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System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

blog.system76.com

261–270 of 427 posts

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#261

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…

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.

If you want a laugh, duck for the thread where the developers debate how to implement .epub format in Evince before ultimately deciding that Evince doesn't actually need to be able to open the most popular ebook format in the world.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#262

When Ubuntu dropped the hammer on Gnome2, I saw Unity desktop and was kinda... ewwww. And next I have installed Gnome 3. After 15 minutes with it I decided that Unity is actually not that bad , so I switched to it. In the following years Unity kinda grew on me, so I'm sad that it was axed and now everyone use this Gnome3 abomination. It is not as bad as it was five years before, but loss of top menu and general prefe…

Unity had its own problems, mostly related to trying to be Mac OSX without being Mac OSX:

- Breaking alt-tab

- Moving window controls

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#264

When Ubuntu dropped the hammer on Gnome2, I saw Unity desktop and was kinda... ewwww. And next I have installed Gnome 3. After 15 minutes with it I decided that Unity is actually not that bad , so I switched to it. In the following years Unity kinda grew on me, so I'm sad that it was axed and now everyone use this Gnome3 abomination. It is not as bad as it was five years before, but loss of top menu and general prefe…

> general preference for biggins buttons instead of drop-down

I could never understand the strong revulsion some people have with that design language. To me the Windows 95 "File Edit etc." toolbar is terribly eye straining and has no place in the 21st century. Besides, with the ubiquity of touch screens in laptops the GNOME team has been entirely vindicated in their decision to take a more touch oriented approach. Larger buttons are easier to click with the mouse too.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#266
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

Speaking as someone who's been using exclusively Linux for the last 5+ years I think it's dishonest of people to say any distro "just works" like MacOS and Windows. For technical users who are willing to invest the time to configure things as they like I feel it's an unparalleled experience, but it certainly takes some work to get there. Most of the issues you mentioned are ones I've personally encountered and fixed (sans the freezes, that's abnormal).

Paradoxically I had a much worse experience with things breaking themselves and not working when using the allegedly more accessible/stable Ubuntu (LTS) than I do now that I use Arch. The Frankenstein-esque mess of held back packages seems to do a better job preserving bugs in amber than preventing them. I would honestly hesitate to steer any technical individuals towards Ubuntu at this point, and I suspect it's given a lot of people a sour taste of desktop Linux.

(just to be clear- I'm absolutely not saying arch is the "just works" distro, just sharing my experience comparison)

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#267
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don’t get the love for iTerm2. I tried it before and see nothing appealing for me over the built in Terminap.app. And it seems to be slower too. On Linux, I just use whatever ship with the distro Gnome Terminal, Konsole... and they work fine.

The search for text -> tab to highlight more of a search result -> the highlighted text is already copied to the clipboard automatically

workflow was such a game changer for me, it’s so snappy.

Could probably be configured on other terminals?

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#268
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome 3 has gesture support. I don't think many are built in, certainly not as many as mac OS gives you out of the box. But you can go wild: https://github.com/mpiannucci/gnome-shell-extended-gestures

GNOME 40 (just released) is also adding a some new three-finger gestures for workspace switching.

That's great! I mean, its ten years too late. But still!
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