mmstick

mmstick OP , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I’d recommend everyone to try out cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) when they get a chance. Whether you use COSMIC or not, it’s fully functional with any desktop environment. It’s packaged by default in Pop!_OS 22.04, available in Fedora 40 via ryanabx/cosmic-epoch, and the AUR.

mmstick OP , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I’ve seen plenty of people using GTK themes with rectangular switches.

mmstick , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

If COSMIC is pathetic, then GNOME must be abysmally unusable. COSMIC was already planned long before there was any beef with GNOME. We listen to user feedback and prioritize development of features that our developers and users want. Good luck trying to replicate COSMIC’s theming and tiling capabilities in GNOME. Let alone the overall stability and performance of COSMIC. COSMIC Store is the fastest app store on Linux now. I’d recommend everyone to try it out. sudo apt install cosmic-store

mmstick , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

There’s a very large gap between having tiling, and having excellent auto-tiling capabilities with intuitive shortcuts and behaviors. COSMIC’s autotiling was designed from the ground up to be just as usable with a mouse as it is with a keyboard.

mmstick , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

GNOME Shell extensions are JavaScript monkey patch injections to gnome-shell’s JavaScript process. They’re only compatible with the exact version of gnome-shell that they target because most of them require to override private internals of gnome-shell that are sensitive to order of injection and names of private variables and methods.

COSMIC uses a modern Wayland-based approach to shell interface design with layer-shell applets. Each applet is its own process, using the layer-shell Wayland protocol to render their windows as shell components, and communicating with the compositor securely with the security context Wayland protocol. The protocols they use are standardized, so they will be stable across COSMIC releases. Other Wayland compositors could integrate with them if they desire to.

mmstick , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Ubuntu is Debian with more up-to-date packages and a lot of additional third party packages. There’s a lot of companies who produce development toolkits, frameworks, and applications that are explicitly built for the Ubuntu base. Some governmental agencies and organizations also require access to packages and repositories that have been audited by security agencies, which Ubuntu has gone through the process of getting certification for certain kernels and their Ubuntu Pro repositories. All of which are useful for real world customers.

Regardless of shortcomings in Snap, Pop does not rely on Snaps, and offers its own packaging for things that would otherwise require Snap on Ubuntu.

mmstick , 1 month ago

I think it already it is available on NixOS

mmstick , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Speaking of being defensive, not only are you being far more defensive than I, but these bullet points are both misleading and wildly inaccurate. It’s also telling that you think none of my points are good, when they are the truth. Could you possibly be even more a hypocrite?

mmstick , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Pop Shop

Install the cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) and try it out!

mmstick , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I’d just remove it with sudo apt remove pop-shop, and install cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) instead.

mmstick , 1 month ago

Consumes less energy (CPU) while also rendering more responsively.

mmstick , 1 month ago

Yeah, it’s in the Pop!_OS 22.04 repositories, this Fedora 40 COPR, and on the AUR.

mmstick , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

What GPU configuration do you have? I don’t have any of these issues. If NVIDIA, you have to wait for NVIDIA to release explicit sync Wayland drivers.

mmstick , 1 month ago

What report are you referring to?

mmstick OP , 2 months ago

That is to show the icon theme feature.

mmstick OP , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

All desktops use the Super key nowadays. Sway, i3, GNOME, Plasma, etc. are all using the Super key. Have been for years. The standard convention is that the Super key is reserved for system-level shortcuts handled by the window manager; and Alt key shortcuts are reserved for application-level shortcuts. Your desktop might have bound both Alt and Super because of legacy reasons.

mmstick OP , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Are you interested in contributing? You can find the source code for theme generation here and here.

mmstick OP , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Did you not read the blog update? That is exactly what the blog update covered… The user’s theme colors are applied to the Adwaita theme used by GTK4/libadwaita, and GTK3 theme support is provided by adw-gtk3.

mmstick OP , 2 months ago

How so? 22.04 is actively maintained and updated by Ubuntu, and is still the latest LTS release. On top of that, the most important packages in Pop!_OS are updated frequently, so we are on Mesa 24.0.3 and Linux 6.8.0. As for when COSMIC releases, you should read last month’s blog post.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

The compositor and its applications have been developed bottom up with a full Rust stack, so stability hasn’t been a concern. We spend very little time debugging since the logic usually works if it compiles.

There’s only a handful of applications slated for the first release, and they’re almost finished. Besides core applications, we need only develop a couple additional settings pages to be ready for release, and integrate COSMIC versions of the remaining desktop portals. Altogether, that’s really not that much compared to all the work in the last two years.

Besides feature development, the main focus will be ironing out theming issues in the toolkit to adhere to our design files, and writing documentation for developers interested in building apps for cosmic. As well as the necessary work to enable a smooth upgrade from Pop 22.04 to 24.04.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

Yes, you can do anything with COSMIC’s dock and panel. No extensions needed. If an applet exists on the system, you can embed it into your panel or dock.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

I heard mention of COSMIC on Asahi somewhere.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

Our internal testing won’t begin until the first ISO is ready, which marks the alpha. As it is open source, our internal testing is also publicly available to everyone interested in downloading the ISO and testing it. The Alpha will not include all features that are planned for release. Then we will switch to Beta after all featues are implemented, where QA will begin reviewing every PR to ensure that no regressions make it to release. Then it releases after we deem the beta free of oustanding issues on the board.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

PRs to cosmic-panel and libcosmic are welcome

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

It should be noted that COSMIC itself hasn’t been delayed. Development on the core applications progressed much faster than expected, so we decided to skip the Alpha 1 release and release Alpha 2 instead.

Why wouldn’t you like using it right now? I wouldn’t call it “very alpha”.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

1. That’s not implemented, but you can click the maximize button, or press Super+M to toggle maximization.
2. You can open the Appearance settings page and change that to your preferred color scheme. We’ve already selected our default colors and they’re not going to change from here on out.
3. What do you mean by minimal? The PrintScrn key opens the screenshot utility, which lets you choose between capturing a selected region, a specific window, or the whole display
4. What’s wrong with the file manager and editor? You can use whatever editor and file manager you want, so that shouldn’t be a blocker for daily use.
5. This can be configured in the cosmic comp config, but will be implemented in the settings app soon.
6. Super+W opens the workspaces view
7. Your distribution should make sure pop-launcher is installed, and each of its plugins symlinked.
8. That is already possible in the Desktop and Panel settings page. As you can see, I’m not using a GNOME style panel or dock here.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

The editor is meant to be a regular text editor. If you want a code editor, there is lapce.dev

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

Wayland compositors have to implement the whole display server, including special handling of XWayland windows. XWayland windows can be very finicky and require caution to handle.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

That’s already happening

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

Static linking is not an issue. Binaries may require more space on disk, but the benefit is that they are self-contained, portable, with excellent performance, and low memory usage. Binaries are compiled with LTO, so unused functions are stripped from the binary. What remains is highly optimized to that application’s use cases.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

I assume you meant Pop!_OS instead of COSMIC. Pop!_OS 24.04 will be based on Ubuntu 24.04.

mmstick OP , 3 months ago

I’d search pop-os/cosmic-store. That is the GitHub namespace for it.

mmstick OP , 2 months ago

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a cosmic-applets-community package which bundles third party applets, or the gradual inclusion of popular applets into cosmic-applets. Given that an applet would only become popular if there’s a lot of need for those use cases, then it would make sense to open a path to getting them mainlined.

mmstick OP , 2 months ago

You might be surprised how much disk space those GNOME Circle applications actually require, despite being dynamically linked to a lot of GTK/GNOME libraries. Unless they’re written in a scripting language, they’re much closer to a COSMIC application than you think.

• flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.TwentyFortyEight 12 MB
• flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Reversi 12 MB
• flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.NetworkDisplays 13 MB
• flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.eog 12 MB
• flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Photos 29 MB
• flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Notes 12 MB
• flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gedit 20 MB
• flathub.org/apps/app.drey.Warp 22 MB
• flathub.org/apps/com.github.flxzt.rnote 41 MB
• flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.news_flash.NewsFlash 42 MB

I don’t see the issue with an application having a static binary within the realm of 15-25 MB. Even if you had 100 applications installed, that’s only 2 GB of disk usage.

mmstick , 4 months ago

Try out COSMIC with the NVIDIA 550 beta driver.

mmstick , 4 months ago

Then have fun with your bad experience. NVIDIA is working quite well in Wayland on COSMIC.

mmstick , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

What makes you think I’m “salty”? I’m not the one complaining about NVIDIA not working in Wayland, or saying that I’m going to sell my GPU.

The only person who is salty is the one who would rather sell their GPU than use a Wayland desktop environment that supports NVIDIA as a first class citizen.

mmstick , 4 months ago

It already supports VRR and DRM leasing. VRR monitors and VR headsets have been tested.

mmstick OP , 5 months ago

It would certainly be easier for them to port COSMIC because there are very few dependencies on shared C libraries. Cargo links all Rust libraries statically, so it’s easier to maintain and update components. This will depend how open they are to accepting Cargo and Rust into their ecosystems.

mmstick OP , 5 months ago

The GTK4 project was cancelled for multiple reasons. We originally began working on Relm4 to use GTK4 for COSMIC applets. While others on the team were also experimenting with alternative Rust GUI libraries.

It required a lot of effort to patch GTK4 to support the Wayland layer shell protocol. Getting those patches merged into GTK4 was also taking a much longer time. There were long delays between code reviews; and they also wanted a series of much larger refactoring changes to be made to GTK4 before exposing the layer shell feature. It was much easier to get layer-shell working with iced, as it is a much leaner and concise code base.

GTK does not support fractional scaling, which is something we want our applets to support on day one. This was one of our major concerns. A concern that didn’t apply to iced.

It was also exceedingly difficult to create custom widgets with GTK in Rust. Even those of us with years of experience considered it to be unreasonably difficult. So it was not feasible to expect new hires on the team to be able to comfortably develop COSMIC components with it. In comparison, our team was able to develop custom widgets with iced with much less effort and with greater flexibility, so the demand for iced grew stronger.

At the end of the day, GTK is not a Rust toolkit, and its API is cumbersome to adapt to Rust. Use of GTK would always be a compromise that lessens the developer experience for COSMIC app and applet development. A compromise that would eventually require us to rewrite everything in a native Rust GUI library the moment it would become possible to do so.

Since we are developing a desktop environment from the ground up anyway, we decided that there would be much more value for our time if we contribute to the Rust ecosystem and utilize iced to make a fully featured GUI library for application development.

mmstick OP , 5 months ago

We will be adding integrations to our theme engine to automatically generate themes for GTK3, GTK4, and libadwaita.

mmstick OP , 4 months ago

Translation: no one should ever attempt to innovate on the Linux desktop. GNOME is the epitome of software development and everyone else should quietly give up. If GNOME can’t fix an issue, no one can. Only GNOME has the god-given right to make decisions on how desktops are developed for Linux. There can only be one party. The One Desktop principle. Contribute to your party leader, or else…