As its first alpha release is closing in, we have another monthly update about COSMIC, System76’s new Linux desktop environment written in Rust. This month, they’ve further polished and shored up their application store, imaginatively named COSMIC App Store, and it’s supposedly incredibly fast – something I can’t say for its GNOME and KDE counterparts, which tend to be so slow I’ve always just defaulted to updating through the command line, mostly.
The file manager now has support for GVfs (GNOME Virtual file system) for making external storage like USB drives work properly, and Greeter login screen, Edit text editor, drag and drop, and copy/paste have been improved in various ways as well. Theming has seen a lot of work this month, with support for icon themes added to the App Library, fixed applet sizes, and more tweaks, while light themes have been disabled for now to fix a number of issues with colour selection being too dark.
There’s also display mirroring now, which even works when the individual displays have different resolutions, orientations, and refresh rates. Pop!_OS is now also being built for ARM64, which makes sense because System76 is now also selling ARM servers. There’s also a bunch of work being done by the community as the alpha release nears.
It will be geat to have another desktop to try out, but can someone tell me why there is so much padding in these interfaces? Gnome (of course), Windows 11, and now Cosmic (which looks very gnome-y)… What is the purpose of all the blank space and fat titlebars? I was playing around in PopOs last night – everything is huge on a 1920×1080 display compared with my XFCE desktop (and Win10 at work). It can’t be just because of high DPI screens because everyone is falling over themselves to develop desktop scaling, which will result in high pixel density with (still) huge screen elements.
I maybe wrong, but creating lots of empty space between objects is the only way to actually perceive it as being something else form one another when everything is the “plane” (no 3D), don’t have borders and the color palette is very low contrast.
I don’t know why this thing is perceived as “modern”. They are a accessibility and usability hellholes. Still… we keep moving further and further away for HIGs and standardized interfaces.