After two year of development, System76 has released the very first alpha of COSMIC, their new Rust-based desktop environment for Linux. This is an alpha release, so they make it clear there’s going to be bugs and that there’s a ton of missing features at this point.
As a whole, COSMIC is a comprehensive operating system GUI (graphical user interface) environment that features advanced functionality and a responsive design. Its modular architecture is specifically designed to facilitate the creation of unique, branded user experiences with ease.
↫ System76 website
Don’t read too much into “branded experience” here – it just means other Linux distributions can easily use their colours, branding, and panel configurations. The settings application is also entirely modular, so distributors can easily add additional panels, and replace things like the update panel with one that fits their package management system of choice. COSMIC also supports extensive theming, and if you’re wondering – yes, all of these are answers to the very reason COSMIC was made in the first place: GNOME’s restrictiveness.
There’s not much else to say here yet, since it’s an alpha release, but if you want to give it a go, the announcement post contains links to instructions for a variety of Linux distributions. COSMIC is also slowly making its way into Redox, the Rust-based operating system led by Jeremy Soller, a System76 employee.
I don’t mind any competition especially as I do not agree with all of Gnome’s decisions.
However, from the screen shots I do not see any USP or advantage and especially I miss a very traditional Left Side Vertical Panel. Without that I would stick with XFCE + Gnome Components + “Adwaida without Adwaida” and “Tokyo At Night GTK Theme” (no rounding corners) forever.
There’s one really big difference: Cosmic applications have consistent in-application menubars (File/Edit/View).
In Gnome, every application has its own set of menus, or none at all, and in each case they are identified by an unlabeled symbolic icon that can apparently be located anyplace in the headerbar — depending on whether the application houses tabs in the headerbar, like Gnome-software or System Monitor do. There is also no clear logic that describes why e.g. a location bar would be in the headerbar (as it is in Nautilus) or in a toolbar (as it is in File Roller).
And so Gnome applications have:
(a) very few menus, options, or tools which are also
(b) disorganized and therefore difficult to discover.
Addressing that issue alone would be huge.
Actually a strong argument, you are right. Thank you!
Finding commands in Nautilus alone is a night mare.
I mean, there are basically two tipe of desktops: windows 7/10, and MacOS. All the rest more or less resemble those. Do we really need 50 different UIs? Are the differences so big that we need to create a new DE each time a small thing is different than what I prefer? This is one of the things I like about MATE (GNOME2), you can set it up as Windows, as MacOS, and as other types.
> yes, all of these are answers to the very reason COSMIC was made in the first place: GNOME’s restrictiveness.
We will see! Because you also need content creators for all this flexibility.
There are currently maybe 4 people creating really high quality themes. Actual count is closer to 2 only.
Same people provide the KDE themes and there is not 1 single added/different KDE theme which was not available on Gnome (please proof me wrong). So who is going to build all those actually usable and high quality themes?
Mark my words: this thing won’t go very far.
Perhaps this is a trojan horse to allow Redox to infiltrate the Linux scene? Graphical shells for linux are a dime-a-dozen, but the possibility that this might be an elaborate scheme to destroy Linux from the inside makes COSMIC more interesting than most.
As for whether Redox, despite claiming all sorts of inspiration ranging from Plan 9 to Minix, is more than simply another Unix but written in Rust, is a whole other debate.
system76 would almost certainly go under before any of that happens.
Huh? Redox is trying to infiltrate Linux from the inside? WTF? Redox has nothing to do with Linux as it does not use the Linux kernel or even have a monolithic type kernel.
You uncovered System76’s 15 year plan to have one employee (in his free time) unseat Linux. #facepalm
Great to have more choice. It’s been a few years since we got a new major desktop environment.
Pop!_OS has been great for my wife’s computer even if it’s not for me. I hope that the resources are there and this does not become the next elementary os.
So, ran it as a test on my Lenovo X131E which is a relatively slow chromebook… results were.
b43 firmware was missing out of the box and I had to add it after that it was found.
Realtek HDA audio doesn’t work even though Linux itself does support this laptop (at least it did on Gentoo a few years ago). It appears I only have HDMI audio on Pop OS and I have not spent the braincells yet to figure out why it doesn’t show up properly. I did check the system with puavcontrol and coppwr.
Those are what I’d call major showstopper bugs for any non technical users which seems to be thier aim.
Now onto the UI… it seems a bit slower than expected but not slower than other modern alternatives I have seen I am sure its fast on modern hardware, but its very slow and laggy on old hardware.
The UI frankly still sucks… it has barely any of the ingrained muscle memory from conventional non mobile desktops. It’s very much still gnomeish (aka shitty). The tiling mode is not bad but also not good, EG window’s tiling mode these day via powertoys is actually better… why can I not have a running app list like every sane desktop has had for the last 20 years instead of getting a app launch dock. Why can I not have a regular menu… instead of a command launcher only. etc. etc… lots to do for them here before I can call this usable.
And I say all of that while keeping in mind that it is alpha and lots of stuff is understandably missing. Like hidden wifi networks but you can add them via nmcli/nmtui.
Also the have comitted the mortal sin of creating yet another toolkit… but if it becomes the dominant one I am ok with that. Especially if gnome just goes away slowly.
All in all despite the negative commentary I am making here I do find it interesting and a positive development in the landscape and hope they can take the criticism to heart so it can become software normal people can use out of the box.
The firmware and audio issues you flag are to do with the OS. I guess they are offering a PopOS alpha here as well but that was not really what is being showcased. PopOS must work better than that generally as I often see it promoted as an easy install to new users. On the OS front though, System76 is clearly “targeting” people that buy their hardware. I am quite confident that hardware will be well supported when any new users give it a go.
I am much more interested in COSMIC and it looks to be maturing nicely. I have built it before from the Arch repos ( AUR ) before but I could not find it this time. Perhaps somebody is building a binary so that it does not have to be built from source. That would be great.
I do wonder why their terminal sucks so bad when Alacritty exists and is VERY fast and is written in rust and is opengl accelerated. I installed Alacrity and it was night and day…. near instance typing vs like half a second lag on the stock terminal. On a modern machine you can probably still feel this… but Alacritty is fast even on 10+ year old hardware.
It is interesting on how in a way GNOME UX is copied, while being made from scratch, and at the same time better decisions are being made in regards to things like supporting tray icons, desktop themes and … As for some potential issues. Likely apps using iced GUI toolkit will be first class citizens on this DE and the rest to feel misplaced. Like when using GNOME and using a Qt app or using KDE with a GNOME app. Now hence iced apps to further stir the pot.
GNOME 3 has great ideas. It is the first “millennial” user interface designed around quick search.
But the elephant in the room is that it was also redesigned to avoid UI patents during the height of the patent war era. That means some good ideas that worked from the “generation x” interface era had to be thrown out and avoided altogether.
Microsoft looked at Gnome 2.x and ramped up hundreds of potential patent infringement lawsuits. This is easily verifiable in any search engine.
Since 2017, Microsoft has left the litigation space. The libre-desktop space is free to develop outside of a vacuum again.
GNOME should be looking at adding some of these useful features back. Desktop icons, tray icons, minimize button, etc.
I have no problem with GNOME. At almost 15 years old, the GNOME Shell layout is not a foreign concept and it’s my baseline from which all other desktops are compared now. But I use a few extensions to make it perfect.
I hope that you don’t actually believe in that BS. For removal of dual pane mode in file manager, tray area, desktop icons, general theming … had anything to do with that. GNOME folk did all that deliberately as they believed that should be done and they didn’t deal with constructive criticism all that well. Now, years after, i read they added a tray area extension, half working, to the list of their officially supported extensions. This is just beyond. Best to leave it to them, to sort it out in years to come, and till then to use KDE or similar instead. It’s the internal issues they need to sort out first and lets leave it to them.
I don’t have to believe it. It doesn’t even have to be true. All it would have taken is a court to rule in Microsoft’s favor in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s:
2007:
“In an unsettling story carried by Fortune over the weekend, Microsoft’s General Counsel claims that free and open-source software (FOSS) violates exactly 235 Microsoft patents: Linux kernel (42), Linux GUI (65), Open Office suite (45), email (15), and then another 68 patents violated across a variety of FOSS wares — the first time Microsoft has provided such specificity. Microsoft goes so far as to claim that that is the reason for open-source software’s high-quality. However, Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation and head of the Software Freedom Law Center, says that software is a mathematical algorithm which can not be patented and easily “invented around” — a case made even stronger last month by the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling undermining patent trolls. Still, FOSS allies such as Sony, Philips, Novell, Red Hat and NEC were already banded together under the Open Invention Network with their own collection of patents meant to protect themselves from the kind of litigious quagmire Microsoft seems poised to launch.” – Engadget, 2007
(https://www.engadget.com/2007-05-14-microsoft-linux-and-others-violate-235-of-our-patents.html)
“The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google (Charts, Fortune 500), Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore. ” – CNN Money, 2007
(https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm?section=money_latest)
Red Hat, which funds development of the Linux desktop, decided to go another direction with Gnome 3 to avoid lawsuit. And that is the desktop that exists today. (Also, in an era where Microsoft sued TomTom for FAT patent violations, even Google was avoiding Microsoft lawyers, which is also why you’ve never seen a Nexus or Pixel phone with removable media.)
That era was so stupid that somewhere, someone sued for rounded corners.
OF COURSE GNOME DEVS SEEMED STUBBORN AND UNWILLING TO LISTEN. They weren’t going to run out and publicly admit, “Oh yeah, we have to avoid xxx feature or redesign yyy feature to avoid patents” because that would be admitting that their previous software releases, with up to 10 years of support that were still in the wild, were infringing on Microsoft patents. RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 were still based on Gnome 2.x. Imagine the royalties Red Hat would have had to pay on all of those older but still supported software products if Microsoft lawyers could cite a single Red Hat employee admitting that they were infringing on patents.
In 2018, Microsoft single-handedly ended the patent wars era by donating their patents to the Open Innovation Network. (https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17959978/microsoft-makes-its-60000-patents-open-source-to-help-linux). So now Gnome is free to develop a desktop tray. Neat.
Enjoy KDE. They’ve largely avoided all of this by virtue of not being any enterprise desktop’s first choice for nearly two decades.
Some of us actually argued with GNOME devs, over removal of something or over some decision being made. It was never ever about patents it was always about their own belief and reluctance to listen or adapt to different opinions. In majority of discussions it was their way or the highway. That was the attitude. They couldn’t care less if they alienated their user base it got even so bad that in the end they alienated most of the hard core supporters. It’s their mess and they should IMHO resolve it internally. Before that best to leave them in their own bubble doing whatever they are doing. Luckily other desktop environments exist so we don’t have to actually live with this mess. Like for example on Windows, on where each and every Windows user actually has to put up with it. With UX delusions enforced by Windows devs.
I’m sorry but quick search is bad when its the only option… regular old menus are MANDATORY. Its also bad when the other optoins are second class citizens rather than presenting the user with an interface that does most things well rather than only half of what I need.