System76's COSMIC Desktop Adds New Window-Swapping Mode, Dynamic Settings

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76's COSMIC Desktop Adds New Window-Swapping Mode, Dynamic Settings

In addition to KDE Plasma 6.0, another exciting desktop milestone we can look forward to in 2024 is the COSMIC desktop from System76 when they end up releasing the next Pop!_OS based upon Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The Pop!_OS / COSMIC developers continue making great progress on their Rust-written desktop environment...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-September

[zexelon]

I am really excited about where this is going. I hope they can make it through these days! I have been a fan of System76 for quite some time. Hoping to pick up one of their laptops next year.

Out of all the distro's I have worked with Pop_OS has been my daily driver for quite a number of years now. Looking forward to giving Cosmic a try when it matures a bit more.

[Quackdoc]

i've been using cosmic for a couple days now, really missing touch support and gammastep support. as for bugs, the icons dont work for me on arch, resizing is buggy. but all in all, I would say for explorers, cosmic is actually in a somewhat usable state if you wanted to jump into it. I'm using pkgbuild I did myself since the aur ones are a bit buggy for me and im not fond of the single pkgbuild setup

[royce]

I wonder when they will release the first version. As far as I recall, Pop OS is now basing itself in Ubuntu LTS, and the next LTS is only half a year away.

[Mez']

i've been using cosmic for a couple days now, really missing touch support and gammastep support. as for bugs, the icons dont work for me on arch, resizing is buggy. but all in all, I would say for explorers, cosmic is actually in a somewhat usable state if you wanted to jump into it. I'm using pkgbuild I did myself since the aur ones are a bit buggy for me and im not fond of the single pkgbuild setup

Thanks for the little hands-on.
Getting closer to getting rid of Gnome.

Any idea if Cosmic uses GTK, Mutter, etc... ? I really hope not.
If it has the versatility of Budgie (as it seems to be easily laid out your own way) with the paradigm Unity had (of which Gnome is a bad implementation of the same), the only thing that would prevent them from becoming the de facto is Red Hat trying to kill it like they usually do when the competition has a better solution.

[MadWatch]

Please COSMIC add workspace grid. Every Linux desktop environment had it back in the days. This trend on "modern" desktop keeping workspaces in a single line is dumb.

[halo9en]

Any idea if Cosmic uses GTK, Mutter, etc... ?

Last year I've read the shell uses GTK4, and the compositor depends on smithay which provides rust interfaces for wayland.

[Quackdoc]

Thanks for the little hands-on.
Getting closer to getting rid of Gnome.

Any idea if Cosmic uses GTK, Mutter, etc... ? I really hope not.
If it has the versatility of Budgie (as it seems to be easily laid out your own way) with the paradigm Unity had (of which Gnome is a bad implementation of the same), the only thing that would prevent them from becoming the de facto is Red Hat trying to kill it like they usually do when the competition has a better solution.

new cosmic uses iced + their own compositor written in rust. I assume some things will stay in GTK or whatever that don't need re-written as far as I can tell, you can pretty much use cosmic-comp as you would use something like sway if you really wanted, Im not sure that cosmic supports everything you would need, however I have a script that setups up my "sway like" environment, waybar, wofi, mpvpaper etc. I assume using some custom configuration, you could get it to be quite configurable. I wonder if cosmic-session (the all in one starting application) could allow custom configuration like that.

EDIT: as an appendage, props to smithay/cosmic teams, when compiled static (which rust is by default usually) cosmic-comp (just the compositor, haven't tested the entire suite) sizes are pretty nice

by default cosmic will compile with lto fat in release mode, there are a couple other things which can be used to reduce binary size like setting codegen units, however this is generally what I do when I target smaller release

this is a tad larger then I would like, however I assume if you removed the x11 and winit and other misc features that arent strictly necessary it could be even smaller.

RUSTFLAGS='-C opt-level=3 -C panic=abort' cargo build --release
19M
stripped
15M
upx --lzma --best
4.1M

RUSTFLAGS='-C opt-level=z -C panic=abort' cargo build --release
16M
stripped
11M
upx --lzma --best
3.2M

[evasb]

Hope Cosmic bring some more competition to GNOME.

[rmfx]

That looks more an more polished. I have no doubt cosmic might be a big hit.
Any plans regarding the other cosmic core application such a cosmic-terminal, cosmic-file-manager and cosmic-text-editor? Do you plan them for v1.0 or later?

PS: system76, Could you improve the image encoding on your blog? The pixels are so so smudged that it's challenging to see properly..