• LeFantome@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    What I am most excited for in COSMIC is the promise of tiling in a full DE. I like the idea that you can switch back and forth.

    I started trying it out a month or so ago. Still pretty incomplete. Promising though.

    The fact that it may drive the Rust GUI ecosystem forward is exciting as well. I do not need to see everything re-written in Rust but it will be great if Rust is a realistic option for new app dev.

    • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
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      5 months ago

      Tiling

      It’s actually really good. I’ve been running the prealpha at times, and I’ve had no issues with tiling.

      I’m missing 2 things from a real tiler: sloppy focus (WIP), and static workspaces.

  • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    I run it on many of my devices, but I am absolutely waiting this one out to see just how useful it is, what’s missing, what’s not, and until it’s ready to be a daily driver. Very exciting.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
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    5 months ago

    I am curious when they will release it as a full GNOME replacement, because that is a crazy task. At the current state, COSMIC is not ready at all. Even though it is already awesome.

  • doodledup@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Modern design they say? It still looks like 2010. They can’t even get the spacings and paddings right.

    • AProfessional@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The project is motivated by “I like Rust, lets make a whole desktop in it” not by good UX.

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        Depends on your point of view.

        Their motivation was “we have a vision for our UX and GNOME won’t let us do it — so let’s write our own.”

        It was only after deciding to write their own that they decided to write it in Rust.

        They like Rust, but that is not what motivated them to make COSMIC.

        • AProfessional@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          My view is that if the goal was to effectively make good software they wouldn’t start from scratch.

          If they used wlroots the desktop would be usable today with a good feature set.

          If they used Qt or GTK they would have feature rich well supported software. (GTK4 could have been an improvement for them, it’s designed around being minimal and having platform libraries implement design choices)

          They didn’t take a practical approach imo. You could argue its a long term investment but because of it it’s probably years off of feature parity. The only upside today is… it’s written in Rust.

          • model_tar_gz@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Sometimes old software just has too much legacy spaghetti written in to really build from though. Starting from scratch gives new ideas room to breathe and grow that might otherwise be impossible to implement in the previous framework—which while probably useful can also be stifling. See the reason why Wayland is being written to replace Xorg.

          • teolan@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            They dix not build the compositor from scratch, they built it on top of smithay, a library similar to wlroots but written in Rust.

            I don’t know if you’ve actually tried to use GTK or QT, but it’s insanely painful. There is a reason almost all apps are written in Electron. Native GUI toolkits suck. If they had used GTK they would have still had an outdated and hard to maintain toolkit, and to deal with Gnome politics. Using GTK was actually the initial idea.

            If we want Linux Desktop to succeed, at some point we have to build tools that people want to use. I’m glad they’re doing it.

            • AProfessional@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              I have written apps in those toolkits. I can’t say it’s easier than the web of course but it’s not that bad.

            • not3ottersinacoat@fedia.io
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              5 months ago

              Linux Mint is one of the most widely-used desktop distros and it defaults to X11 (and Wayland on Cinnamon is still experimental). LM is known for not changing things until the solution is good and ready.

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yeah.

      Don’t get me wrong I guess I’m glad to see a bit more diversity in the DE space, but the design of cosmic has always been “Gnome but a bit dated and uglier” to me.

      Still, theming exists despite the quirks it can cause sometimes, so it’s not the end of the world.

      I’m still going to have a little mess around with it and see what it’s like though.

    • Gebruikersnaam@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      When I used Pop!_OS I disabled their extensions because it felt way more clunky than stock GNOME. The applications menu looks out of place and the bottom bar wastes so much vertical space by default. In the end I just switched to Fedora when I got more comfortable with Linux. I’m a little sad that this looks exactly like GNOME with the extensions baked in and not something novel entirely. It is, however, exciting to see a new player enter the field and learn from their approach.

      • doodledup@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I think stock Ubuntu looks sexy af. Plus, they make great use of your Desktop space. Barely any clutter in the way. But that’s just personal taste.

        • mitrosus@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 months ago

          Correct. They have the history of “the best use of desktop space” from unity DE. Although I will not forgive canonical for dropping unity, the gnome they have is close.

    • refalo@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      More importantly to me, can blind users even install the OS.

      All current mainstream distros now use Wayland, which has broken screen reading, so the OS cannot be installed.

        • Rogue@feddit.uk
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          5 months ago

          Honestly, it’s not as important. These projects are working with very limited resources, typically dependent on free labour. Accessibility is incredibly hard to get right and half arsing it isn’t going to work. The priority should be pushing out a reliable, working prototype that people want to use. Once that’s accomplished you can refocus on expanding the features.

          Demand for reliable multi monitor support is going to be far higher than screen reading capabilities.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      Daily driving it is brave! I’ve been trying it out in a VM and found it to be pretty… temperamental so far lol. But obviously it’s a pre-alpha so that’s to be expected.

      • 书行 [he / comrade]@lemmygrad.ml
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        5 months ago

        Yeah, it can be sometimes. But to be completely honest, my workflow is not that deep. I just need neovim, a web browser and spotify. Every other application I use runs natively/smooth on Wayland, so no problems there. My biggest grip right now is that I can’t change input methods on the fly for some reason, but I’m sure they will address it at some point.

      • Toribor@corndog.social
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        5 months ago

        They also specifically warn that it’s not optimized for a VM right now. It’s still not quite ready on bare metal, but less so in a VM.

  • yak
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    5 months ago

    How far is it to be daily drivable, in your opinion? Like, crazy far or just far?

    • AndrewZabar@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I have a few machines running Pop. It’s exceptionally good IMO. It’s like an extremely refined Ubuntu. It’s one of my fav distros.

        • Jestzer@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I use Pop!_OS on 2 machines daily with KDE Plasma and am happy with it. I use KDE Plasma because COSMIC is too GNOME-y for me. The only thing I liked better in COSMIC was the fractional scaling- that was way better than the options I have in KDE.

      • yak
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        5 months ago

        Yes, I agree. Pop!_OS gets a lot of hate for some reason, but it’s actually a really, really good distro.

        I was asking about COSMIC though, since I’m really looking forward to try it!