[flagged]
Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
31–40 of 207 posts
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#32[flagged]
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 same thing? How much effort was wasted in unity?
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#33I 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.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#34All 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,...
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#35Earlier 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…
KDE and Gnome are nowhere near the same thing, they have very different philosophies, guidelines, and underlying UI frameworks.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#36Earlier 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…
Cosmic is building on top of https://github.com/Smithay/smithay there is convergence happening on de facto wayland protocols compositors support
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. The beauty of open source is that many philosophies have room to prosper. The Linux ecosystem is not the Apple ecosystem.
At first I was going to say something like "Well with that attitude we'll never get the 'year of the Linux desktop.' But actually, what you say describes exactly what the Linux desktop is. It isn't about hegemony but rather a free marketplace of ideas and philosophies that gives its users a depth of choice between desktops and configurability within desktops that you can't find in any other operating system. So with…
Desktop Linux only "competes" with Mac O's and Windows on a superficial level. While it seems like marketshare matters... it really doesn't from a existential standpoint. Desktop Linux has no* financial driver towards greater marketshare. It's not* competing for dollars with commercial, proprietary OSes.
* Not entirely true... there are certainly commercial offerings and financial backing for the ecosystem, though I'm certain it would still exist without them.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#38Earlier 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…
Right, this is why I compared it to car manufacturers. At a base level, there is little to no reason to prefer one car to another. Bicycles can be the same. That said, at the ends, there are people that latch on heavily to decisions and small differences in the options.
Now, again to your point, we are all on the same roads. Such that standardizing parts is incredibly valuable.
I /think/ the trap is that standards often act as constraints on the manufacturers. And software is a large industry where constraints are easy to effectively ignore during development. Memory requirements. Safety from malicious actors on the system. Capabilities of different computers. I could probably go on.
I suspect it is worse than that sounds, even, as developers tend to focus on the intrinsic quality of code thinking that is paramount. I hate that sentence, as it makes it sound like I don't think the quality of the code matters. I fully think it does. I also fully think we fall for aesthetic quality of code far more than we do any other quality.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#39I 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.
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 on aesthetics. People used to care about making sure buttons are recognizable and differentiated with icons, colors, and clear labels. Now it's just text. People used to make sure windows had clear, visible borders, and the active window was clearly identifiable. Now it's just a shadow, and if you have a dark user interface, you can't even see the shadow. People used to make sure scrollable areas where clearly identifiable, now you have to just guess at what is scrollable.
From the screenshots, this looks like the same low-contrast, low-usability, but visually pretty design approach most modern desktop environments have adopted.
It's unfortunate that this seems to be the direction we're going in.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#40Neat, any word on getting this working on Arch. I use Majaro now and KDE is okay, but I'd like to try something new.