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System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

blog.system76.com

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Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#421

Post by gtf21 »

BigJ1211 wrote: post #161
gtf21 wrote: 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.

I spend a lot of my day either with documents or in a terminal, I just don't find that it made a huge difference to my life.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#422

Post by human301 »

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,…

That's exactly what I did a week ago (with a Fusion 15, but System76 was a serious competitor). It took a day to customize the thing to my heavily-apple-influenced habits and it was a joy to find out I could actually feel _pleasure_ using the machine, something I had forgotten 3 or 4 macOS updates ago.

Now, do we need another DE? Dunno, wouldn't make the top of my wishlist. I realize the good I'm getting comes much more from intelligent choices of sensible defaults rather than specific features. It's removing - or, if you prefer amend - the noise (apps/utils/extensions/clutterware) the key here, even more so for the open-source software ocean of half-baked solutions. Yes, that's what distributions are for but unfortunately even the biggest struggle to keep a steady route (think Ubuntu and Unity, for instance) and often fall for the latest shining tech everybody wants (hint: no, there's a whole lot of people who'd better like a stable, predictable, coherent environment to a new set of flashy icons and widget palettes).

And if you wonder what would make the top of my whishlist, it's solid a development environment (again, a-la macOS but it's actually a-la OpenStep and NextStep, where it all started) enforcing good defaults at the OS level, letting people/companies build quality apps easily and preventing them to disrupt/reinvent existing OS patterns/paradigms (without a reason). Or we could keep on downloading browsers-disguised-as-applications and call it a day.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#423

Post by foldr »

Const-me wrote: post #397
foldr wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fixed to 10-15W in the Macbook Pro. I'm also a programmer, but don't find performance particularly important once it reaches an acceptable level. I would rather have a thin a light laptop (as would most people, judging by sales).

> I'm also a programmer I should have noted I specialize on desktop and embedded development. I can always find uses of faster CPUs, more cores, and more RAM. > I would rather have a thin a light laptop I agree, but to an extent. I don’t have a gamer-targeted laptop because heavy to carry around. But still, I believe these unupgradable ultra-thin laptops are a bad deal. They only saving a few millimeters of thickness…

>They only saving a few millimeters of thickness and ~0.2kg of weight, for a huge performance cost.

Can you point to a laptop that's only slightly larger than the M1 Macbook Pro and has much better performance?

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#424

Post by Const-me »

foldr wrote: post #423
Const-me wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also a programmer I should have noted I specialize on desktop and embedded development. I can always find uses of faster CPUs, more cores, and more RAM. > I would rather have a thin a light laptop I agree, but to an extent. I don’t have a gamer-targeted laptop because heavy to carry around. But still, I believe these unupgradable ultra-thin laptops are a bad deal. They only saving a few millimeters of thickness…

>They only saving a few millimeters of thickness and ~0.2kg of weight, for a huge performance cost. Can you point to a laptop that's only slightly larger than the M1 Macbook Pro and has much better performance?

If I wanted a new one, I'd look for something like HP ProBook 635 Aero G8 with AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U CPU.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#425

Post by foldr »

Const-me wrote: post #424
foldr wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They only saving a few millimeters of thickness and ~0.2kg of weight, for a huge performance cost. Can you point to a laptop that's only slightly larger than the M1 Macbook Pro and has much better performance?

If I wanted a new one, I'd look for something like HP ProBook 635 Aero G8 with AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U CPU.

But there’s no indication from benchmarks that it would have much better performance then the MacBook Pro. Indeed, it would be expected to perform less well on some common tasks - and it has half the battery life. I can’t even find a benchmark comparing that particular laptop to a MacBook Pro. Did you find one somewhere?

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#426

Post by Const-me »

foldr wrote: post #425
Const-me wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted a new one, I'd look for something like HP ProBook 635 Aero G8 with AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U CPU.

But there’s no indication from benchmarks that it would have much better performance then the MacBook Pro. Indeed, it would be expected to perform less well on some common tasks - and it has half the battery life. I can’t even find a benchmark comparing that particular laptop to a MacBook Pro. Did you find one somewhere?

There're benchmarks comparing M1 with Zen 2 mobile CPUs such as Ryzen 7 4800U. Based on the results I saw, on average, AMD delivers similar single-threaded performance, and way better multithreaded performance.

Ryzen 7 4800U is very similar to Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U: same core and threads count, same frequency, same 10-25W TDP. The main difference of the new one is Zen 3 microarchitecture instead of Zen 2, and there're quite a few sources comparing Zen 3 to Zen 2.

If you want to be certain, wait for the direct benchmarks.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#427

Post by [deleted] »

Const-me wrote: post #426
foldr wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there’s no indication from benchmarks that it would have much better performance then the MacBook Pro. Indeed, it would be expected to perform less well on some common tasks - and it has half the battery life. I can’t even find a benchmark comparing that particular laptop to a MacBook Pro. Did you find one somewhere?

There're benchmarks comparing M1 with Zen 2 mobile CPUs such as Ryzen 7 4800U. Based on the results I saw, on average, AMD delivers similar single-threaded performance, and way better multithreaded performance. Ryzen 7 4800U is very similar to Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U: same core and threads count, same frequency, same 10-25W TDP. The main difference of the new one is Zen 3 microarchitecture instead of Zen 2, and there're qu…

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