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.