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I’ve been following the work on COSMIC (though not super actively) and I keep on saying that I like what I’m seeing because, well, I do! The idea of a tiling DE is a very exciting one and COSMIC really has the potential to become a Major Linux DE.
I particularly like that, just like their current Gnome extension, it supports both tiling and floating, with a quick toggle between them.
This’ll be a pretty interesting year for people interested in DEs.
As a regular i3 user, I was very satisfied on how tiling was implemented into the Pop shell of Gnome. After a few keybind change here and there it almost felt like home maneuvering the windows and workspaces. One minor complain is glitches happen when external monitor is connected/disconnected on the fly (laptop usecase), in which case windows are disoriented and thrown around at random unexpected places instead of staying at where they were. I’m blaming Gnome on that one however, since I’m assuming it is related on how Gnome handle multiple screens and Pop shell act on top of it, so I’m expecting it to be fixed in Cosmic DE
Yeah, I’m a Pop user and like what they do with Gnome now. I can’t wait to see what it’s like when the desktop isn’t limited by the Gnome extension system.
I’m just happy there’s a rust DE being written in slint. KDE is nice and all, but it’s all C++. No way am I touching that trainwreck of a language again.
I’ve been following Cosmic and really looking forward to it. I love the idea of a Gnome-like desktop without Gnome-like design decisions.
Incredibly excited to try it. I love the early support for Nix, I plan to run it as soon as a NixOS module becomes available!
Huge props to the design team here, the aesthetic looks amazing on all of the apps I’ve tried. They all feel consistent and look great.
[cosmic-randr] uses the wlr output configuration Wayland protocols.
Does this mean cosmic-randr should work on other compositors that support the wlr output configuration protocol (e.g. sway, hyprland, river, …)? It’s great to see cosmic adopting existing protocols, instead of compositor specific protocols (or worse, no external app support at all).
Also, it’s great how portable Cosmic DE seems to be, as it’s already mostly packaged on NixOS. On first look, cosmic-term seems to be a quick terminal so I might switch to it, as well as cosmic-files.
If they support the wlr output configuration protocols, then yes it’ll work fine. There are some more advanced features that we want that aren’t supported by the protocol though, so we will likely develop some cosmic protocol extensions for those features.
It doesn’t use GTK does it?
No, we have been making our own platform toolkit (libcosmic), which is built upon iced-rs. We are using this both for our wayland compositor applets, and our desktop applications.
Beautiful, so there’s a good chance for it to not be a hot mess! Looking forward to it. 😊
iced? Interesting. I though it’s still pretty experimental. There’s no official documentation yet, right? When I was looking at Rust UI libraries Yew and Leptos looked more mature. I guess you’re confident iced have enough backing and isn’t going anywhere.
How do you find working in Rust on a bigger UI project? Any issues?
Iced is a lower level GUI library, similar to what GDK is to GTK. We built our own COSMIC-themed GUI toolkit around iced, which is called libcosmic. As we’ve gotten more and more widgets and application logic developed, actual application development with libcosmic is a breeze. Even if you do have to create a custom widget, it’s much easier to creating custom widgets in GTK. We’re able to develop much faster than we ever could with GTK now.
Yew and Leptos aren’t comparable since they’re not native GUI toolkits. These are for web developers rather than application development. It wouldn’t be possible to use this for developing layer shell applets for COSMIC, either.
This sounds really cool. I don’t see any documentation for libcosmic. Are you planning to promote it as an alternative toolkit for building desktop apps or do you see it more as an internal tool strictly for COSMIC DE development?
As of today, https://pop-os.github.io/libcosmic/cosmic/ is now available.
You can generate documentation by running
cargo docand browsing the generated web pages intarget/doc. There are also examples in the examples directory of libcosmic, as well as a design demo example which is a WIP.libcosmic is an alternative toolkit for building desktop applications and layer shell applets. It wouldn’t make much sense to build a toolkit only for ourselves. It’s the best way to develop layer shell applets for COSMIC, and other Wayland compositors that support the layer shell protocol.
Why develop libcosmic around iced instead of going with something else modern that’s easy to develop in such as Flutter? Iced/libcosmic is probably a bit more efficient resource-wise but that probably wasn’t a huge point.
I’m really excited to test the Alpha, it’s looking really good so far!
Tldr: New desktop environment designed for PopOS (but usable elsewhere)
I recognize this is an odd comment to make, but I’m glad to see this screenshot tool supports capturing a window in Wayland. My next question is, can the screenshot tool be invoked from the command-line or via a script?
That is like Elementary OS approach, some default apps have own unique UI, but all other apps have other UI, which makes entire os to look indeed inconsistent, while trying otherwise.
I’m not sure why you think this is unique to COSMIC or elementary OS. Do you not realize that this is true of all operating systems? Look at Steam, Spotify, Discord, Zoom, and Slack for starters.
I can look into GNOME or KDE, they both will look more consistent, than Elementary OS if user has some bigger demand of apps. Elementary even have own software center with some more apps with default elementary look, if user is OK with that limited amount of apps it could look nice… With Cosmic, the choice is none, some rare apps will be cosmic, others won’t be at all, it always will look inconsistent?
None of what you stated makes sense. Most people are not using exclusively GNOME applications on GNOME, or exclusively KDE applications on KDE. Like with elementary OS, most people are running applications like Steam, Spotify, Discord, Zoom, Slack, etc. Plenty of people are using Qt and KDE applications on GNOME, or GTK and GNOME applications on KDE. You think no one uses Krita or Scribus on GNOME, or GIMP on KDE?
Thanks to Flatpak, you might even be running elementary applications on your system. Even Windows back in the late 90s and 2000s was full of desktop applications with custom proprietary interfaces. Nowadays everything’s becoming a web view bundled with a Chromium runtime, and you’re more worried about a COSMIC app ecosystem having a different UI from GTK?
COSMIC is a good thing because it’s a standardized and open source cross-platform native desktop toolkit. People can create themes for it, and those themes can be bundled alongside GTK and Qt/KDE themes. Due to the nature of how Rust libraries are developed and linked, COSMIC applications are mostly statically-linked, which even makes it trivial to put them on a USB drive and bring them to any PC.
I use GNOME and I prefer all app to look same. Sure there are some apps, that wont look same, but how many? 5 of 100? I am fine with this. 70 of 100? I should switch to KDE maybe? 40 of 100?That is bad. Which would be if I use Cosmic? Probably 40 of 100?
Anyway. People mostly do not care at all, so I think Cosmic will be usefull for people and be fine.
That’s already not possible on GNOME because some GNOME applications hardcode their theme, others use libadwaita, some use GTK4 without libadwaita, some use GTK3, and there may still be a GTK2 app lingering around here and there in the repos (ie: GIMP).
Few people are going to care that there’s a GTK application installed on their COSMIC desktop. COSMIC will automatically generate GTK3/4 themes to match the system theme. We may even automatically generate a libadwaita theme, so it will look “same enough”.
Sounds cool. Thanks for your time, I’ll definitely check Cosmic out when it is ready.
Why do we invent new DEs instead of making proper settings app in already existing ones?
Because that’s not how software development works, and that’s not how you make progress in the field. In order for our technical vision to be integrated with an existing desktop, such as GNOME, it would have required that they give us the reigns to their project to delete their entire codebase and rebuild it into exactly what you see today in COSMIC.
As in life, sometimes you’ve got to demolish, pave, and build better foundations. There’s a lot of cool technologies available to build a truly next-generation desktop experience in, but you’re not going to get it through rigid bureaucracy and old tools. With COSMIC, we’ve got freedom to make decisions and build something truly unique, and we’re using our talent to show you what we can do.
Well said. I’m nervous and excited to see what this turns in to. Pop is my daily driver and has been for years. I’m excited to see all this progress.
If you will create “next gen” desktop, you will just solve some problems of already existing ones and create your own. Maturity of software is far more important, than uniqueness. GNOME didn’t evolve into its current state for no reason.
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…
Sometimes it’s easier to start over than unbreak an existing project. Gnome is old and big so it’s harder to change. So starting over where you don’t have to keep existing features or care about existing users is way easier than fixing gnome and rewriting it in rust. Plus system 76 can. There’s no single party that can stop them from making a desktop
We do what we must because we can.
FOSS software development is very much like evolution. Many projects are born but only the best thrive. It is a wasteful system because resources are spread over similar projects, but it creates very good software.
Not really. Best Foss projects do not always thrive. Git wasn’t really better than mercurial. But it had happened to be published earlier, so it got wider adoption.
It doesn’t have to be the best, it just has to be better than the current standard. Git was better than CVS and SVN, so it won.
Welcome to FOSS lol
Because some developers act on their own consciousness and don’t have a slavemaster corporate manager telling them what they need to do or not do.
When one doesn’t like any of the available choices yet a new one is born. Can you measure how many v.terminals we have, or how many window managers on X11?
Fortunately such “new choices” get abandoned very quickly. Making new solution instead of improving existing ones is counterproductive. Unless there is a large legacy codebase. Smart people have invented Unix principles to avoid that.
