Pop!_OS' COSMIC Desktop Finishing Up Work On App Store

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Pop!_OS' COSMIC Desktop Finishing Up Work On App Store

The developers at System76 working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment catering to their in-house, Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux distribution have provided their latest monthly status update on the desktop effort...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Pop-OS-COSMIC-April-2024-Goes

[Quackdoc]

a couple things ill go in order;

> - The "ultra fast" COSMIC App Store is nearly implemented. There is ongoing polishing to address user experience issues:
calling it ultra fast is an understatement. once it loads it's pretty much instant video vs gnome software. both launches are after removing the .cache files

https://files.catbox.moe/mzz004.mp4

>- The COSMIC Files file manager has added GNOME Virtual File-System (GVFS) integration for handling external storage and network shares.
gfvs can be disabled, but even without disabling it, it just throws a small error to stderr, completely optional thankfully, id prefer kio over gio, but both aren't great. now if only it could do rclone for mounting remotes.

>- COSMIC Greeter integration with logind.
cosmic greeter is pretty nice UI, it's like most other greetd ones. currently it defaults to a cosmic session and not "last opened session" something to note, but otherwise no complaints

>- COSMIC Edit now supports CRLF-encoded files.
originally reported on windows but this effects a lot of wine stuff too, so glad this is fixed

>- The ability to drag-and-drop text and images has been added for COSMIC Files.
this includes dragging into and out of cosmic files, cosmic files is now a fully usable files app pretty much

all in all cosmic is progressing at breakneck speeds. it's extremely exciting, the one thing I have issue with is cosmic applications (not cosmic-comp which is actually competetive with weston on ram usage) use a lot of ram for a single application. This wont be an issue if you run many applications at the same time thanks to same page merging, but you can see in the massif image, cosmic applications waste a lot of ram loading font system, graphics stuff etc. into ram

https://files.catbox.moe/6au1qe.png

https://files.catbox.moe/x0tp5s.png

now the "actual ram usage" of all the applications running at the same time as I said wont be bad because it will be a lot of shared memory, but it's still kind of annoying to see such a high base ram. but high ram usage aside, they have extremely light cpu and gpu impact, much lighter then GTK so cosmic I think will be far superior for stuff like low end socs assuming they can get that ram under control.

[charmitro]

all in all cosmic is progressing at breakneck speeds. it's extremely exciting, the one thing I have issue with is cosmic applications (not cosmic-comp which is actually competetive with weston on ram usage) use a lot of ram for a single application. This wont be an issue if you run many applications at the same time thanks to same page merging, but you can see in the massif image, cosmic applications waste a lot of ram loading font system, graphics stuff etc. into ram

https://files.catbox.moe/6au1qe.png

https://files.catbox.moe/x0tp5s.png

now the "actual ram usage" of all the applications running at the same time as I said wont be bad because it will be a lot of shared memory, but it's still kind of annoying to see such a high base ram. but high ram usage aside, they have extremely light cpu and gpu impact, much lighter then GTK so cosmic I think will be far superior for stuff like low end socs assuming they can get that ram under control.

These are actually great findings regarding the RAM usage. Should you or someone else share this comment with them?

[timofonic]

Rust's potential for a KIO/GIO alternative in COSMIC is notable. While Rclone is effective, Rust's safety features could enhance file sync tools like Syncthing, Celeste, and FreeFileSync.

[Malsabku]

I really don't see the difference between Cosmic, Budgie and Cinnamon. All three are in the same vein.

Is there a beta or daily image where I can test Popos24 with Cosmic Desktop?

[luno]

I really don't see the difference between Cosmic, Budgie and Cinnamon. All three are in the same vein.

Is there a beta or daily image where I can test Popos24 with Cosmic Desktop?

if you are on NixOS, there is flake for it

[xAlt7x]

I really don't see the difference between Cosmic, Budgie and Cinnamon. All three are in the same vein.

Is there a beta or daily image where I can test Popos24 with Cosmic Desktop?

You can try "Universal Blue" image called "Fedora Cosmic Atomic" (plus, you can rebase on it from Fedora Silverblue / Kinoite).
Also, official "cosmic-epoch" Github repo has instructions for installing packages on Fedora 39/40, Arch and Pop!_OS 22.04

[ptr1337]

if you are on NixOS, there is flake for it

On arch there is also cosmic-epoch-git.

[skeevy420]

I have reservations about calling the software manager the App Store because the word Store brings certain implications that a software manager doesn't like buying, selling, reviews, support, payment management, cloud services, user and system wide usage management, and more. Finding, installing, removing, and updating are just part of what an actual App Store is supposed to do. The word Store also implies that it's a For-Profit program where System76 gets a vig like Steam, Google Play, Microsoft Store, or Apple's service marked App Store.

Regardless of the implications of the word Store, Apple is sue happy and y'all are using their name. Y'all should probably call it anything else than the seemingly generic sounding App Store.

Narrator: It wasn't generic.

FWIW, I feel the same way about store.kde.org. It's also not a store. It's more of an exchange, repository, depository, library, etc. It's Discover on a web site. Speaking of which, the COSMIC App Store screenshot reminds me of KDE Discover with CSD.

[user1]

id prefer kio over gio, but both aren't great..

I think if Cosmic won't have its own io library, then gio would be better. KDE suffers from the notorious freezing under heavy io, which AFAIK is an issue with kio. There is no such issue with gio.