There are people here who say that GNOME is a copy of MacOS I want to let you know that you that you are deeply unserious, one desktop is functional and the other is MacOS.

Same thing with people who say KDE is a Windows clone like Windows 11 didn’t just steal KDE design language but made it worse because unlike KDE which is unified, just a few clicks in Windows you are suddenly transported to 2010 with the old Windows control panels, and Windows users vastly prefer the older menus.

Linux desktops are superior to their proprietary rivals. We may not have Adobe (lmao who needs that shit 🥴), we may not have HDR (not yet, check back in a couple of months or half a year), we don’t have display mirroring (okay that one is valid) but our workflow is far superior.

He’s a Finnish millionaire so he’s closer to demsucc than ML but even demsuccs can shut down reactionary assholes. I don’t think he would spew propaganda uncritically though like most liberals.

Europe is a weird place politically compared to the US.

More like we ran out of luck due to the failing US medical system, he was a piece of shit but he didn’t deserve to get fucked over with his mental health like that.

The whole thing doesn’t depend on him it’s just that he’s the benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) of the Linux kernel and everyone pulls from his git tree. Linus just reviews and approves patchsets sent to the kernel to his tree and people trust his judgement.

There should really be corresponding kernels besides Linux but so much of the development and hardware bring up is focused on the Linux kernel.

Most nerds his generation are mostly libertarians if they didn’t go the silicon valley elon techbro alt right pipeline. RMS was a libertarian and had a lot of brainworms.

If you asked them he’d probably say he’s a demsoc judging from his reaction and that he’s finnish

Linus didn’t sell out though and become a neo-nazi billionaire. He’s a woke communist through and through!

One of my irrational fears is that Oda is going to pull a bothsides sort of thing with the ancient kingdom and the World government. Like one side is clearly in the wrong (with all the genocide and slavery).

DPRK my beloved

Yup. Dates are flexible though. We are still at the cutting room floor stage and things outside of COSMIC have to be resolved as well (Nvidia support in Linux, HDR color support, wayland protocol finalization etc).

Timeline is in rough stages right now. 2 alphas, a beta, and then a stable release alongside POP!_OS 24.04 which should be released around mid summer to the end. But as always, there are no hard dates for a good reason.

POP!_OS will do yearly releases from that point as well as maintaining upstream system components like Mesa, nonfree Nvidia drivers, systemd, pipewire among others.

There’s no plans to move away from their ubuntu base. COSMIC will come to other distros for sure like OpenSUSE and Fedora (obv Arch as well) so don’t feel like you have to use POP!_OS to get COSMIC.

I think the goals were met since eelco left the board. NixOS 24.05 is going to be released but there are two new forks mainly lix (rust impl of CppNix) and auxolotl which is a soft fork afaik

If you want to turn into a COSMIC fan. Their app store takes approximately a second to fully load everything. Searches take on the magnitude of milliseconds to complete.

It’s literally faster than typing flatpak install <app-name> -> y. GNOME Software and KDE Discover don’t come close to this level of blazingly fast rust speeds.

but I am skeptical about System76 dominating development rather than letting the community run things

Don’t worry, they’ve already been accepting community contributions to COSMIC (such as gestures and window preview). They just have to work on finalizing the initial foundation of libcosmic and write documentation for it (but there are already non S76 COSMIC apps). They’re also leveraging the Rust community’s crates to build everything while also giving back to the community (like with cosmic-text text rendering which has become the de-facto standard on Rust). Iced is entirely community maintained and isn’t even at its stable 1.0 release yet.

Rust rewrite of GTK

The issues they had with GNOME went far beyond the application toolkit. GNOME simply wouldn’t implement swiftly (or at all) wayland protocols and desktop features that their (S76) clients and userbase wanted. COSMIC is exactly what you’re asking here. They will have desktop extensions (and applet extensions), just not the ones GNOME have already.

They look like a mix of the awkward elements of Qt and Android.

I had that impression too. And when you’re using it there’s no animations or transitions between widgets. It’s very much still in the pre-alpha stage right now (they even disabled light themes because theming wasn’t working properly). I didn’t like how far spaced apart some widgets were (like in COSMIC settings but that app isn’t even near to be completed).

Even in these screenshots, I still far prefer the aesthetics of the Libadwaita apps. I wonder if there will be Adwaita themes for iced eventually. Not sure how well it would mesh with the iced layout though.

No one is beating GNOME on aesthetics no matter how hard you try lol, they cracked the code pretty much for the most appealing applications. But I think COSMIC’s support for advanced theming that you can do on the fly will distinguish it aesthetically from KDE and GNOME apps (which have no such 1st class feature, yet. I know KDE is working on accent theming for 6.1). You can also change icon themes easily and Qt theming is still in the works so there’s an effort to make the desktop integrate well together no matter the app.

They didn’t technically build their own GUI stack, iced already existed and this was during the time where native Rust applications were being theorized about but no one really put pen to paper yet. So COSMIC acts as an example of what iced is capable of doing and what it needs to implement to improve.

LXQT comes to mind when leveraging Qt for the desktop and it certainly works, but KDE is much more than just a Qt-based desktop since it has its own components on top of it (like Kio, etc.) System76 is a hardware company so their principal interest is to ship an operating system that works with their client’s hardware without any hiccups (or at least hiccups that can be fixed immediately by them instead of waiting for upstream). They can’t afford to wait for GNOME or KDE to implement certain wayland protocols or desktop features that they know their clients already expect with their GNOME 42 spin. Wayland is reaching critical mass and they can’t afford bargaining with GNOME nor switching to a C++ based KDE when most of their engineers use Rust.

It’s a technical exercise as well as a pragmatic one. If you have the resources to engineer your own compositor and DE on your own stack, then you should take the opportunity since that’s a once in a lifetime thing (considering wayland KDE and GNOME have dominated the space for so long).

That’s valid, all the work that goes into cosmic also goes into the Rust application stack as well, so people are passively benefiting from this as well.

Plus there are only 2 Wayland desktop environments, the big 2 have to be challenged sometime.

¿porque no los dos?

Yes the fishy shell. I heard that they are doing a full rewrite in Rust. I might switch from bash when that happens (rust desktop moments).

1500 dollary-doos oh no ma’am i use linux cause im POOR /hj

All this stuff looks really cool but it’s still in its infancy right now and also Fedora doesn’t have good support for RISC-V processors (they’re still working on ARM and hopefully apple silicon speeds that up).