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Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

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Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#51

Post by gjsman-1000 »

mwidell wrote: post #43

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. Looks gorgeous, but every new release takes a complete reinstall, which is the most user-unfriendly way of doing a basic distribution task.

I’ve just learned to accept that Linux on the desktop is never going to happen.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#52

Post by katzinsky »

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 been seriously using those features of X11 for a while anyway.)

And honestly this is preferable. It looks hideous but it's much more pleasant to use. CWM doesn't have many features but the few it does have (such as the regex window title search) I so dearly miss on much nicer looking UIs (like OSX on my work computer.)

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#53

Post by juujian »

mwidell wrote: post #43

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.

I have no admittedly no understanding of aesthetics. Is the ideal big margins and this is far away from it, or is this close to the ideal with minimal margins? From a functional standpoints margins around a dock would be a waste of space, no?

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#54

Post by jklinger410 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #51
mwidell wrote: post #43

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…

I installed EOS on my dad's old computer. He is stuck on an old version because he is not technical enough to do a re-install. I pretty much swore it off after that issue.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#58

Post by devnull3 »

mwidell wrote: post #43

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.

> a visually appealing GUI

I think it requires a combination of things: a good taste, a sense of visual design and programming. The first two is more of art form.

Most of the developers on these projects are really good at programming but its rare to get a good combination mentioned above AND willing to work on open source over multiple years consistently.

Update: Also someone in the decision making hierarchy needs to have a keen sense of design. Example: Steve Jobs learnt calligraphy and even though he did not actually designed it he would certainly veto and pass feedback to the developers.

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#59

Post by elaus »

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.

There are links on how to install this on various distros right on the landing page (section "Try it out on your favorite distro!").

E.g. for Arch this leads to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/COSMIC

Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

#60

Post by jwells89 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #51
mwidell wrote: post #43

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…

Seems like the ideal is for group 2 to be producing the DE and working in concert with group 1 who's responsible for the distro. How exactly to arrive at this result is another question.
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