal" here is using a rust-native toolkit, iced[0], rather than just slapping together another reskinned gtk-based solution like most similar submissions do.
So this is potentially a really cool thing, not just somebody tinkering with stylesheets.
Probably the HN crowd is a bit jaded because of all the hyperbolic "low effort" distros/DEs that are just modified ubuntu/GNOME, but these folks seem to be legit.
One cool feature that I didn’t see described very well here is Cosmic allows you to group windows in tabs, but the tabs can be different applications. Kind of an interesting idea that the OS/window manager is what should be responsible for tab support, not each application.
I like the idea but I also get reminded of the way the edge browser turns each tab into its own unit in the alt-tab switcher. That feels quite annoying.
There are a number of UX conventions, like tabs and tiles that often get replicated across both OS level and across different apps and they get slightly different key combos and interaction details.
It would be interesting if those conventions could be moved to the window manager layer instead. But then there are probably a bunch of interesting edge cases that needs solutions. Like should the file tree navigator of the ide exist in a separate WM-tile than the editor tiles? And if the file navigation spawns an editor, where should it appear? Etc...
You could drag the short title bar with a modifier key to move it from the leftmost position, and non-overlapping title bars would snap together to form tabs.
Several Linux WMs and DEs had this feature a long time ago, when screen space was kind of at a premium. Fluxbox had it for as long as I can remember it. KDE used to have it at some point in its 3.x or 4.x-series releases, I don't recall which one.
"Kind of an interesting idea that the OS/window manager is what should be responsible for tab support, not each application."
I agree completely, and even popup menus, sidebars and other sections of apps could/should be handled above/outside the app, for consistency, flexibility, etc.
This reminds me of a discussion on Twitter about this. Macintosh System 7 that had an app called Stapler, early Mac OS X had one called LaunchList both contained aliases to apps and documents. So I see the benefit of the OS managing this grouping.
So many negative takes here. Does it look perfect? No, it's an alpha. I think the most important thing is that it's built on a solid base that will allow it to grow into a really really great DE.
Looks like all the UIs are made with iced, a new UI library. My question, is this missing all the accessibility features found in uikits like Gtk and Qt? Does each app respect my system theme?
They've created a new theme engine for their DE, they've also done minimal integration for Gnome apps (many of the non-iced apps are still Gnome based). Where KDE theme integration is on the backlog.
[Posted different version under a now flagged comment]
I would love a completely customizable desktop system.
Be able to select different window arrangers, docks, etc., for each workspace.
--
Thinking bigger, something useful would be persistent and named "worksets" of workspaces, that can be closed and reopened. One workset at a time, or multiple.
It would help to be able to view/edit/access the same docs and tools in multiple windows, across workspaces, with different sizes and placements. Think the same Word doc, open in different workspaces, with disparate sizes.
I would optimize worksets for every possible context: crafting areas, development projects, regular tasks, etc.
The result would be dozens of worksets, that let me return to useful contexts months or even years between visits. So the workset manager should allow for hierarchical organization.
And I would want worksets to sync across devices, along with my regular file and app syncing.
I like this a lot. But Im not such a specific programmer to even fathom how to do this. I do have the skills to learn anything. I just wonder if this would be possible with Erlang.
I wish ChromeOS's desktop environment gets ported and reimplemented across mainstream Linux and we're all freed from the GNOME/KDE GTK/Qt hell. It's just sad that Google's Linuxes (Android and ChromeOS) can do things like HDR, VRR, decent fractional scaling, decent font rendering, etc. but desktop Linux is still starved for these things to this day.
I am sad that they discontinued their Pop Shell gnome extension.
I use GNOME but with the animations completely turned off. That combined with the tiling shell feels really snappy and good. I am really considering forking that extension and also visually improving it a little (not a fan of their design language, though I like the modern adwaita style of gtk/gnome apps).
It's a beautiful DE. I have Pop!_OS 22.04 running in my Helios 300 PH315-53 w/NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB card. The laptop itself has horrible BIOS firmware, though. COSMIC works great, for the most part, with Pop!_OS with the exception of two issues. One is an Nvidia Driver issue, e.g. a stopped nvidia-power-services, which I resolved by rolling back to the nvidia-470 driver. The other thing that I have not been able to figure out is how to enable the Places Menu Item in the top dock bar. I don't see a setting for it either in gnome-tweaks, extensions or main settings App. I wish there were a way to have that option available in Tweaks.
The corners are configurable, many people seem to prefer a dock over a toolbar, as to the edge, it does docking to the portion of the screen (half/quarter/third).
NixOS is the first Linux distro that I'd dare to swap out a new DE with.
I've broken past installs (Arch, for sure) by trying to do this on other distros.
Obviously, make a full backup (unless you're on NixOS, in which case, everything just gets rebuilt deterministically from a definition file in either direction, and all previous instances are saved, permitting trivial rollbacks)
On Arch this stuff is easy. I use GDM as the login manager and launch pretty much whatever DE I like from there at login time. I use nix too, though rootlessly with nix-portable.
that's what they said from the beginning though? They just wanted something they could change instead gnome constantly changing things with little or no notice in new releases, breaking applets, plugins, etc with little or no time to change things and no input allowed from anyone other than what the gnome devs chose.
This looks good for an alpha. The days of Compiz Fusion and crazy desktop gizmos are far behind. I'd love Linux to be a viable gaming platform, I'd totally use this. Steam OS is a step in the right direction but nowhere near the flexibility of Windows yet.
(Please don't try to convince me otherwise. Good luck playing Fallout London on Linux, for example.)
Well... Honestly not much impressed, it's a design from another era.
For the present a desktop should be as "invisible" as possible, like old Ubuntu Unity desktop, a thin bar, a launcher, the rest search&narrow, menu included via the Unity HUD. Gnome SHell doing the opposite on purpose, copying the rest have just showcased another btrfs answer for zfs, or the reactionary behavior of some devs who refuse to operate "under the hood" instead in narcissistically in plain sight try to do their best to keep up an essentially deprecated model.
Disclaimer: (Incoming long rant - I was an early and often adopter of the S76 machines when I ran a dev team ~10 years ago - S76 Gazelle was my first full-time production linux-only laptop that I ran (I still have 2 of them, and they are bother broken because between model releases CLIO (the OEM) changed the screen interface connector so a dead screen on one laptop couldnt be moved to the other, and lots LOTS of internal screws would fall out an rattle around - and then S76 wanted a retarded amount $$ for a replacement power adapter - etc... and their service went poor as they grew (Hellow Penguin Computing) -- with that said:
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If you want to redo the desktop, this is a Fisher-Price level of "why should I care" -- HERE Are the features I want in a desktop redux - (ita ll about the WORKFLOWS - not the fricken applets/widgets (the applets idea is a pullover, even if they dont know it, from when Android was seeking to be a good desktop, rather than a tablet, like vision (hospital devices - could give a tech talk on this)...
But hear me out WORKFLOW or CONTEXTUAL desktopping:
I can have multiple desktops on any OS - with a click-swipe left or right I can have another desktop. Which is akin to switching a clear spot on the physical desk.
What I would want within a "new desktop environment" is that I can swap between my "coding" "gaming" "research" "kids-screen-time" "python rabbit hole" "AI Image gen" contexts... with a differing visual clues to which setting im contextualizing:
Imagine you boot to your primary "normal desktop" - its just like any OS' vanilla post-login experience. Blank, no apps open, grab a browser, open a file, go to email - whatever.
Now - I want to swap over to Context[0] - coding.
I switch to that context, I get a visual cue (sure we can load pretty backgrounds, but a subtle change to the overall visuals of the windows dressings switch showing me I am in that context - it would load appletts that give me a preset of context that important (I select a series of things to pre-load, such as "Open VS Code with these folders, and launch FF with this set of contextual tabs. From this context block reddit, [other sites] - and ssh to this machine, give me a widget that shows connections to [environment] etc - give me a summary history of previous commands I was running, current active procs within [context scpoe] etc -- so effectively I have my development desktop context available.
Then I switch to research and its opens the things I want for that - connections to whatever GPTs, rstudio/some BI tool... whateer - and a bucket of tabs and history that are appropriate.
Kids tab is a sandbox for the kids as I teach them certain things... Or a Cooking context thats related to all things cooking. has a timer widget, last recipes looked up etc...
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You get the idea.
(I wrote a white paper about this ages ago - and attempted to recruit some buddies from Goog multiple times to make the contextual computing relevant once motorola came out with that phone that could be docked with data (My white paper on the subject was written in ~2002-4 (cant recall now) -- which was that you held your environment in your mobile and you could walk up to any empty compute/gpu/KVM - slot your phone there, it is the key - it opens your context from device, and cloud, and gave your the local resources of GPU/CPU/KVM whereever you needed it. No storage on the local HW... but you could take advantage of it
(aside: A great alt model that is a modern version would be able to walk up to a heavy GPU with pre-loaded giant models - and you can plug into them for context and run your stuff locally against them and get your results - but walk away from them (think Hot-Desking but for big-ass-GPUs -- I havent thought too much about this - but its an effective analogy for when I first wrote about this)
Anyway -- What I want is a revolutiuon in HOW we see the desktop.
The analogy for a desktop, a physical desktop is dated -- now its "conscious compute contexts" -- Where the whole environment shifts to support what one is attempting to do.
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This really sounds like it could serve the above.
The sharing it with friends:: or team members -- you should be able to invite folks to a context - such that you can have a multi-user context whereby you send an @COSMIC link to a context to a colleague over slack - they load the link, and it effectively launches a "docker" context of the environment to the other user... now they have all apps and deps to jump fully into the context.
This would be useable for teaching, guiding, troubleshooting, development, collaboration...
Set a master context and its all in a repo - and when other users need to upstream a dependency to the context they simply install whatever within their context and it acts like PR to the context owner. It allows for ephemeral installatino of dependencies - and you can tick for perm inclusion - else they evap on leaving context - yet the history of the ephemerals is kept incase you want to resurrect them/include them in the master context settings.
from a window management aesthetic -- KILL ALL WHITESPACE -- meaning all the superflous padding. Stop making desktop buttons look like shit I should be using on a kiosk.
With all that said:
Im down to try it I will give it an honest go - and if any Sys76 folks are here - I still have my gazelles - and my ticket about you swapping out the connector on the same model of box still stands! Ill see if I can make an applet -- specifically I want a context applet that is imbued with RAG -- mayhaps building the applet on txtai libs so that my entire bash hist is txtAI rag'd ...
Ill try out COSMIC on a flagship OMEN 3070 gaming box and see how this works...
I really want to see if I can imbue (imbue was the name of my white paper from ~2002 on the subject) the workflows I would like...
(I've Forrest Gump'd through a lot of technical tides in my sordid life in Silicon Valley)
This is a lot like wishing car manufacturers would unify on how to build a car.
And I mean that not as a dismissal. Standards on many things are nice. So is exploring all of the area left open by the standards.
I think it is an open question on whether or not we could have more standards around what a desktop environment should/could be? Unfortunately, I don't know that there is a company in a good position to build out new standards, at the moment. Most of the big companies are largely content to work alone in their world. Maybe build up a sandbox that keeps developers there.
I am ok with desktop environment exploring new ideas and it is very cool that linux allows them to do so (e.g. I myself am a big fan of tiling window managers and it is one of the main things I miss when I am not using linux).
What I am not okay with is myriad of linux window managers which are 99% the same generic window manager. How much effort is being split between KDE/Gnome despite them being essentially the same thing? How much effort was wasted in unity?
Right, this is why I compared it to car manufacturers. At a base level, there is little to no reason to prefer one car to another. Bicycles can be the same. That said, at the ends, there are people that latch on heavily to decisions and small differences in the options.
Now, again to your point, we are all on the same roads. Such that standardizing parts is incredibly valuable.
I /think/ the trap is that standards often act as constraints on the manufacturers. And software is a large industry where constraints are easy to effectively ignore during development. Memory requirements. Safety from malicious actors on the system. Capabilities of different computers. I could probably go on.
I suspect it is worse than that sounds, even, as developers tend to focus on the intrinsic quality of code thinking that is paramount. I hate that sentence, as it makes it sound like I don't think the quality of the code matters. I fully think it does. I also fully think we fall for aesthetic quality of code far more than we do any other quality.
> What I am not okay with is myriad of linux window managers which are 99% the same generic window manager.
Not sure if you were there but this was way worse in the 1990's when Linux was still very young. Every person and their dog wrote a window manager (I know I wrote a shitty one) and until GNOME & KDE there was no DE to standardise around at all.
At least we have 3 or 4 fairly fully fledged desktop environments now as well as a 1000 different window managers.
What is more likely to turn out "one decent desktop environment"?
1) Take all developers interested in desktop environments, ask them to collaborate and come up with one (1) desktop environment that suits everybody's need
2) Let developers who want to experiment with their own desktop environment, do so, with the hope that at least one experiment results in a decent desktop environment. The ones that want to collaborate can do so
(3) Take all developers interested in desktop environments, ask them to collaborate and come up with one (1) modular desktop environment that allows everyone to develop/choose the basic modules they want. For workspaces, windows, docks, and any other window arrangement and quick access features.
I would love being able to select different window managers, different docks, etc., for different workspaces. The best arrangements for each task.
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Thinking bigger, I want persistent named "worksets" of workspaces, that can be arranged, closed, reopened together. One workset at a time, or multiple.
It would help to be able to have the same docs and tools open in multiple windows, with different placements and sizes. Think the same Word doc open and editable in two different workspaces but with different window sizes and placement.
I would optimize worksets for every crafting area, development projects, and work task, etc.
I expect I would end up with dozens of worksets. So the workset opener should be allow for hierarchical organization.
> modular desktop environment that allows everyone to develop/choose the basic modules they want. For workspaces, windows, docks, and any other window arrangement and quick access features.
But here you are already assuming that all these developers want to have a modular desktop environment. Not everyone wants that, or workspaces, or docks or whatever.
So yeah, if everyone wanted the same thing, I guess we could end up with one desktop environment that covers everything everyone wants. But (fortunately), the world is more complicated than that :)
At first I was going to say something like "Well with that attitude we'll never get the 'year of the Linux desktop.' But actually, what you say describes exactly what the Linux desktop is.
It isn't about hegemony but rather a free marketplace of ideas and philosophies that gives its users a depth of choice between desktops and configurability within desktops that you can't find in any other operating system. So with your philosophy the "year of the Linux desktop" has already happened and is continuing to.
In other words it's ok for people quit obsessing over low market-share and instead enjoy their freedom.
Desktop Linux only "competes" with Mac O's and Windows on a superficial level. While it seems like marketshare matters... it really doesn't from a existential standpoint. Desktop Linux has no* financial driver towards greater marketshare. It's not* competing for dollars with commercial, proprietary OSes.
* Not entirely true... there are certainly commercial offerings and financial backing for the ecosystem, though I'm certain it would still exist without them.
Weird to use market metaphors to describe things that are not commodities. Plurality is the key here, everyone free to choose their own software. The "free marketplace of ideas" metaphor implies that there's some natural process determining which ideas are ultimately the best, when really it's qualitative and very subjective.
for what it's worth, I've when gnome moved from version 2, I was completely lost. I went to xfce for a while then settled on kde for a long time but when I reformatted a machine to have to the side of my work laptop, I used pop_os just to test it out. It is on par with ubuntu as being a complete cohesive operating system. I'm excited to see where they take it and without knowing much about them, I'm a supporter.
Who would control it? There isn't just one "Linux community". There are multiple organizations that use Linux, and the ones that are well-managed tend to do the best. How would the key people behind Gnome and KDE resolve their differences, or any of the smaller projects? Should everyone just use ChromeOS?
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. I personally like Elementary the most, and it has an objectively robust strategy of copying macOS.
Why it is hard to take leadership of the desktop on Linux? There's lots of crappy, buggy projects. They differentiate themselves on meaningless, non-functional experiential things like theming specifications, what programming language you write so and so functionality in, the licenses, etc.
The tiny audience of "undecideds" in the Linux ecosystem adopt stuff for stupid reasons. Meanwhile normal people are obviously happy to use macOS. To copy macOS and deliver what those people need, you need millions of dollars of product development every year. You'd have nothing to show for it year after year. So it's very hard.
They're bringing up customization because a contributing factor to System76 deciding to make their own DE rather than continuing to work with the GNOME developers was a difference of opinions on the amount of customization/branding that a distribution could add to GNOME.
This is the first alpha release of a full new desktop environment, built on a new GUI toolkit (based on Iced) and a new Wayland compositor, together with a suite of applications, all built from scratch in Rust .... give it some time.
Most interesting to me is the integrated tiling support.
I've been on i3/sway for many years, but a lean, lightweight and fast DE with tiling as a core feature and full proper keyboard navigation support everywhere might get me to switch. There are times where you really miss a proper DE over the hacky patchwork that a custom setup with a niche Wayland compositor entails.