Cosmic

[Jarmer]

Wondering what you all think about the new DE from system76?

For those unaware: system76 has been developing a brand new ground up DE for linux called "Cosmic" for a little while now. It's written in Rust, and they just recently released the first alpha which is available for testing now. More info here: https://system76.com/cosmic

Personally I'm very excited for this project! I know there are about a dozen DE's already out there, but in reality I think this is a good modern competitor to the duopoly we currently have. I really like popos in general (even though its based on ubuntu which I dislike) so it'll be very interesting to see where this project goes. The reviews of people using it in Alpha have also been very complimentary. ESPECIALLY for a first release alpha.

There was some recent news that the dev team will release a Fedora Spin soon which I will definitely try out, whichever release it makes it to. I currently use Plasma, which I'm mostly happy with, but a change would be welcome.

 

[Timbaloo]

I tested it the other day (it's in the Arch repo) and it was quite buggy and to some extend not very intuitive (compared to Gnome and Plasma). I removed it straight away considering it just "not ready yet".

I'm not sure how it will do mid/long term against the obvious competitors, but I don't really feel it is needed in the first place. I get that system76 want to get "their spin" on Linux, but I doubt it will gain a lot of traction. When I first tried Plasma 6 when it hit Arch "stable" (so transition from extra-testing to extra), I was significantly more impressed with that (and I never was a KDE guy).

That being said, I never was a desktop environment guy in general. I always preferred the light ones (mostly Blackbox/Openbox back in the days, now on Wayland Hyprland), so take my words with a grain of salt.

 

[Jarmer]

How are you linking Hyprland? I'm always tempted to try it but then just don't because it seems too difficult to even get up and running.

And definitely makes sense on cosmic being buggy. I still do think it's just good to have more options out there, maybe force plasma and gnome to think just a little bit differently.

 

[Timbaloo]

How are you linking Hyprland? I'm always tempted to try it but then just don't because it seems too difficult to even get up and running.

When I got back to Linux (November 2023) I played around with compositors on Wayland and tried tiling compositors for the first time. First sway (which I liked already) and then moved to Hyprland. I love it, it looks good, it's stable (or at least my requirements are basic enough not to run into bugs). It's imho the best tiling compositor there is right now overall. But it comes down to wether you like tiling window management over stacked management. I'd urge you to try it out. Hyprland seems hard to get running, but imho it's just a matter of a couple of hours to go through the basic setup. Certainly sway is an easier starting point to get into tiling.

And definitely makes sense on cosmic being buggy. I still do think it's just good to have more options out there, maybe force plasma and gnome to think just a little bit differently.

What's funny is, I believe the success of tiling compositors (window managers) has more influence on Plasma and Gnome (and Cosmic) than Cosmic will have. But yes, options are what makes Linux great in that regards (Desktops), but I have my doubts wether Cosmic will have the impact that Gnome and KDE/Plasma have. I fail to see what's groundbreaking new about it, and the always mentioned "written in Rust" is not really a selling point (who really cares about the language something's implemented in if the result is good (or bad?)).

I'll sure try it out again later, when it's considered somewhat final.

 

[Ja.KooLit]

How are you linking Hyprland? I'm always tempted to try it but then just don't because it seems too difficult to even get up and running.

And definitely makes sense on cosmic being buggy. I still do think it's just good to have more options out there, maybe force plasma and gnome to think just a little bit differently.

you can try my scripts for installing hyprland

its on the pinned repo

JaKooLit - Overview

Just a regular dude. JaKooLit has 43 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

not on pinned repo but t here is also for Ubuntu

GitHub - JaKooLit/Ubuntu-Hyprland: Automated Hyprland installer for Ubuntu. NOTE: Repo Branches as per Ubuntu Versions

Automated Hyprland installer for Ubuntu. NOTE: Repo Branches as per Ubuntu Versions - JaKooLit/Ubuntu-Hyprland

github.com

 

[SchumannFrequency]

I think this is a good modern competitor to the duopoly we currently have.

There is no duopoly.

window manager only = +- 9%
cinnamon= +- 8%
XFCE= +- 6.5%

There are five players who (each) have more than 5% market share.
Cosmic looks like a tweaked Gnome desktop, it is more similar to Gnome than XFCE and cinnamon.

The strength of Linux, Illumos and BSD is just window managers (with Polybar or an alternative) instead of full desktops.
But if I were to choose a desktop, I would probably say LXQt or KDE Plasma.

Qt is a more powerful and versatile toolkit than GTK.
I find the typical wide top bar of GTK apps ugly.