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Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

system76.com

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121–130 of 207 posts

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#121

Post by JeremyNT »

duped wrote: post #77

A lot of negative takes here. My understanding is that the point of developing cosmic is to enable distros and users to address UI issues in the first place, since GNOME is too limiting.

Agreed, it seems the "big deal" here is using a rust-native toolkit, iced[0], rather than just slapping together another reskinned gtk-based solution like most similar submissions do.

So this is potentially a really cool thing, not just somebody tinkering with stylesheets.

Probably the HN crowd is a bit jaded because of all the hyperbolic "low effort" distros/DEs that are just modified ubuntu/GNOME, but these folks seem to be legit.

[0] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#122

Post by tracker1 »

max-throat wrote: post #68

Why rounded corners? Why a bookmarks bar at the bottom instead of a proper taskbar? Can we please stop copying MacOS? I bet it's going to do the "pop out when you hover the mouse near an edge" thing that MacOS does that I hate too.

The corners are configurable, many people seem to prefer a dock over a toolbar, as to the edge, it does docking to the portion of the screen (half/quarter/third).

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#123

Post by layer8 »

tgv wrote: post #112
msephton wrote: post #96

I see nothing really "different" or "better" here, in terms of visuals or ease of use. To that end... I don't see the point in imitating a desktop experience that is pretty stagnant and moving in the wrong direction (macOS; I'm a user myself) when there are the decades that preceded Y2K that could be mined for much more usable an interesting desktop experiences. There's BeOS, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST various windowi…

It looks nice, and it looks familiar. That's important. You don't sway people with a UI that's too far from their experiences. And people like eye candy. If you ever have to build a demo, first make sure it looks good. The first impression counts, unfortunately.

It depends on where you’re coming from. If you despise all the shallow visual-design oriented fashions of recent-ish times that have generally been degrading the UX, then it doesn’t actually make for a good first impression.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#125

Post by wruza »

the_duke wrote: post #97

A lot of shallow "but the buttons!" comments here... no need to be so negative. This is the first alpha release of a full new desktop environment, built on a new GUI toolkit (based on Iced) and a new Wayland compositor, together with a suite of applications, all built from scratch in Rust .... give it some time. Most interesting to me is the integrated tiling support. I've been on i3/sway for many years, but a lean,…

Alpha release is how people remember you. Virtually no one interested in a clear ui will check it again just in case it got buttons. People are tired of this ui fad and speak out cause it’s probably important for them.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#126

Post by SilentM68 »

It's a beautiful DE. I have Pop!_OS 22.04 running in my Helios 300 PH315-53 w/NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB card. The laptop itself has horrible BIOS firmware, though. COSMIC works great, for the most part, with Pop!_OS with the exception of two issues. One is an Nvidia Driver issue, e.g. a stopped nvidia-power-services, which I resolved by rolling back to the nvidia-470 driver. The other thing that I have not been able to figure out is how to enable the Places Menu Item in the top dock bar. I don't see a setting for it either in gnome-tweaks, extensions or main settings App. I wish there were a way to have that option available in Tweaks.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#128

Post by hindsightbias »

mwidell wrote: post #43

Look at how the icons at the bottom have almost zero margin to the overly rounded sides. Why is it so hard for anyone outside of Apple to make a visually appealing GUI? It just requires a little bit of taste and sense of aesthetics. I am baffled that this hasn't happened yet. The closest thing so far is probably ElementaryOS.

Another spelling for OCD was Ive.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#129

Post by ddtaylor »

I have been following Cosmic since it's inception and Pop_Os! as well. For context, I was very against the Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 transition at the time because it destroyed so many useful and (at the time) did not replace them with an alternative. System76 is very hit-and-miss with their hardware (it's often pretty bad) but they are getting better at software over time.

As a Linux user or a developer, Cosmic is not something I can touch right now. I'm super excited for the future of it and they are making a lot of waves. They are giving Gnome the kick they need in making a functional desktop for real users. The fact that Gnome still comes out of the box with no real solution for multitasking (dock, bar, something) other than to randomly hit the super key or jam your mouse into a corner is insane. Every distro and 99% of users are installing some kind of multitasking aid (you don't count if you're using a tiling window manager)

I don't know all the specifics, but they also seem to be putting a realistic alternative to some of the plans, protocols, etc. Right now we have Gnome and KDE. KDE mostly does their own stuff and works with the FreeDesktop groups. Gnome works with them too, but more in a way of "here is what Gnome is doing you'll follow suite" kind of way. Having Cosmic as an option for people who want things closer to Gnome than KDE but don't want to deal with the "Gnome problems" will be good.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#130

Post by abeyer »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #89
culebron21 wrote: post #24

I see a slightly restyled Mate desktop environment. Nothing really new, some marginal advantage like a tiny bit more visible window focus. Scrollbars still invisible. Buttons even harder to distinguish from not-buttons, and not clear how a disabled button can look when everything is so graywashed. Generally, looks like another designers take on style, not usability.

If you ignore the fact that it looks much better than Mate, maybe. The sentiment of "looks don't matter" seems to be very common among Linux users. Or maybe they don't see the difference, but it would be like not seeing the difference between a beaten Lada car and a modern Toyota Camry.

> like not seeing the difference between a beaten Lada car and a modern Toyota Camry.

So, both ugly, and only one with evidence of being useful and used?

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