System76 Making COSMIC Improvements To Their Launcher, Better Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76 Making COSMIC Improvements To Their Launcher, Better Performance

In addition to working on their in-house Linux laptop prototype and other hardware endeavors, System76 continues being quite busy working on their COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/System76-COSMIC-Spring-2023

[Quackdoc]

Props to the cosmic team, been using cosmic-epoch for a while off and on using arch, and while I certainly wouldnt reccomend anyone do it, I do love their application library. Tiling is very smooth albiet obviously buggy. and screen sharing is pretty much unusable using the xdg-portals due to terrible performance.

the design language of the tools that are available is really nice. all in all, it's fun to tinker with. I just hope that cosmic will be a flexible ecosystem. I would love to see application launcher working on say sway. I have tested mpvpaper and it's working pretty ok. waydroid doesn't seem to work. plan on looking into that.

preformance is decent, the desktop kinda slows down and gets stuttery when high gpu or cpu workloads are happening though. it would be nice to get vulkan support. but it's not something I would be able to test if they wind up like sway and need image drm format modifier support thanks to polaris.

[dreamcat4]

quicksilver, albert

[Steffo]

I see great potential and maybe I will switch back to Linux again, when this desktop gets mature, fast and - this is very important for me - reliable!
Already this state and pace is really impressive! And it's cool, that they are reusing rust toolkits and contribute to them.

[kvuj]

I like what I'm seeing, and we definitely need some serious competitors to the big DEs.

However, I'm wondering about how applications will use libcosmic. Will it be statically linked, where every single program needs to update the dependencies to get access to bug fixes? If so, I'm not sure I like that. I get that it will simplify the developers workflow (as in they get to control when they upgrade) but I can also see some application being semi abandoned and having mismatched GUI bugs as a result...

[user1]

I like what I'm seeing, and we definitely need some serious competitors to the big DEs.

Yes, we need competition, but in a form of a new DE that preserves the traditional desktop paradigm (with SSD's, traditional menus, etc). From the early screenshots of Cosmic and of a window that uses their new tookit, it seems to me that all they currently do is imitate Gnome (they use the same CSD windows, hamburger menus and the general layout seems similar to Gnome. This really baffles me because I don't think the Linux desktop needs another Gnome and it's even stranger considering the fact that they dislike Gnome so much to the point of ditching it and creating their own thing.

Why do I think we need a new desktop that preserves the traditional desktop paradigm instead of another Gnome clone? Well according to this discussion in Ubuntu Mate Forums, the future of traditional GTK desktops (Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce) is very uncertain because of the changes in GTK 4 and beyond that make it harder and harder maintaining the features characteristic of traditional GTK desktops (more details in the discussion).
Yes, now it's probably still too early to predict what will happen in the far future, but I think there's a possibility that KDE will remain the only traditional desktop on Linux (and even in KDE there are already some deviation from traditional desktop elements like the use of hamburger menus).

So basically, I would've applauded System76 if they were making a new modern desktop with a focus on the traditional paradigm, but to me it seems that they currently do nothing but reinventing the wheel.

[Steffo]

This really baffles me because I don't think the Linux desktop needs another Gnome and it's even stranger considering the fact that they dislike Gnome so much to the point of ditching it and creating their own thing.

I think, they are ditching Gnome, because they don't like the technology under the hood. The developers are big Rust fans and their motto is: "Let's rewrite it in Rust". People make fun of this meme, but I find it interesting.

If Xfce and Co. have problems with Gtk, they could switch to Qt like LXQt has done and maybe also use some KDE technology under the hood like Dolphin, KIO and so on.

[Myownfriend]

Yes, we need competition, but in a form of a new DE that preserves the traditional desktop paradigm (with SSD's, traditional menus, etc).

Gnome is the only DE that doesn't fit your idea of a traditional desktop. KDE is traditional as is Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE. Yea, I know you already spoke to some of those with the whole GTK4 thing but I honestly think the bigger issue with the desktops you mentioned is that they're intentionally stagnant. In the case of Mate, it wasn't even designed by the people who are maintaining it. It's just trying to preserve what a previous version of Gnome once was.

I don't even know what you mean by "traditional menus" btw. Does Gnome have non-traditional ones? Other than that and SSDs, what is considered to be a traditional desktop paradigm?[/QUOTE]

[user1]

I don't even know what you mean by "traditional menus" btw. Does Gnome have non-traditional ones? Other than that and SSDs, what is considered to be a traditional desktop paradigm?

It's the one that has "File, Edit, View, etc" bar.
Btw, you may find it surprising, but I'm currently a Gnome user myself. However, as I said, I really don't think the Linux desktop needs another Gnome clone. Regarding KDE, some people love it, but some don't (and I don't want to start another DE war so I won't get into the reasons). That's why I think there is a place for another traditional desktop. You can say that the other GTK desktops are intentionally stagnant, (which isn't really true at least for Cinnamon BTW), but that doesn't change the fact that their future is in jeopardy because of the changes in GTK 4.0.
And now regarding Cosmic: compared to Gnome, what advantages does it have over Gnome? The fact that it's written in Rust and uses Vulkan? That doesn't seem compelling to me.

[Quackdoc]

So basically, I would've applauded System76 if they were making a new modern desktop with a focus on the traditional paradigm, but to me it seems that they currently do nothing but reinventing the wheel.

nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel, if the wheel wasn't reinvented time and time again, we would all be driving wooden carriages. if they can do it right, good. they are taking the wheel, deciding that what they have to work with is a pile of crap, and looking to do it better. you don't need to do something brand new to make it worth while, you just need need to do better.