Thanks (to whomever) for making this work on NixOS and including instructions for that!
Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
151–160 of 207 posts
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#152A 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,…
did they need to build all that?
I'm all for them doing something new, especially integrated tiling support. But it seems they have taken on way too much for a small company.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#153I 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…
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"?
I have a theory about this "Jobs-ism" (And now that he's dead, "Ives-ism"
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Nobody was seemingly capable to say no to either jobs or ives.
Jobs was a visionary for a lot of UX items - however, and this is my opinion-- He was heavily left handed (in thinking and physically) - thus a lot of his UX items are from A) position of supreme leader and B) his physical UX with all things come from a left-handed perspective, which is fantastic for certain things, poor for others)
and with Ive -- his over-powering desire to be the HW minimalist wreaked havoc on consumer wallets.
If he wasnt such a jerk about refusing a lanyard hook on the iphone - he cost consumer *billions* in cases, screens, etc.
Apples outright evil stance on connectors, and forcing their designs upon the consumers costs billions in wasted time, money, hardware, resources, angst etc...
I fn hate jonny ive's design decisions around the fragility of the iphones design for aesthetic.
Sure it has "gorilla glass" -- but a physical design that ensures that a single drop of the device kills it.
Then the decision to put inert glass panel on the REAR of the phone?
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Had Ive ever stepped into any mall in Asia before and around the time the iphone came out he would have noticed the vast market for chotchky-lanyards that were sold in every cell store.
Those lanyard were *important* and there were so many stylings.
Basically - the folks at apple appear to have never been able to say "yeah, but" -- and no matter what anyone says - the market shows that they could not.
How many trillions of resources are in the trash because of aesthetic designs, and how many wasted human conscious hours due to frustratingly obtuse UX interaction have had.
There hasnt been an super-productive-revolutionary UX interactions that I feel macOS has given me?
(and I know its a cheap fn shot -- but for a visionary, releasing a touch only phone day-one without copy paste shows that UX was NOT the primary facto operandai -- but a profit operandai...
Ill die on my hill that jobs wasnt as truly a UX master as history writes himself to be. (Breakout anyone?)
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#154All of the Linux desktop environments feel like thin skins compared to what we had in the past. I keep hoping somebody will implement OS/2's Workplace Shell for Linux. Rexx would be nice too but I suspect most people would rather stick with a scripting language they already know. https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/The_WorkPlace_Shell,... https://komh.github.io/os2books/pdf/OS2_REXX.pdf
Is it possible to summarize what this is/was? I know I could RTFM but it's 336 pages, and the wiki didn't seem to shed any light on this for me.
screens only appear on page 120+ of the pdf - and its talking about the coding of the actual UI elements...
Interesting history - but feed that to an LLM to grok - not a human (Sadly, some technical writer prolly almost committed suicide writing that by deadline)
--- but my other points still stand on the stat of Desktop UX (Specifically experience) -- when it comes to re-envisioning the actal X part of a destop UI/UX -- so little vision is happening (it would seem -- Im sure there are a flurry of dark-web eastern EU Bulgarian Hackers (looking at you Ivo) that could pull off a better new idea given some attention from real TechBro Money)
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#155Neat, any word on getting this working on Arch. I use Majaro now and KDE is okay, but I'd like to try something new.
NixOS is the first Linux distro that I'd dare to swap out a new DE with. 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)
Fortunes favors the bold!
This isn't a work PC, I tried Cosmic and just got a black screen and switched back to KDE
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#156All of the Linux desktop environments feel like thin skins compared to what we had in the past. I keep hoping somebody will implement OS/2's Workplace Shell for Linux. Rexx would be nice too but I suspect most people would rather stick with a scripting language they already know. https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/The_WorkPlace_Shell,... https://komh.github.io/os2books/pdf/OS2_REXX.pdf
Is it possible to summarize what this is/was? I know I could RTFM but it's 336 pages, and the wiki didn't seem to shed any light on this for me.
I don't know how to summarize WPS with words, but I can testify to the fact that the combination of WorkPlace Shell + ThinkPad X61 TrackPoint is the strongest mind-computer synergy I've ever experienced and the only computer interface I can use fully ambidextrously.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#157I 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 it's a fast, Rust written, modern, Wayland native DE with quarter tiling I am already happy. Let it grow from there.
If it's really a Rust ground-up new DE, it sounds promising.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#158I 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.
I have the newest Mate in dark theme, and there's not much difference. Both imitate Mac UI, as far as I know Mac.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#159A 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,…
did they need to build all that? I'm all for them doing something new, especially integrated tiling support. But it seems they have taken on way too much for a small company.
As an owner of a System76 laptop I'm really conflicted on this stuff.
On the one hand, I'm glad to see developer attention given to the Linux desktop. I use and like GNOME well enough, but it's great to see competition and innovation.
On the other... I guess when I buy System76, I'm effectively paying a markup to subsidize development of these side projects (I'll never use pop_OS for example).
As somebody who's looking to just buy a computer, it makes justifying the expense of System76 a little more difficult. There are other Clevo rebadgers, after all.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? What will we find?
A built in mac-like dock, completely different styling on components, no weird bottom window bar, no windows-like application menu, customized theme engine, built in window tiling. Just a few little differences.
In Mate, you can turn this bottom icon bar on, if you really want to imitate Mac.