It's very... Gnome-ish...
Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
91–100 of 207 posts
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#92I 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…
The real lesson they need to learn is to add the right UI components. Apple did that right. There gradually added and styled tab bars, sidebars, etc. It didn't come on day one. If they can do that maybe we get a framework that actually adds components necessary to build good desktop applications.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#93Look 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.
Microsoft attempted the same thing with Windows 11 and it turned out to be a functional disaster. All platforms have their own legacy default workflows that regular customers are used to, that cannot be screwed with for "aesthetics".
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#94A lot of negative takes here. My understanding is that the point of developing cosmic is to enable distros and users to address UI issues in the first place, since GNOME is too limiting.
Yeah, I'm also very excited for cosmic, and a solid modernize toolkit for the longer run future as well.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
a classic market irony example is keyboards.. Every single user here has a keyboard, yet keyboards on a mass scale are cheap and badly designed, with no end in sight.
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 typing experience that decreases hand fatigue and can easily last 20+ years with no maintenance.
And don't get me started on layouts. QWERTY is ubiquitous but is a piece of tech debt that has hung around for over a century. Studies have been done and layouts have been produced that are much more efficient and produce less hand fatigue, but none have taken hold because of the sheer momentum that QWERTY has.
Want to see an easy place where there's room for improvement? Why are the rows on every keyboard you've ever used staggered so bizarrely? Because on a typewriter, mechanical limitations meant that there had to be room for the linkages. But inexplicably, we continue to manufacture keyboards that preserve this fossilized layout. Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#96I 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 windowing managers, OS/2, Windows 9x, the list goes on...
I still use Mac System 7.x from the mid-1990s which with a few choice extensions is basically equivalent to modern macOS windowing experience. And of course that goes back to the early 1980s with the prior System software and even the late 1970s with Apple Lisa development.
Go further! Be more daring!
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#97A 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, lightweight and fast DE with tiling as a core feature and full proper keyboard navigation support everywhere might get me to switch. There are times where you really miss a proper DE over the hacky patchwork that a custom setup with a niche Wayland compositor entails.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#98I wish ChromeOS's desktop environment gets ported and reimplemented across mainstream Linux and we're all freed from the GNOME/KDE GTK/Qt hell. It's just sad that Google's Linuxes (Android and ChromeOS) can do things like HDR, VRR, decent fractional scaling, decent font rendering, etc. but desktop Linux is still starved for these things to this day.
Isn't that because the hardware providers make it work?
I doubt that ChromeOS would have the same features if it were just a distro to install on unspecific hardware.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#99So many negative takes here. Does it look perfect? No, it's an alpha. I think the most important thing is that it's built on a solid base that will allow it to grow into a really really great DE.
Re: Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment
#100Look 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'm looking right now at my mac's dock (on the left side) and see clear misaligned stuff. I think it's because of the black dot that tells when the app is opened or not, but the right margin is smaller than the left margin, and the dot is not even centered in the left margin, is close to the left edge, looking even bad if you notice.