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Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

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Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#131

Post by kkfx »

Well... Honestly not much impressed, it's a design from another era.

For the present a desktop should be as "invisible" as possible, like old Ubuntu Unity desktop, a thin bar, a launcher, the rest search&narrow, menu included via the Unity HUD. Gnome SHell doing the opposite on purpose, copying the rest have just showcased another btrfs answer for zfs, or the reactionary behavior of some devs who refuse to operate "under the hood" instead in narcissistically in plain sight try to do their best to keep up an essentially deprecated model.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#132

Post by nine_k »

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…

Speaking of Mac OS, it refuses to add any window management beside manual dragging from first versions until today.

The Cosmic environment appears to have a ton of window management features, which I find very nice.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#133

Post by tracker1 »

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,…

I will say, the integrated tiling and being able to also break out is nice imo. I actually like the gnome based cosmic enhancements that Pop has done in the past and have been following the COSMIC development with a lot of interest. I wouldn't mind seeing a relatively simple app... maybe Calculator, with libCOSMIC so I can have an idea of a getting started level of such an app with Rust. It's harder to start with more complex apps as an example to look at or work from.

I agree that it could use some more polish. I'd also like to see the bulk of the icons (re)generated from a primary and secondary accent color as well. They look out of place as you may tweak the colors. A unimenu and kde theme generation are also things I'd like to see sooner than later.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#134

Post by The_Colonel »

Fwirt wrote: post #95
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could the design of keyboards be improved?

Much like user interfaces: by careful study of how people use them and not by aping what the most "successful" keyboards are doing. Anyone who has used a mechanical keyboard can tell you that there is much room for improvement. Rubber dome keyboards are cheap to manufacture and adequate when new but wear out quickly, and most people don't treat them like a wear item. Meanwhile, mechanical keyboards provide a superior…

> Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.

I'm curious why. It never occurred to me that this would be a source of discomfort. If I look at how I have my hands on the keyboard, they are angled anyway - my torso is wider than the keyboard center, elbows rest on the arm rests, so the hands then kinda meet in the middle angled. It doesn't look like an orthogonal layout would be particularly advantagenous.

Otherwise, I think keyboards are a case of "good enough" and high transition costs compared to the benefits. I'm a software dev, so certainly above average in the amount of typing I do. But I can't even type with all ten fingers, yet it never seemed like a bottleneck. I can't "outtype" my thought anyway.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#135

Post by shortrounddev2 »

Fwirt wrote: post #95
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could the design of keyboards be improved?

Much like user interfaces: by careful study of how people use them and not by aping what the most "successful" keyboards are doing. Anyone who has used a mechanical keyboard can tell you that there is much room for improvement. Rubber dome keyboards are cheap to manufacture and adequate when new but wear out quickly, and most people don't treat them like a wear item. Meanwhile, mechanical keyboards provide a superior…

I think the market rewards cheap keyboards because most people don't use desktop computers, most people do almost all of their computing on mobile phones. Some people use laptops for work, which they swap out about every 2 years, so the longevity of the keyboard doesn't matter to them.

I've seen coworkers using 65% or less mechanical keyboards and I have no idea how they get anything done. They always seemed like a cosmetic item to me, though they seem more portable if you're connecting it to a laptop. I use a full mechanical keyboard with keypad and regularly use home, del, pg up/up keys and appreciate having the arrow keys in their own little area. I use a few of the F-keys too. To each their own, but I personally find these tiny keyboards to be far less useful than a full sized keyboard

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#136

Post by mhuffman »

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…

BeOS was streets ahead on OS and hardware. I have a feeling that timing alone is responsible for them not being a household name.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#137

Post by pxc »

wruza wrote: post #125
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.

That's ridiculous. I wouldn't consider running this in alpha regardless of what it looks like, so you can get I'll be checking back in when it hits its first stable release to actually give it a try.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#138

Post by ibash »

PufPufPuf wrote: post #64
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.

People are just used to how Apple GUIs look like. I could do the same thing, look at the macOS dock and exclaim that it's ugly because the bottom margin is noticeably larger than the top margin. It's all a matter of taste.

It's really not a matter of taste though. This dismissive attitude of good design is part of the problem.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#139

Post by renewiltord »

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.

Only software has the culture of sharing. Not other engineering. And certainly not design. Consequently, the open-source mentality pervades software: lots of good stuff is available. Lacking this culture, people with design sensibilities work on design in proprietary spaces and comment in public but do not make open-source software.

Some people think this is because it's hard to contribute as designers, but I think it's just that designers are brought up in a proprietary school of thought. It's just like some cultures have recipe-sharing and others have the notion of 'secret recipe'.

To my people there is no 'secret recipe': if you ask, you shall receive. But others hold this notion dear. This cultural divide pervades occupations and makes some incapable of sharing.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#140

Post by FireInsight »

Y_Y wrote: post #41
teekert wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a fast, Rust written, modern, Wayland native DE with quarter tiling I am already happy. Let it grow from there.

Much as those things sound nice, I feel like the GP in that a DE is very much a user-focused tool, knowing it has nice developer-friendly internals is a distant second to having a good interface.

Nice developer-friendly internals get more contributors and some of them might make interesting UX contributions.
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