Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

system76.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 207 posts

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#161

Post by ralfn »

JeremyNT wrote: post #159
awill wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 looki…

There isn't a fixed number of Linux users. Your economic model for this is misguided.

System76 seems to want to sell to engineers, researchers and data scientists. The competition here is a MacBook with the typical Unix ecosystem or a Windows laptop with WSL.

So this allows them to take control of the total user experience and increase their customer base.

Their target audience is people who want and need a Unix based environment, are power users, but don't want to play around too much.

So this investment is intended to sell more laptops. I think they have a fair shot at making this pay for itself and they have a small but reasonable opportunity to grow exponentially and become a player of a seriously different size.

I would assume people on HN could appreciate the ambition.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#162

Post by tapoxi »

JeremyNT wrote: post #159
awill wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 looki…

Framework is a good option in the Linux laptop space, aside from the awkward aspect ratio on the 14.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#163

Post by loa_in_ »

jklinger410 wrote: post #78
stonogo wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

Everything I can have in Mate

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#164

Post by sureglymop »

I am sad that they discontinued their Pop Shell gnome extension.

I use GNOME but with the animations completely turned off. That combined with the tiling shell feels really snappy and good. I am really considering forking that extension and also visually improving it a little (not a fan of their design language, though I like the modern adwaita style of gtk/gnome apps).

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#165

Post by sureglymop »

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,…

Gnome with animations completely turned off + the pop shell extension is a great experience. And for when you have to, you can still log into sway from GDM.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#166

Post by sureglymop »

pmarreck wrote: post #150
999900000999 wrote: post #40

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.

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)

On Arch this stuff is easy. I use GDM as the login manager and launch pretty much whatever DE I like from there at login time. I use nix too, though rootlessly with nix-portable.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#167

Post by nineteen999 »

hexomancer wrote: post #32
taeric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot like wishing car manufacturers would unify on how to build a car. And I mean that not as a dismissal. Standards on many things are nice. So is exploring all of the area left open by the standards. I think it is an open question on whether or not we could have more standards around what a desktop environment should/could be? Unfortunately, I don't know that there is a company in a good position to build…

I am ok with desktop environment exploring new ideas and it is very cool that linux allows them to do so (e.g. I myself am a big fan of tiling window managers and it is one of the main things I miss when I am not using linux). What I am not okay with is myriad of linux window managers which are 99% the same generic window manager. How much effort is being split between KDE/Gnome despite them being essentially the sam…

> What I am not okay with is myriad of linux window managers which are 99% the same generic window manager.

Not sure if you were there but this was way worse in the 1990's when Linux was still very young. Every person and their dog wrote a window manager (I know I wrote a shitty one) and until GNOME & KDE there was no DE to standardise around at all.

At least we have 3 or 4 fairly fully fledged desktop environments now as well as a 1000 different window managers.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#168

Post by InsideOutSanta »

eightysixfour wrote: post #104
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more. I feel like as the computer literacy of the people making decisions in tech companies has gone up, the care that's being invested into actually making good user interfaces has gone down. This applies to Macs, Windows, and also to Linux desktop environments. Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more…

> Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more on aesthetics. I'm going to make an argument I don't fully agree with, but I think is worth discussing: the dramatic increase in digital literacy affords us the ability to focus on aesthetics more now. When no one knew how to use a computer or what it could do, everything neede…

That is objectively true, but I still think it's a bad decision. Computer-literate people may not depend on good user interfaces, but they still benefit from them.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#169

Post by gedy »

seaal wrote: post #4
gedy wrote: post #2

One cool feature that I didn’t see described very well here is Cosmic allows you to group windows in tabs, but the tabs can be different applications. Kind of an interesting idea that the OS/window manager is what should be responsible for tab support, not each application.

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.

I've been running PopOS, but don't see it - the Super+S stack shortcuts don't seem to be available unless I'm missing something.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#170

Post by wruza »

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…

Modern mechanical keyboards are overpriced rgb widgets for the most part. And god forbid you’re any literate in switches, lubing, etc, it becomes impossible to just get a keyboard. I’ve returned two m. keyboards and am absolutely fine with kv-300h (cheap island scissors with no bells or whistles). I have two, one from 2017, another from 2024. No difference.
Post reply on HN