A few months ago, System76 announced that they would be developing a new desktop environment based on the Rust programming language called COSMIC.
Their idea is to create a desktop environment that is similar to the one that is currently available for the Pop!_OS operating system, but with a different focus.
System76’s objective is to create something that is faster, more customizable, and free of the limitations of the GNOME desktop environment, and let’s face it, we’re all curious how this desktop will look.
This post will explore how this new desktop environment is shaping up.
There’s not a ton to see here yet, and it’s clearly very early days. Still, it’s interesting to see the beginnings.
One of the BLT comments said they wanted to make this DE available for other projects. I’m going to skip discussion of design, implementation, and portability. What I do hope for is this puts focus on making every single DE a one click drop in option for every distribution. While this may be the case generally to a large degree it’s not 100% and can cause user uncertainty and anxiety. Removing that anxiety and the 1001 headaches and support tickets which get generated would be very good.
One parting comment is they seem to be focusing on the coherency of the design throughout all parts of the DE. That’s good. Again, it reduces end user frustration and friction.
So what’s the feminist angle on this? Well…
Hah hah. Had you going there.
Actually, a feminist take on UIs would likely be a welcome talking point. To the best of my knowledge, the last 30ish years of current WIMP and spatial metaphors have generally come from male dominated areas. I’m sure there’s lots of areas that could be improved (or at least considered) by a constructive critique from a feminist viewpoint.
I anticipate that there’s more direct and immediate benefit to be had from critiquing the hardware the software runs on, given articles I’ve read pointing out how little consideration goes into things like “with the average woman being shorter and with smaller hands than the average man, is this product comfortable/practical to use as envisioned?” but I would definitely be curious to see such critiques.
Every 10 years there is a worldwide survey of people. Every single conceivable measurement of the human body is collected and analysed. I forget the nae of the book but a copy would set you back around £4000. It’s usually universities and healthcare systems and clothing and car manufacturers and various consultants who buy this book. Why? People change and populations and demographics change. This data is used to gauge everything from the width of a car seat to clothing sizes.
I had an idea yesterday to rattle off a post discussing bra purchasing. I’ve been looking into this and there’s quite a lot behind the subject. The reason for considering this as a topic is in the tech world you have tech specifications and methodologies coming out of your ears. It’s pretty much absent in the clothing or beauty industry. The point being to expand discussion on management and communication and the balance of attention paid to human rights and equality and end user satisfaction.
Bras are designed around the reference point of a classic breast shape. However, all women are different and come in all shapes and sizes. There’s a number of different types. Different bras cover different types. I can wear a full cup to balcony to plunge and, depending on the fit, a side support bra. (Every man in this forums asks what is a side support bra and what does it do? In simple terms it stops overspill and throws all the blubber forwards providing more fullness and uplift. A push up is something else.) I now have a far better understanding of what to buy and why and it all makes sense now when before it was a bit of a throw spaghetti at the wall kind of thing.
As pieces of engineering bras can be incredibly complex and use many different materials. Some parts stretch while other parts don’t. Some parts are structural while other parts can be aesthetic. To a man a bra is just a bra but, like, who has to wear the thing? I care as much or more about this than men care about gamer chairs.
The military have done research into bullet proof vests. Men tend to be shaped like a cylinder and the default design followed this model. Women’s bullet proof vests used the same pattern only smaller. This caused all manner off fit problems with bullet proof vests digging in where they shouldn’t. Now the military are taking this on board but the pace of change varies and varies from place to place. It is annoying to say the least. I bet if Mr I’m Alright Jack had his rifle jam at the wrong time and wrong place it would be fixed sharpish. But this wouldn’t happen because they run extensive tests in multiple rounds years ahead. Not a peep out of them when women have been complaining for years about ill fitting equipment. Okay, this is changing now but you get the point.
There’s actually an AR-15 marketed for women in the US. I read up on this and the specification is actually very good and actually the first choice of men who know about these things. It’s just most men in the market would, I guess, go for longer barrels just because and this particular rifle is sold in pink. I joke not.
On to less alarming things I’m fine with my full sized illuminated keyboard. The relatively low quality laser etching which is standard today instead of solid embossing can wear off. I don’t have long nails but they can be longer and my keyboard has worn. Not happy so I may buy a quiet MX keyboard next if I can find one which has decent volume controls and doesn’t have designed for macho gamers or hipsters plastered all over it.
That doesn’t surprise me. The articles I’m remembering were along the lines of “A smartphone is something we spend a ton of time using every day, so why are their designs skewing toward the biometrics of one half of the population as badly as bulletproof vests are?”.
Here in Canada, there’s a variant of the Benchmark Retract-A-Bit screwdriver sold in pink… apparently with the explicit intent of keeping the men in the house from wandering off with it.
Have you considered just mapping global hotkeys for volume control to Win+something so you can use any standard layout and let other design concerns drive your purchasing decisions?
I can attest to how much easier it makes it to find a keyboard meeting my specifications. (Heck, without it, I wouldn’t have wound up going for a Unicomp board with buckling spring switches to get my clicky, tactile fix.)
Yes and don’t forget blind people! The urge to put flat screens on everything and do away with buttons on domestic appliances is causing havoc. Blind people also like phones with real buttons and keyboards. I understand screen readers and web page accessibiity are another barrel of laughs.
Hah hah. Yes! It doesn’t surprise me.
I like the volume buttons on my keyboard. I can find them easily and easily press mute if need be without hunting for it. I’m fine with my Logitech Illuminated Keyboard only fed up with keys wearing and I have run out of spares. I’m thinking an MX keyboard gives me options and the quieter springs with or without modification may be okay.
I do have a view which is more in the direction of questioning arbitrary leadership and emotional labour effecting end users. I have problems with the linearity of things and the various weights and biases effecting processing from conception to completion.
On a completely unrelated note I had a phone call with a woman in a management position today to resolve some problems caused by similar issues in an administrative and other specialist domain context. Thankfully we did resolve things. It’s not a conversation I could have had with a man. There’s things which men simply don’t get and in some work environments and professions that can be pretty terrible. I’m as frustrated as anyone that women’s IT conferences don’t discuss tech or women advancing novel ideas and producing good implementations and from time to time specific products which solve problems for women. They almost always turn into a group hug. “Menopause and C++”. Okay, no I’m being fallacious but menopause and various deep sighs over institutional blockheadedness did come up during our conversation. I’ also frustrated with media treatment of professional women and journalists manipulating conversation around to relationships and emotional drama which suckers women every time instead of discussing professional achievements and the technical qualities of women’s work. Even my eyes glaze over when reading this. I expect men yawn and turn the page which adds to women being written out of history and every an going “but what have women done?” *facedesk*
I’m deliberately staying away from discussing the design issues but I do think DE environments could accommodate women more. The defaults for Linux Mint are too monochromatic and rigid for me. That’s not to say I want everything pink and flowery, I said looking at a pink cigarette lighter on my desk and two vases of flowers in eyeline and a pink desktop background and pink controls… It’s the next level up technically and requires more diversity of artistic input but I think there’s some space to make interfaces more individual without breaking the model and ensuring they are usable for everyone else if they were plonked in from of it. It may be the functional and templating mechanisms are there and there is a space for discussion and experimentation to explore what is possible. There’s probably a million things I haven’t thought of. Scripting and configuration files are another thing which is a long standing complaint with Linux but other systems too. It tends to favour technocratic men but for women breaks practicality and lands us up to our neck in situations we need to be able to back out of. It’s fine when everything works. It’s not fine when something breaks.
Another thing men don’t get is one negative interaction experience with a jerk can lead to days of emotional turmoil and impact negatively on getting work done. Why? In simple terms there’s a difference between white and grey matter but it’s deeper than that. Men tend to get caught up in their focus and linear rulesets and immediate peer group. Women tend to be concerned more about the whole problem which includes different factors men may exclude and relations and autobiographical histories and worrying about end points. There’s loads of science and women’s commentary on this and the public policy development arena and media aren’t too great with covering it in the most useful way. Actually, there’s terrible but you do get the one in a hundred article which is very on point and informative even if nobody with less than a PhD bothers to read it.
While exclusionary to a degree (if only because of the name “feminist” and omg “female things” omg omg) feminist economics gets to the heart of some issues which also effect men. Authoritarian one size fits all we know what is good for you take it or leave it environments are as unhealthy for men as well as women. Impossible to use interfaces and dark patters and bad ergonomics are bad for men too as well as women. Yes women can drive and have cars too and a bad tyre design can cause problems for women as well as men. Yes the reasons can be different and the situations and risks and consequences be different which tips us into gender economics but a duff tyre is still a duff tyre.
That’s a high level simplistic view. It can get more complicated than that but that’s simply because some decisions are multivariate not univariate and the stack of bellcurves and edge cases are different from case to case but that’s life anyway.
That post was longer than planned…
*chuckle* And that contrast between my comment and yours is a perfect example of why it’s so important.
I was so fixated on “product and end users” that I didn’t put any thought into “process” or “developers”, let alone the nuances within what I was focused on… I suppose that makes sense, given that I’m on the autism spectrum and one of the old ideas about “Asperger’s syndrome” was the theory of the hyper-male brain. (It does make me wonder how much “computer-fixated aspies gravitate toward tech because it’s easier to understand than people” has hurt us overall.)
I think that’s fair comment. I’m aware of the issues surrounding autism and aspergers and the history of diagnosis and medical gender biases but by no means have expertise in this area. UK police now have guidelines for interviewing people as witnesses with autism which I believe may be a useful model when dealing with people who have suffered trauma and discrimination. Lawyers should get the “with regard to” comment and its usefulness in the absence of any specific and formal guidance in other contexts, or perhaps even ordinary workplace or customer orientated situations.
I think you show a fair degree of awareness and self awareness with respect to identifying why you entered the field and the potential pitfalls and consequences of this. But having identified this and being aware you are in a position to carry discussion forward and identify other avenues and safe spaces for people with similar conditions to find productive careers and life opportunities.
Lots of none autistic people are fixated on authorities and processes and they completely forget customer experience and outcomes so you’re not alone!
True, I suppose, but with UI/UX being my area of interest, though not currently my area of employment, that’s sort of the bare minimum that should be expected of me… not really something particularly praise-worthy.
Well, we can’t always think of everything. Sometimes discussing things with other people can help a penny drop.It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to mention it in conversation although like yourself, on reflection, think it should given past work and interests in this area but this is how we learn and allow creativity to grow so it’s all good.
I have some work to do after discussing things with the other lady today so need to get on with that. That’s taking up my time now having left technology behind.
…as for this:
My first impulse would be to experiment with building something in the vein of Paletton into the control panel, making it easy for users to customize the color scheme but hard to step outside what the computer can use color theory to verify as meeting accessibility requirements should someone else sit down at the machine.
(i.e. A color picker that makes it easy to start from and choose between color relationships like monochromatic, adjacent, triad, tetrad, etc. and then easily experiment with fine-tuning them while the computer will uphold the relationships that make them feel good and stay sufficiently contrasting for accessibility. Thus avoiding what Windows 3.1 and MySpace became.)
I’m not expert enough to comment but have learned a little about colour theory. I really wouldn’t know how to manage this and my artistic skills aren’t good enough to make use of it. I think you do have a point though about bad colour choices! I’m sure there are many heuristics to chose from as there are colour looks!
Paletton is very much a tool for designers, but I was more focused on how it lets you organically play with the underlying relationships by draging handles and watching the preview change in real time, while equations based on color theory substitute for you having to manually keep the colors harmonious and maintain text contrast.
I think that could work very nicely if the preview that was changing in real time was a sample window similar to the previews in KDE’s Application Style and Colors control panels.
(Analogous to what Paletton gives you if you click the “Examples…” button, but changing in real time.)
I just had a look. I think I used Paletton a few years ago when I was learning about colour models for photography. I have no expertise or eye for this with photography. I just know the expertise baked into old school film and with now the digital equivalent is really quite a thing. Good photographers and cinematographers can really work magic. I can only speculate about how top artists could contribute to things or what standard looks they might design to use with a system like you propose.
I can barely grasp colour and texture and fabrics but know that good designers can make choices which really lift the quality. I’m wearing a satin shirt today in just the right colour of wine red. The saturation makes all the difference. Well, there’s lots of other details too but the underlying factory gate materials cost is likely not over £5-10. Good design choices make it a premium item.
In what way are women different from non-technocratic men in the issue of configuration files. There are valid complaints against Linux but I don´t think the difference is men vs women but tech savy vs ordinary folk.
Cluestick: structural discrimination.
jgfenix,
That’s what I was thinking. I don’t see how the suggestion isn’t insulting to women. What exactly does a woman targeted configuration file look like anyways? And how would that work? “Apache, download the woman version here”.
That’s a complete different issue. The easy-to-use of a product is tangential to the fact that the community around that product is discriminatory. A file format is nit sexist.
The whole article is basically comparing the look of the current DE with the new DE, the whole Rust gimmick doesn’t really matter, as well as anything else in the blurb. It’s just a visual comparison.
One question that remains unanswered is: If this new DE becomes popular, what prevents other OEMs from taking the code for $0 and offering the same product System76 does, minus the R&D costs?
Google can afford to open-source their OS because they make money from the proprietary GMS and use it as a differentiator, what is System76’s plan?
So far, I get the sense they might be treating it as a necessary cost of business, a continuation of the patching/extension-ing they were already doing to GNOME, and not something they’re concerned about because their money-maker is the tested-to-work integration of the components, not the bits and pieces they had to write to achieve it.
There’s a lot of value in that and those design skills and experience may not come cheap or easy. anyone can push out a “looks like item” and they be sufficient but not necessarily in other areas which matter and likely not replicable for future projects. This is another area where they create perceived brand value and customer loyalty.
There’s a whole body of case law in this area especially in UK contract law mostly catering to the finance area which is a very niche and expensive area of law. You can also buy books on this stuff and there’s some economic theory covering it. I know some developers and game developers have mentioned it in the past too. In fact any R&D and academic area and any area relying on building institutional expertise will recognise this: once you break up a team it can be very difficult to recapture this. German universities who used to be the world number one in their fields to this day are still recovering from the destruction caused during the Nazi era.
Which is the problem here. Linux on the Desktop, due to its eternal “80% done” nature, needs a non-trivial amount of R&D input to be sellable with hardware. but then any other OEM can take the fruits of that R&D for free and make clone hardware.
At this point, the only hope for Desktop Linux is Valve (see Steam Deck), since Valve can keep Steam as a proprietary value-add while subsidizing Desktop Linux as a hedge against the Microsoft Store (just in case Microsoft gets their act together and stops treating the Store as an uncurated passive income source).
Generally, hardware vendors don’t do well with open source in the consumer space (see Nokia), but companies offering online services do.
Or, it could end up like Unity.
Canonical spent a significant amount of resources to replace Gnome with their own environment. Turns out even a billionaire cannot sometimes get things done. To be fair, I don’t think it was ever liked by most of the users. I particularly wanted to go back to Gnome.
This is the problem of trying to differentiate a Linux distribution by their desktop environment. If it is a “skin” on Gnome, KDE, or XFCE, it will be copied. If it is a separate DE, it will either die, waste a lot of resources trying to keep up, or will again be copied.
And System76 is trying to integrate their own hardware, Linux distribution, and the DE. That is even bolder. And as you mentioned it can potentially be copied with ease. Even if Dell does not do it, any user take this work, and install it on a their own machine.
One way that is successful, is locking down services. Synology does this. Even though the OS is open source, and can be booted on commodity hardware, it will be restricted from the full feature set: https://xpenology.org/
A bit off-topic on my side, but whatever:
The problem with Unity is that they tried to randomly copy things from OS X which just didn’t fit. The global menu bar was such a case: GTK allows multiple menu bars per app (a main menu bar and one per window) like Windows does, while Mac OS X only allows one main menu bar. This restriction is what allows OS X to have a global menu bar btw. When the Unity people tried to copy OS X’s global menu bar, on applications with multiple menu bars they had to overlay the window menu bar on top of the main menu bar using a weird fade effect. Also, if a single window inside the app had a menu bar, it became the main menu bar of the application, because global menu bar duh. Reversing the window controls from top-right to top-left was another thing badly copied from OS X.
I liked the Unity dock and the theme (although I didn’t like the fact the dock didn’t offer any UI-centric way of creating launchers for apps that didn’t have their own .desktop file, but neither GNOME does). Actually, I am happy the good parts of Unity made it into Canonical’s Gnome skin.
However, the biggest controversy with Unity was: Why is Canonical spending money on this when Desktop Linux needs more urgent help in other areas? Answer: Because Mark Shuttleworth wanted it. Unity is what you get when you have a billionaire dude with a severe case of Steve Jobs envy who doesn’t know crap about the underlying technical details.
Although the real money waste happened in Mir. Which was the result of Mark Shuttleworth getting Steve Jobs envy in the smartphone space this time.
Also, if a single window inside the app had a menu bar, it became the main menu bar of the application = Also, if a single window inside the app had a menu bar and the application didn’t have a main menu bar, the window menu bar became the main menu bar of the application
(that wasn’t easy to explain, sorry)
> One way that is successful, is locking down services. Synology does this. Even though the OS is open source, and can be booted on commodity hardware, it will be restricted from the full feature set: https://xpenology.org/
How does this happen exactly? An open source OS can be ported to support everything.
Yes, someone determined can support everything, but as Canonical has shown, it is not easy, even is you have money.
The issue is of course, finding a viable service which System76 can do better than the competition.
Ironically, Ubuntu has that for the server space. Even though their enterprise tools like MAAS are available freely, you need to buy an expensive subscription for the full functionality.
I suppose in the same way that people using CentOS benefited Red Hat. People gets used to their product instead of using a competing design.
Considering the recent Log4j incidents were basically the result of building on top of things that were never contributed back down to, I’d be really interested how System76 are contributing back down the dependancy chain as part of this (if indeed they are!)
I don´t think that using GTK is a good idea. They have stated that they don´t care about anything that is not GNOME and they don´t care about backwards compatibility.
Also my greatest grip with all these DEs is the coupling between DEs and the SDKs for writting applications.