141–150 of 207 posts
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Stacking is fantastic feature but it's not unique to Cosmic as the current DE for Pop_OS already has this feature. Also available on Windows with FancyWM, which has been growing on me.
Originally from BeOS, I believe. (Thus the funky BeOS window shape. Still quite difficult to discover.)
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Or ... (3) Take all developers interested in desktop environments, ask them to collaborate and come up with one (1) modular desktop environment that allows everyone to develop/choose the basic modules they want. For workspaces, windows, docks, and any other window arrangement and quick access features. I would love being able to select different window managers, different docks, etc., for different workspaces. The be…
> modular desktop environment that allows everyone to develop/choose the basic modules they want. For workspaces, windows, docks, and any other window arrangement and quick access features. But here you are already assuming that all these developers want to have a modular desktop environment. Not everyone wants that, or workspaces, or docks or whatever. So yeah, if everyone wanted the same thing, I guess we could end…
Those that don't want a modular environment just use the defaults someone else has created.
Modular doesn't mean you are forced to customize. You can still just choose/use your desktop setup as a single decision.
I wish ChromeOS's desktop environment gets ported and reimplemented across mainstream Linux and we're all freed from the GNOME/KDE GTK/Qt hell. It's just sad that Google's Linuxes (Android and ChromeOS) can do things like HDR, VRR, decent fractional scaling, decent font rendering, etc. but desktop Linux is still starved for these things to this day.
Isn't that because the hardware providers make it work? I doubt that ChromeOS would have the same features if it were just a distro to install on unspecific hardware.
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I'm really astounded that macOS window management is so bad. For a company lauded for their UX decisions, how can they accept the current full screen/splitting workflow as "good enough"?
All the devs I know that work on Mac just have the windows casually thrown around and as a windows user with FancyZones I don’t know why but it bothers me so
But for my part, at least, I typically 'tile' my windows by hand into thirds on my ultrawide monitor with Rectangle, then switch windows exclusively via fuzzy filtering across all windows rather than Command-Tab between apps. (I do occasionally still use Command-`, though.)
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If you want to redo the desktop, this is a Fisher-Price level of "why should I care" -- HERE Are the features I want in a desktop redux - (ita ll about the WORKFLOWS - not the fricken applets/widgets (the applets idea is a pullover, even if they dont know it, from when Android was seeking to be a good desktop, rather than a tablet, like vision (hospital devices - could give a tech talk on this)...
But hear me out WORKFLOW or CONTEXTUAL desktopping:
I can have multiple desktops on any OS - with a click-swipe left or right I can have another desktop. Which is akin to switching a clear spot on the physical desk.
What I would want within a "new desktop environment" is that I can swap between my "coding" "gaming" "research" "kids-screen-time" "python rabbit hole" "AI Image gen" contexts... with a differing visual clues to which setting im contextualizing:
Imagine you boot to your primary "normal desktop" - its just like any OS' vanilla post-login experience. Blank, no apps open, grab a browser, open a file, go to email - whatever.
Now - I want to swap over to Context[0] - coding.
I switch to that context, I get a visual cue (sure we can load pretty backgrounds, but a subtle change to the overall visuals of the windows dressings switch showing me I am in that context - it would load appletts that give me a preset of context that important (I select a series of things to pre-load, such as "Open VS Code with these folders, and launch FF with this set of contextual tabs. From this context block reddit, [other sites] - and ssh to this machine, give me a widget that shows connections to [environment] etc - give me a summary history of previous commands I was running, current active procs within [context scpoe] etc -- so effectively I have my development desktop context available.
Then I switch to research and its opens the things I want for that - connections to whatever GPTs, rstudio/some BI tool... whateer - and a bucket of tabs and history that are appropriate.
Kids tab is a sandbox for the kids as I teach them certain things... Or a Cooking context thats related to all things cooking. has a timer widget, last recipes looked up etc...
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You get the idea.
(I wrote a white paper about this ages ago - and attempted to recruit some buddies from Goog multiple times to make the contextual computing relevant once motorola came out with that phone that could be docked with data (My white paper on the subject was written in ~2002-4 (cant recall now) -- which was that you held your environment in your mobile and you could walk up to any empty compute/gpu/KVM - slot your phone there, it is the key - it opens your context from device, and cloud, and gave your the local resources of GPU/CPU/KVM whereever you needed it. No storage on the local HW... but you could take advantage of it
(aside: A great alt model that is a modern version would be able to walk up to a heavy GPU with pre-loaded giant models - and you can plug into them for context and run your stuff locally against them and get your results - but walk away from them (think Hot-Desking but for big-ass-GPUs -- I havent thought too much about this - but its an effective analogy for when I first wrote about this)
Anyway -- What I want is a revolutiuon in HOW we see the desktop.
The analogy for a desktop, a physical desktop is dated -- now its "conscious compute contexts" -- Where the whole environment shifts to support what one is attempting to do.
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This really sounds like it could serve the above.
The sharing it with friends:: or team members -- you should be able to invite folks to a context - such that you can have a multi-user context whereby you send an @COSMIC link to a context to a colleague over slack - they load the link, and it effectively launches a "docker" context of the environment to the other user... now they have all apps and deps to jump fully into the context.
This would be useable for teaching, guiding, troubleshooting, development, collaboration...
Set a master context and its all in a repo - and when other users need to upstream a dependency to the context they simply install whatever within their context and it acts like PR to the context owner. It allows for ephemeral installatino of dependencies - and you can tick for perm inclusion - else they evap on leaving context - yet the history of the ephemerals is kept incase you want to resurrect them/include them in the master context settings.
from a window management aesthetic -- KILL ALL WHITESPACE -- meaning all the superflous padding. Stop making desktop buttons look like shit I should be using on a kiosk.
With all that said:
Im down to try it I will give it an honest go - and if any Sys76 folks are here - I still have my gazelles - and my ticket about you swapping out the connector on the same model of box still stands! Ill see if I can make an applet -- specifically I want a context applet that is imbued with RAG -- mayhaps building the applet on txtai libs so that my entire bash hist is txtAI rag'd ...
Ill try out COSMIC on a flagship OMEN 3070 gaming box and see how this works...
I really want to see if I can imbue (imbue was the name of my white paper from ~2002 on the subject) the workflows I would like...
(I've Forrest Gump'd through a lot of technical tides in my sordid life in Silicon Valley)
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.
Care and craft. A lot of software engineers think that “done” means functional. And not “feels right”. That and unless a software engineer has specifically practiced implementing pixel perfect designs from a great designer, then they don’t spot the errors. The design will feel wrong but they don’t know why.
They're also shitty for accessibility. If you're significantly visually impaired but still inclined to rely on your remaining vision, you'll find that (a) macOS doesn't let you jack the fonts up big enough and (b) when you actually do get large enough text just by jacking up the scale of the whole Ui, all kinds of text fields are truncated and some windows some even fit properly on your screen.
Aligning UIs by pixel makes them worse.
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.
It seems Linux is stuck in two worlds, never the Twain shall meet: 1. Engineers who are great at code, bad at UI and UX (unless your tastes are 1990s-2000s styles, you do you, but watch your market share always be niche. Reeducating the populace to see the superiority of your preferences compared to Apple is never going to happen.) 2. Engineers who are great at UI and UX but sloppy at fundamentals - take elementaryOS…
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You still use System 7?!
Yes! Here we go: - Mostly on an iPad Pro, no less: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/04/17/turning-an-ipad-p... - Here's my latest artwork done in System 7: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/07/14/shibuya-pixel-art... Believe it or not there are apps that run under System 7 that have no modern equivalents, or their modern counterparts are objectively worse. The vector apps I use on System 7 (Canvas, artWORKS, F…
Neat, any word on getting this working on Arch. I use Majaro now and KDE is okay, but I'd like to try something new.
I've broken past installs (Arch, for sure) by trying to do this on other distros.
Obviously, make a full backup (unless you're on NixOS, in which case, everything just gets rebuilt deterministically from a definition file in either direction, and all previous instances are saved, permitting trivial rollbacks)