System76, the premiere Linux computer manufacturer and creator of the COSMIC desktop environment, has updated COSMIC’s Alpha release to Alpha 2. The latest release includes more Settings pages, the bulk of functionality for COSMIC Files, highly requested window management features, and considerable infrastructure work for screen reader support, as well as some notable bug fixes.
↫ system76’s blog
The pace of development for COSMIC remains solid, even after the first alpha release. This second alpha keeps adding a lot of things considered basic for any desktop environment, such as settings panels for power and battery, sounds, displays, and many more. It also brings window management support for focus follows cursor and cursor follows focus, which will surely please the very specific, small slice of people who swear by those. Also, you can now disable the super key.
A major new feature that I’m personally very happy about is the “adjust density” feature. COSMIC will allow you to adjust the spacing between the various user interface elements so you can choose to squeeze more information on your screen, which is one of the major complaints I have about modern UI design in macOS, Windows, and GNOME. Being able to adjust this to your liking is incredibly welcome, especially combined with COSMIC’s ability to change from ’rounded’ UI elements to ‘square’ UI elements.
The file manager has also been vastly, vastly improved, tons of bugs were fixed, and much, much more. It seems COSMIC is on the right path, and I can’t wait to try out the first final result once it lands.
This all sounds great, I will be using Pop! as my main OS once Cosmic is out of Alpha I think. The only bit of software I might miss is Visual Studio, But I can run a VM for that I guess.
Interesting times ahead 🙂
Yes! Another GUI to add to the 100 we already have for the 1000 distros that we use!
This is actually not such a problem and choice is hence a good thing here, what is a slight problem, 100 Wayland display servers. Here we are really being as stupid as it gets. As for 1000 distros, this could be a problem but on the other hand it’s really not. That is nobody really cares if there are 1000 distros out there. From some commercial software point of view you target something like Ubuntu and maybe Fedora anyway so you don’t really care. And it’s not really all that hard to provide support for a handful of distros, once you support one. They are not inherently different so at best what you need is run a compiler a couple of times, instead of lets say once, basically a non issue. I do agree that distros should settle for some universal packaging format, to reduce the maintenance burden when it comes to packaging FOSS. I perceive COSMIC as a GNOME clone, said that they are making some sane choices and go against stupidity GNOME wanted to impose on GNU/Linux world, and luckily failed. So lets see if a clone can outdo the original. Beyond that any sane person in this day and age, going after a fully fledged desktop environment, IMHO uses KDE as nothing comes remotely close. Even outside GNU/Linux ecosystem.
As somebody that used KDE3, skipped 4 and 5, and is now typing this from KDE6, I guess I cannot really refute your last point–though I want to.
I think that COSMIC is more than a GNOME clone. I mean, it makes sense that System76 would create a gentle transition between their old desktop and the new and the old one was GNOME based. However, COSMIC is building the foundation for something that could be quite unique and that has a tonne of potential. For me, the boldest promise is a desktop environment that offers truly native experiences for both floating and tiling window fans.
It is very interesting that it looks like COSMIC is going to be the desktop environment for Redox as well. I do not think it is remotely a goal for them at this point but it would be interesting to have COSMIC available on a platform like Windows as well. Rust is very portable and the GUI toolkit they are using targets Windows, Mac, and even the web in addition to Linux. I would love to have the same desktop environment available across operating systems. The main reason I use different operating systems are the applications ( not the experience ). If I have a choice, I use Linux.
But the biggest departure from GNOME is likely to be philosophy and approach. The GNOME folks are very design driven. I respect their skills and commitment though I do not agree with all their choices. And with GNOME, keeping your from disagreeing with their choices is part of their ideological goal. They have a lot of the same “we should all just settle on one thing” philosophy that you espouse above. COSMIC on the other hand appears to want to very much accommodate reasonable preferences while not totally over-complicating or compromising on the experience for everybody. They are very pragmatic. As you say, they seem quite “sane”.
Of course choice is good, and I value that we have Mate or Cinnamon instead of Gnome or KDE, but it gets to a point where it is ridiculus. So much time wasted on the 1000+1 distro that does 99% de same as the others.
Desktop environments are actually rather distinctive and usually a new one is made that satisfies some need and to do things (slightly) differently. This is something Windows and macOS doesn’t have and it’s inherently a good thing to have and we can be lucky we have it on GNU/Linux. If there would be only one it would likely be bad anyway. Generally speaking. As for 1000+1 distros, who cares. It doesn’t really change much if we have 1000+1 or lets say 10 distros. What i am trying to say is what really is wasted effort is complaining there are 1000+1 distros out there. As said, who cares.
I don’t see how Cinnamon is sooo different from Budgie or from Mate with the Windows skin really. Can’t they just work together?
It’s like asking on why can’t all web browser projects just work together on Chrome.
Reminds me of how, during the “Clearlooks as default theme” era of GNOME, I was using a third-party theme named Clearlooks-Compact. Definitely welcome.
Meh… loks as flat as windows or OSX, so it is not for me.