What I am most excited for in COSMIC is the promise of tiling in a full DE. I like the idea that you can switch back and forth.
I started trying it out a month or so ago. Still pretty incomplete. Promising though.
The fact that it may drive the Rust GUI ecosystem forward is exciting as well. I do not need to see everything re-written in Rust but it will be great if Rust is a realistic option for new app dev.
I run it on many of my devices, but I am absolutely waiting this one out to see just how useful it is, what’s missing, what’s not, and until it’s ready to be a daily driver. Very exciting.
So what sets COSMIC apart from the rest of the gang?
I am curious when they will release it as a full GNOME replacement, because that is a crazy task. At the current state, COSMIC is not ready at all. Even though it is already awesome.
Modern design they say? It still looks like 2010. They can’t even get the spacings and paddings right.
The project is motivated by “I like Rust, lets make a whole desktop in it” not by good UX.
Depends on your point of view.
Their motivation was “we have a vision for our UX and GNOME won’t let us do it — so let’s write our own.”
It was only after deciding to write their own that they decided to write it in Rust.
They like Rust, but that is not what motivated them to make COSMIC.
My view is that if the goal was to effectively make good software they wouldn’t start from scratch.
If they used wlroots the desktop would be usable today with a good feature set.
If they used Qt or GTK they would have feature rich well supported software. (GTK4 could have been an improvement for them, it’s designed around being minimal and having platform libraries implement design choices)
They didn’t take a practical approach imo. You could argue its a long term investment but because of it it’s probably years off of feature parity. The only upside today is… it’s written in Rust.
Yeah.
Don’t get me wrong I guess I’m glad to see a bit more diversity in the DE space, but the design of cosmic has always been “Gnome but a bit dated and uglier” to me.
Still, theming exists despite the quirks it can cause sometimes, so it’s not the end of the world.
I’m still going to have a little mess around with it and see what it’s like though.
When I used Pop!_OS I disabled their extensions because it felt way more clunky than stock GNOME. The applications menu looks out of place and the bottom bar wastes so much vertical space by default. In the end I just switched to Fedora when I got more comfortable with Linux. I’m a little sad that this looks exactly like GNOME with the extensions baked in and not something novel entirely. It is, however, exciting to see a new player enter the field and learn from their approach.
I think stock Ubuntu looks sexy af. Plus, they make great use of your Desktop space. Barely any clutter in the way. But that’s just personal taste.
