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Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

system76.com

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Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#181

Post by zem »

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.

as someone currently running a mate desktop with xmonad as the window manager, this is pretty much everything i want in a desktop environment. mate is showing its age a bit and has some rough edges and glitches, so if a modern, active project is taking over the mantle I'm perfectly happy to embrace it.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#183

Post by ziml77 »

tapoxi wrote: post #162
JeremyNT wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Awkward? Nah. My Surface Book had a 3:2 aspect ratio and it felt just right for that screen size (for larger screens I do think 16:10 is better)

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#184

Post by pxc »

ibash wrote: post #179
pxc wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Pixel perfect' designs are stupid, qnd responsible for backwards steps in font scaling. GUIs should be reflowable, not 'pixel perfect'. Dumbass 'pixel perfect' designs are the reason you can't resize the fucking System Preferences window. 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 jac…

You're arguing with yourself. "Pixel perfect" doesn't mean what you think it does. > Pixel perfect is a design approach that aims to achieve a precise and consistent look for a design, down to the pixel level. https://www.google.com/search?q=define+pixel+perfect

I'm aware that 'pixel perfect' doesn't strictly mean 'totally fixed layout'. That's not really relevant here.

You can't have, for instance, consistent alignments down to the pixel level, on systems with arbitrary DPI emulation, e.g., when you set DPI manually to something other than 96 in Xorg. This is where the usual caveats for 'fractional scaling' come in (because you have to render at a higher resolution and then scale it down), why such scaling often results in blurry text, why HiDPI displays are required for the normal scaling on macOS, etc. Such changes come in part in pursuit of enabling 'pixel perfect design' on the desktop, and they suck.

Commenters on this site will frequently point out things that are apparently misaligned by a single pixel. What is their complaint, if not that the UI element in question fails to be pixel perfect?

Whether the System Preferences pane must have a fixed size in order to achieve 'pixel perfection' is perhaps debatable. That such inflexibility makes pixel alignment easier is obvious. You think Apple have some other, better reason for System Settings being completely unresizable? What is it?

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#185

Post by ibash »

pxc wrote: post #184
ibash wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing with yourself. "Pixel perfect" doesn't mean what you think it does. > Pixel perfect is a design approach that aims to achieve a precise and consistent look for a design, down to the pixel level. https://www.google.com/search?q=define+pixel+perfect

I'm aware that 'pixel perfect' doesn't strictly mean 'totally fixed layout'. That's not really relevant here. You can't have , for instance, consistent alignments down to the pixel level, on systems with arbitrary DPI emulation, e.g., when you set DPI manually to something other than 96 in Xorg. This is where the usual caveats for 'fractional scaling' come in (because you have to render at a higher resolution and the…

The point was that unless an engineer has practiced implementing designs exactly, they often miss the details and don’t _see_ the details they’ve missed.

I say this as someone who used to not see the details, and then worked at a company where it was expected that we implement designs exactly. Ever since then I can’t _not_ see UI design details.

It’s like shopping for a car, once you’re biased towards a specific model you see it everywhere.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#186

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

ralfn wrote: post #161
JeremyNT wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 base…

Framework, Lenovo, Dell all offer linux laptops now.

I like what they are doing though. To be fair, I really love the concept of tge Framework though.

I recently bought a secpnd nvme ssd for my gaming pc and put Kubuntu on it, I'm not sure I want to go back to a laptop. It's insanely fast.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#187

Post by darthrupert »

tapoxi wrote: post #162
JeremyNT wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Taste is taste, but personally the aspect ratio was in the top #3 reasons why I got a Framework.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#188

Post by darthrupert »

colordrops wrote: post #107
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,…

Yes, I'm using Hyprland at the moment but it's got a chaotic community and it's still pretty buggy (though heading in the right direction), but I'd love an advanced tiling Wayland WM that is less "hobbyish" as my daily driver.

Hyprland community is fine.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#189

Post by orbisvicis »

katzinsky wrote: post #52
criddell wrote: post #34

All 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

People keep forgetting Wish still exists and many Open Source GUI apps are scriptable with guile. And the reality is that Linux desktop environments are skins. The widget toolkit is almost always a separate project. This is becoming even more pronounced with eg Wayland where the compositor just hands the client a surface to render its UI on and knows absolutely nothing about widgets or fonts (not that people have bee…

> many Open Source GUI apps are scriptable with guile.

What does this mean?

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