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System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

blog.system76.com

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Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#81

Post by varispeed »

867-5309 wrote: post #70
varispeed wrote: post #34

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching th…

4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit

I currently have XPS 15 with 4k screen and I can easily see pixels, so 14 should be a little better. There is also the feeling that it is 2021 and should I still be seeing pixels? I think crisp high resolution view is much better for the eyes and feels more natural. I am also almost always within reach of a mains socket, so I don't particularly care about battery life, just that I can move the machine from one place to another easily.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#82

Post by superkuh »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #78

I wish Ubuntu would maintain a gnome3+ fork like that, with top menu and reasonable file picker, or partner-up with System76. Not because I can't use another distro, but because I think a well-tested default target desktop distro is important and helping the community. I'm still on Ubuntu 20.04 because I need third-party based stuff to run, such as Chromium and Electron-based apps such as Skype and Teams (which howev…

File picker loss of functionality is the fault of Gtk3 and Gtk4. It would still apply even in systems without GNOME at all. Maintaing a fork of Gtk3 and 4 with patches to restore 2010 era functionality would be difficult but not infeasible. Arch does some of it.

I've looked at the code and it is quite a terrible mess. It's no two line patch to change settings anymore because everything gets reset multiple times in functions you don't expect.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#83

Post by acdha »

867-5309 wrote: post #70
varispeed wrote: post #34

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching th…

4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit

Use a Mac with a Retina display for a week and see whether you don't notice a difference — and it's certainly nowhere near half the battery life. Everyone I know who's done this has never wanted to go back.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#84

Post by Sayrus »

867-5309 wrote: post #70
varispeed wrote: post #34

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching th…

4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit

Text rendering is way smoother, you can also read smaller font because they are more detailed instead of being pixelated.

While QHD is enough for me, 4K is great because it is a factor 2 compared to 1080p.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#85

Post by still_grokking »

I of course appreciate the effort but besides "a big Gnome extension" I don't see much that could be called a new desktop environment.

Also the planed features read a little bit funny to me, to be honest, as that are all things KDE Plasma provides out-of-the-box.

But clearly looks like an improvement over vanilla Gnome, that's sure!

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#86

Post by Tsiklon »

aidenn0 wrote: post #51
thepangolino wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I liked about unity was the HUD that allowed you to search through application menus by typing the setting you were looking for. Do you know if there’s anything offering that functionality for Gnome3?

This is my biggest missing feature from the Mac. Do any of the major GUI toolkits for linux support this?

MacOS sort of supports it - the help menu for each app has a search box CMD+Shift+/ (or CMD+? If you prefer to think of it like that) will open it up.

Each of the menu bar options should be searchable, and the search box will open the requisite menu to the correct branch/leaf and highlight it for you.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#87

Post by ktpsns »

aidenn0 wrote: post #51
thepangolino wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I liked about unity was the HUD that allowed you to search through application menus by typing the setting you were looking for. Do you know if there’s anything offering that functionality for Gnome3?

This is my biggest missing feature from the Mac. Do any of the major GUI toolkits for linux support this?

There is for instance http://afiestas.org/appmenu-runner-meet-the-kde-hud/ , and I bet there are similar tools for Gnome. However, from what I heard of Unity, it seems to be a hell of a work to keep/maintain it running for all kind of programs (regarding the different UI toolkits).

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#88

Post by sk1pper »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #44
rvz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the Linux desktop ecosystem. Another window manager that some users will use and will later complain that their browser isn't working with it or it crashes with etc Wayland, X11, Yet another Linux app or even Z shell, etc. Sometimes it's only 'fun' swapping in alternatives of alternative system components, until you actually need to get work done. Then it must not get in the way of the user. I prefer the deskt…

You are basically teabagging. There is a lot of awesome people in the Free Desktop community, who work hard for what they believe in. Criticism is always welcome, there is a lot of work to do and a lot of stuff to improve. But having people who use a different OS come in and ridicule all of that work is not really nice. I've been happily using the treaded GNOME without filepicker thumbnails for 10 years now and I'm n…

Not parent commenter but I've had the same experience - and I'm sure this comment will be received just as poorly as theirs, but I've given up on Linux desktop. It just isn't stable. I've tried so many times and I don't know what 1) is wrong with me or 2) the "I'm just as productive on Linux" people are smoking. Just getting basic stuff to work like bluetooth is a hassle. Headphones stuck in headset mode, let's go drop an argument to the bluetooth kernel module to enable autoswitching to A2DP. Touchpad driver for my machine kinda sucks, click and drag is still a little broken. Screen tearing watching YouTube videos on Firefox. Oh and it randomly freezes requiring a hard restart. Good luck upgrading packages, you never know what will randomly break. Extra good luck upgrading to the next LTS release, your machine might not boot when you go to restart.

I've been wanting to love Linux desktop for 10+ years and I just give up. I don't have time for this stuff anymore. And I'm not using esoteric distros. Ubuntu LTS, I also tried Fedora and it was even worse.

Sorry, but none of this happens to me on macOS or Windows. They're not perfect - of course crash, have certain quirks, etc, but they waste much less of my time on basic desktop functionality being unstable or needing special treatment.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#89

Post by dahfizz »

Sayrus wrote: post #84
867-5309 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit

Text rendering is way smoother, you can also read smaller font because they are more detailed instead of being pixelated. While QHD is enough for me, 4K is great because it is a factor 2 compared to 1080p.

> 4K is great because it is a factor 2 compared to 1080p.

I strongly disagree. QHD is perfect for me, because everything renders natively and looks beautiful. 4K without scaling is unusable, and 4K scaled up is just 1080p - You lose all the screen real estate you paid for.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#90

Post by arnaudsm »

varispeed wrote: post #34

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching th…

Note the latest AMD 5850U chip is 40% faster [1] than the M1 for the same wattage! It really deserves more media exposure than the M1 which has the only merit of beating Intel.

[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...

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