Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

blog.system76.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 427 posts

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#91

Post by kitsunesoba »

marcodiego wrote: post #33
llcoolv wrote: post #20

I think that those "Let's make our own DE" dumb kids are both a symptom and a cause why Linux never broke on the mainstream workstation market. Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X. Why waste all the time on such a massive amount of extremely useless work? Just because it is fun? And yeah, you can downvote this into oblivion, I don't care. The…

>Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X In terms of appearance, maybe. Make that work consistently with most used programs with the same shortcuts, composition, behavior and rich integration between all these apps and then we're talking. Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast demands many people thinking, designing,…

Additionally, out-of-the-box functionality matters a lot. DEs like XFCE have insane tweakability, but outside of a handful of settings most users don't take advantage of that. The majority of Windows and macOS users don't spend hours tweaking their setup to perfection, they just install Chrome and Spotify and maybe vertically orient their taskbar/dock if they're feeling spicy and it's off to the races.

And moving the needle on the out of the box usability front often requires changes that can't be made by changing the default configuration or becoming a contributor to an existing DE. The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#92

Post by toomanyducks »

silisili wrote: post #59

Nice to see! And glad they are...gasp...listening to people. The Gnome devs could learn a lot from that approach. The most popular distros all include a dock. And yet with Gnome 40, they not only refused to add a dock, they moved what gimped dock they had to the bottom of the screen. But you can't see it until you hit the top left corner. I wish I was making that up. (keyboard shortcuts aside, in fairness) Rant aside…

To be pedantic, you can see the dash/dock when you hit the super key, I don't believe anyone actually uses the hot corner.

Also to be pedantic, there are plenty of desktops that don't use a dock, in the form of most window managers. I'm currently running opnebox with no dock and it's totally fine, though the approach is better suited to tiling window managers.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#93

Post by fnl »

I've recently switched from my usual MBP upgrade to System 76 (Oryx Pro). While yes, Apple's walled garden does feel like a Rolls Royce compared to anything, the price tag difference this time was just way too step for me to keep buying a new Mac: It was basically 2x or more for roughly similar hardware, if not slightly worse on the MBP side. Overall, using Pop_OS! with its specialized GNOME3 setup has been a bliss, and I must say I had expected a far more difficult migration. In a few days I was happily up and running with my new machine. And then, there is the support - Apple's support outside of visiting a Genius Bar is basically non-existent. System76 has diligently helped me even set up external hardware that wasn't theirs! Long story short, very much looking forward to COSMIC and continuing this experience. The only thing I do miss a lot is my iTerm2... :)

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#94

Post by smoldesu »

marcodiego wrote: post #33
llcoolv wrote: post #20

I think that those "Let's make our own DE" dumb kids are both a symptom and a cause why Linux never broke on the mainstream workstation market. Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X. Why waste all the time on such a massive amount of extremely useless work? Just because it is fun? And yeah, you can downvote this into oblivion, I don't care. The…

>Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X In terms of appearance, maybe. Make that work consistently with most used programs with the same shortcuts, composition, behavior and rich integration between all these apps and then we're talking. Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast demands many people thinking, designing,…

Linux has no presence on the desktop market, yet apps like Steam and Spotify are ported to it, often with special considerations in mind. If we're talking about market share, you can have it: but in terms of software availability, everything is on Linux now. Wine is good enough to run any Windows app carte-blanche, and all of the most common apps (eg. Telegram, Discord, Zoom) have native clients.

Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast is not a matter of manpower, it's about the modularity of your system and the power the end-user has.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#97

Post by pram »

arnaudsm wrote: post #90
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...

The M1 is the entry level processor, and is still beating everything in single thread performance. What merits the media exposure?

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#98

Post by abreis »

varispeed wrote: post #81
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

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…

4K at 15" is 294 dpi. I'm very surprised to hear that you can see pixels at that density at a normal laptop screen viewing distance.

My laptop is 'only' at 226dpi (16") and I can't see pixels unless I bring my nose to the screen.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#99

Post by s3tz »

snicker7 wrote: post #49

"Keyboard" or "Mouse" driven? What about trackpad? I would love some gestures to quickly switch windows and workspaces.

Yeah, I think for me it's almost entirely the trackpad that's the dealbreaker still. There isn't a single laptop that I can use linux on where the trackpad just doesnt suck. I'll tolerate the noise and the subpar display, even the speakers can suck, but the trackpad should be at least 80% of the way of what a macbook has.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#100

Post by smoldesu »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #91
marcodiego wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X In terms of appearance, maybe. Make that work consistently with most used programs with the same shortcuts, composition, behavior and rich integration between all these apps and then we're talking. Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast demands many people thinking, designing,…

Additionally, out-of-the-box functionality matters a lot. DEs like XFCE have insane tweakability, but outside of a handful of settings most users don't take advantage of that. The majority of Windows and macOS users don't spend hours tweaking their setup to perfection, they just install Chrome and Spotify and maybe vertically orient their taskbar/dock if they're feeling spicy and it's off to the races. And moving the…

>The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive.

That's kinda the point of PopOS in the first place: retrofitting GNOME and Ubuntu with extra utilities for a better "out of the box" experience. Manjaro does basically the same thing on the Arch side of the fence, and both are essential to providing that experience you're describing. The GNOME team isn't intentionally holding back features or making intentionally bad choices here, they're just part of the brick in the wall. The GNOME desktop should be bland, so that the distro can provide a default and the end user can make changes where necessary. It's all part of one big machine.

Post reply on HN