System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment • Hacker News Board

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#161

Post by BigJ1211 » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:12 PM UTC

gtf21 wrote: post #110

acdha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who went from a mac (for the last 15 years including several retina MBPs) to a 1920x1080 13" screen on a lemur pro, I really don't find that it makes a huge difference to me. I thought it would really irritate me but it doesn't.

It's really noticable when reading/writing text. I personally do dev work for a living and when I have to use a FHD screen instead of a UHD screen it's really noticable.

It's kind of like going from 144Hz back to 60Hz when playing FPS games.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#162

Post by read_if_gay_ » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

abreis wrote: post #98

varispeed wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My iPhone has ~320dpi and I can't see pixels at non-ridculous viewing distances. I don't know what GP's viewing distance habits or eyes are like but for me, considering laptop viewing distance is probably like twice that of smartphones, I can't imagine a 15" 4K laptop being anything but overkill.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#163

Post by emilsedgh » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

toolz wrote: post #155

arnaudsm wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 and 5850U are in the same laptop price range. But I agree on the single-thread, it's indeed 12% faster.

I recently bought a lenovo ideapad (ultrabook form factor) for under $900USD with a 5700u 16GB ram 512 nvme https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MH... I'd say AMD is really blowing the M1 laptops out of the water at half the price and more performance.

What exact model did you get if you don't mind me asking?

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#164

Post by superkuh » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

heftig wrote: post #127

superkuh wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

What is Arch doing?

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gtk3-classic/ is a partial fix, but it still doesn't restore the filename-entry location bar.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#165

Post by mxschumacher » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

skrtskrt wrote: post #159

fnl wrote: post #93

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,…

iTerm2 is a beauty, is there a closest equivalent on Linux? There seem to be 25 popular choices especially now with the GPU-accelerated ones. Tried a few of the classics like Termite and they all seemed painfully outdated and crappy compared to iTerm.

I use iterm at work and a combination of alacritty, fish and i3-wm (so I don't open multiple tabs but just several terminal windows) on my personal machine, I'm really happy with that setup.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#166

Post by tored » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

young_unixer wrote: post #119

I was really hoping for a traditional, Windows-like environment but with professional modern design. Like XFCE or KDE, but beautiful.

Yes, me too. System76 has done great work with Pop!_OS and pushing Linux as a true laptop OS, however their default theme and wallpaper always make me nauseous, something I feel a color blind would put together. Beautiful is not something I associate with Pop!_OS and System76.

Weird thing is that Linux as a server has made great progress the last decade, but it seems that the Linux desktop has evolved backwards. It started sometime around the introduction of Gnome 3.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#167

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

s3tz wrote: post #102

toomanyducks wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a completely unnecessary extra action the completely breaks your flow.

The power of window managers. Use whatever floats your boat. I love i3wm too much and its the exact reason I love Linux

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#168

Post by arnaudsm » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #160

arnaudsm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

TDP rating != wattage consumed. In an ideal world it would, but it has long since stopped meaning that generally. This includes the M1, which will happily exceed 15W of power consumption, and the 5850U almost certainly does as well since AMD's previous generation CPU in that class happily exceeded 15W. You'll have to wait for a proper review that does power measurements to get a sense for how they actually compare on…

I agree, it'd be fairer to compare wattage at peak load. Notebookcheck indicates 40W for AMD and 30W for M1, so I guess the perf/watt is closer between the 2 chips.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#169

Post by joelthelion » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

skrtskrt wrote: post #159

fnl wrote: post #93

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,…

iTerm2 is a beauty, is there a closest equivalent on Linux? There seem to be 25 popular choices especially now with the GPU-accelerated ones. Tried a few of the classics like Termite and they all seemed painfully outdated and crappy compared to iTerm.

Gnome terminal is really good.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#170

Post by stereolambda » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

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…

When you say 'dock', do you mean the top bar? Well, that would be a development. If you mean a menu of application icons at the bottom, I never had that in GNOME 3 on Fedora.

I actually like GNOME 3 as a desktop: the streamlined process of hitting the Super key or moving the mouse toward the corner and typing in the application name that I want to launch, with the whole screen used for the preview. I also never put anything on the desktop (as in icons, files etc.). Even saying this I get strange flashbacks to 2000s computing.

What pushed me away from it at the end (to KDE) was the applications. The trend in GNOME is clearly removing or at best hiding everything except the barest minimum required for pretending we have an app. At some point it shifts from very annoying to unusable. And now I'm putting up with KDE's own weirdnesses, like insisting on creating a cryptographic wallet for everything, or broken hibernation on desktop (a.k.a. big people computer). I hope it's just standard Linux jank and not sign of decline of the space.