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System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

blog.system76.com

231–240 of 427 posts

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#231
post #41
post #3

Wonder if the file picker will have image thumbnails.

My favourite “UX bug” is when Discord wants to upgrade, it downloads a newer deb, you open it in App Store, and it only shows the “delete” button. Wonder if it’ll ever be fixed.

I wish my discord did that... it just errors after timing out trying to connect to their update server. Sometimes force killing helps, sometimes trying the next day does. Once it connects the rest is all automatic though.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#232

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...

Is it? I see Geenbench gives the M1 as having 1733 (single) and 7652 (multi) GeekBench score, whereas a AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U system has 1414 (single) and 8140 (multi), so the M1 is quite faster in single core than it (22%) and slower but close in multi-core (the AMD being 6% faster). And that's with the M1 having 4 slow cores for better battery life / consumption (with 8 full speed cores it would obliterate the 5850…

They're using PassMark instead of Geekbench.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MH...

Apple M1 - CPU Mark: 14,872 / Single thread: 3,630

AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U - CPU Mark: 20,659 / Single thread: 3,237

The AMD is 38.9% faster on the multi-core benchmark, and 10.8% slower on the single-core benchmark.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#233
Does anyone run System76 hardware with a distro other than Pop!_OS and if so, how's it working out for you? I love what the company is doing and will probably consider a System76 laptop in the future (once they move away from Clevo to custom designs), but I'm pretty attached to my Linux environment of choice. Arch Linux and KDE Plasma have been very good to me for years and the idea of moving to an apt + GNOME-based system doesn't quite appeal to me. That said, the tiling window management features here look really nice and I'd love to see something similar for Plasma (KWin scripts work fine but have always felt just a bit jank in my experience).

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#234
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…

No matter how unpopular this approach is, I must agree... I've been on Pop OS for years, and it really is the best GNOME I've seen. However, GNOME itself is pretty weird and even slow these days – yet it's nearly the de facto Linux DE. And System76 is adding more bells and whistles, probably not making it more snappy. This is sad to see, because there are stable, nice, and fast DE's, like Budgie. Or KDE, of course, b…

> like Budgie

I also would like it more if System76 contributed to existing project like Bugie instead. It's tiresome how GNOME monoculture is dictating everything in GTK nowdays.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#235
I really like Pop!_OS' tiling feature but the one thing that really bugs me is you can't disable windows always raising on hover. You're meant to be able to tweak it using Gnome Tweaks however disabling the option and enabling tiling means flinging your mousing anywhere causes all the windows in its track to raise to the front. If you've got a floating window it just disappears behind the stack.

Theres an open issue[1] but it hasn't been solved yet.

[1]: https://github.com/pop-os/shell/issues/627

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#236

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…

I love pixels. Seeing them reminds me that I am in front of a computer and not a TV. Same as a car that smells a bit of oil/gasoline. Feels like a real car.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#237
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Based on lots of previous comments (and yours!) that describe a day/night difference, I've concluded this is highly personal.

Work issued me a 2018 Mac with a 2880x1800 15.4" display (220 dpi), and I work at home with it plugged into a 1920x1080 23.5" display (93 dpi) from Sceptre. They are side by side, all day long, and I vastly prefer writing and coding on the FHD display, to the point that I thought I was being trolled when I read comments about "never going back".

So, I'm guessing people just like different things!

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#238
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use gnome as my daily driver. Was OSX previously. Now, I can’t stand the wasted real estate of a dock. I really love Gnome, so maybe they’re listening to some of us and not to others.

I think most people just want the option. I don't want to force a dock on you. I also don't want you to force a barren wasteland on me. That's what I liked about this design shown in the video, it's all optional!

You can get a dock on Gnome via any number of plugins. Manjaro ships with one out of the box, if I recall.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#239

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…

Why IPS and not OLED?

If I had an OLED I’d be constantly worried about burn-in. No thanks.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly like Gnome. I have been using it for years. But the development team of Gnome is so closed minded that it makes my head hurt. I asked on the bug tracker if Evince could have a tabs feature, so I can have 10 pdfs open in one Evince window. They asked me to cite a usability study showing that it would objectively improve user experience.

That's really weird, considering things like gedit and gnome-terminal are tabbed. Perhaps ask them to get the usability study from those guys :).

"The concept of Evince is one document, one window"
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