System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 2 Desktop Packages

[Blisterexe]

I would hope that Linux works well on their devices; there computers consist of generic AMD CPUs and GPUs, if Linux didn't work well on that then we would have some serious problems.

First, system76 usually uses nvidia cards, so way to show you know what you're talking about, second, when i say "works well", i dont just mean linux booting, i am talking about the battery life being good and the wifi card being utilised properly, things like that. Also the fact it ships with linux means their customer support team will help you with it, which is a big boon for people who are not techy.

Knowing about them does not equate to sales, nor is "word of mouth" a business strategy that leads to significant growth,

Word of mouth is quite literally the most effective kind of marketing, and even if it was not, system76 can hardly afford to advertise at even close to the scale other laptop companies do.

the reason that COSMIC is open source is that that allows them to make the experience better, faster.

care to refute this part?

[skeevy420]

I've been daily driving COSMIC for about 2 months, updating to the latest git commits about once per week. I'm extremely pleased with it, it suits my needs wonderfully and is progressing at a rapid pace. Leave it to Phoronix comments to whine about how much they dislike something they haven't even tried, it's like offering a child a new food for the first time...

Moreover, they're arguing about something that's labeled as Alpha. Perhaps wait until it's considered Beta or RC before being too critical about anything.

[Mez']

There are more screenshots in the blog post, I fail to see anything childish about them. I don't like the floating, center-aligned taskbar, but I'm sure it's configurable.
One of the goals of Cosmic is a "comprehensive theming system with shareable themes". A concept alien only to Gnome users by now.

Plus it's funny when Gnome has such big icons, headerbars and buttons.
And you can't even professionalize it by reducing them to something less playskool. Gnome devs are too woke to allow that.

[Mez']

This claim is disingenuous.

They could get away from Gnome by forking Gnome as has been done before, adopting any of the dozen other desktops, such as Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE, Deepin, Plasma, there's lots of options other than writing a De from scratch.

But they decided to create a unique DE from scratch, in a language that no other De uses.

Even if we grant that they didn't initially start out with the goal of selling more systems, they are still missing a golden opportunity.

In theory these people are adults running a business, not some hippie high school kids chasing some dumb ideology.

That is just stupid.
Let's start with a soft case, Budgie. Budgie is not a fork of Gnome, yet it relied heavily on bits of Gnome (GTK, Mutter), and the burden of maintenance is still high, and they depend still on decisions made by Gnome, like what happened with Mutter 44 which was unusable for Budgie, so they forked Mutter 43 into Magpie, and now have to maintain it.
Now if we take a hard case, a pure Gnome fork, what happens is that either you need to fork the whole ecosystem with it or you need the evolving ecosystem to keep working on your fork with older technologies. Either way, it will have a huge maintenance burden, or you will have to submit to whatever decision is made on the progress of the components of the ecosystem.
In both cases, you are still depending on the whims of Gnome devs to a relatively large extent.

If you are going to have work to do in any case, and want to get away from Gnome, it's better to be radical about it and be able to implement your own vision throughout the whole ecosystem without having to compromise on what Gnome wants.

System76 got it perfectly right there, especially since they have the financial means to do it.
Budgie is heading the same way, although obviously it relies a lot more on volunteer work and therefore they will make use of the existing ecosystem as much as they can.

But this is how Gnome is fragmenting the Linux ecosystem, by being so close-minded that they literally push other actors to distance themselves if they want to be able to follow through with suggestions or a slightly different vision.
All that Cosmic or Budgie do could have been contributed to Gnome instead, if only they had the tiniest flexibility to allow third parties to give some options to their users.

After years of lockdown caused by Red Hat/Gnome self-absorbed mindset, it is a great time again for the Linux desktop.

I hope Cosmic will deliver. And I hope Ubuntu will switch its default to it soon, so as to relegate Gnome to a bystander role. Then, finally, they will stop imposing their outdated and monolithic vision to everyone, and hopefully go back to being a bit more realistic, pragmatic and flexible.

[Mez']

been using cosmic daily for a while myself, probably since it actually became a usable wm for gaming. It's progressed a lot. The default styles are pretty out there but you can go for more muted looks if you want them https://cosmic-themes.org/

It's nice, but all these themes are mostly colouring from what I see... At least it seems the button corner radius can be modified, so it's already going further than ugly libadwaita.
I like to fool around with customizing themes if it's easy enough. I will definitely have a look at Cosmic in the near future and see if I can make it look visually good for me. Unlike Adwaita, which is a pile of turd however you color it.

[Mez']

People buy system76 computers because they officially support linux, and linux works well on their devices, the reason that COSMIC is open source is that that allows them to make the experience better, faster.
Also, if they DID make it proprietary, the number one reason people know about them, which is word of mouth, would vanish overnight because people who would otherwise recommend them would be pissed off at that, and recommend something like tuxedo instead.

Sadly System76 computers are very limited to the US Qwerty world so far, since they don't offer keyboard layout variety. Tuxedo or Slimbook are much more versatile in that regard, and until System76 changes that, I cannot consider buying one of their products.

[Mez']

Why might I want to use Cosmic, if I've been fine with GNOME for years?

Like there's Plasma, Xfce, Sway, etc; basically a lot of options. So what is Cosmic offering that can long-term beat the experience I get from GNOME that's backed by major companies (and trust long-term)? I trust GNOME and Plasma will exist 5 years from now; what about anything else? There's still improvements to be made on Linux, GNOME will keep rolling-along, but is Cosmic offering anything currently that would imply they're willing to either continue following behind GNOME or knowingly blow it away so-hard that even RHEL defaults to it? I'm thinking long-term

Or, why are people using Cosmic over anything else currently? With limited understanding I'm thinking it's just new-thing-hype?

Because people use Gnome out of spite, the ecosystem around it is good, and it's the least worse for us. But it's not good either, and we are not satisfied with the closed-minded vision, forcing their limiting beliefs on their users.
People want to customize the desktop to their workflow and be more productive the way it works for them.
This is something Gnome doesn't offer, whereas Cosmic is based on the very idea of offering just that. Completely differend mindsets.
That is why it looks so exciting to a lot of us, us being the Gnome-by-lack-of-anything-better users.

[Espionage724]

Because people use Gnome out of spite, the ecosystem around it is good, and it's the least worse for us. But it's not good either, and we are not satisfied with the closed-minded vision, forcing their limiting beliefs on their users.
People want to customize the desktop to their workflow and be more productive the way it works for them.
This is something Gnome doesn't offer, whereas Cosmic is based on the very idea of offering just that. Completely differend mindsets.
That is why it looks so exciting to a lot of us, us being the Gnome-by-lack-of-anything-better users.

Why not Plasma, Xfce, or anything else?

[rmfx]

people like you are the reason we have wars. Psychopathic egoism with no value given to common good. Luckily not everyone is like that, otherwise the best operating system/kernel would not exist.

I couldn't word it better
Sofisticules is just a mentally ill person who has issues with himself anyway.

[Quackdoc]

For the people that have been testing Cosmic Alpha:
How has your gaming experience been?
How is the experience with video/audio conference apps like Teams?

I test git on arch, but seeing as no one has replied that I can see, hope this will do for ya. Rock solid, I recently found that I had a perf regression while using gamescope, but I have no idea if that's because my gamescope is old (had it pinned because of gamescope regressions) or whatever, but I removed gamescope from my system as I don't need it anymore (only needed it to use the second gpu for some games) and all has been dandy. I don't play all too many games, but the ones I do don't seem to have any major issues.

I don't use teams, but browser screensharing has been working without issues if that is what you mean. Not sure what else could be effected though, let me know I can try it.

One thing you will find is that xwayland even with the "don't scale" will still do 5k when you use fractional scaling on a 4k monitor. Native wayland applications don't have this issue. Im not sure if wine will enable wayland by default or this will be solved first, allegedly wine is really close to enabling wayland by default (not running it by default afaik, just enabling it????)

Whether you use COSMIC or not, it's worth trying out the COSMIC Store as an alternative to GNOME Software and KDE Discover. Compare the performance and memory usage. One of the best aspects of it is that it doesn't need to be kept running in the background since it can cold boot with its database in a fraction of a second.

Cosmic store is the fastest of any linux app store currently that I am aware of, regardless of it being flatpak, synaptic, distro dependant or what not. I actually have an old video floating around that has a comparison against gnome store, and that was when cosmic-store was slower lol