TLDR: System76, a company that makes a Linux distribution named Pop!_OS (currently using GNOME as its desktop environment) released the first alpha build of their COSMIC desktop environment. It's...
TLDR: System76, a company that makes a Linux distribution named Pop!_OS (currently using GNOME as its desktop environment) released the first alpha build of their COSMIC desktop environment. It's written in Rust and aims to be secure and performant, but also customizable.
Personally I'm excited to try it this weekend. Once this becomes stable I'll probably permanently switch to Pop!_OS.
I still feel like a relative Linux newbie, but I’ve been running Pop!_os as my daily driver for about a year now. I’m scared to try a change like this, but also excited! Luckily, I’m not doing...
I still feel like a relative Linux newbie, but I’ve been running Pop!_os as my daily driver for about a year now.
I’m scared to try a change like this, but also excited! Luckily, I’m not doing anything critical with my desktop this weekend, so I have time to recover if I bork something.
Switching desktops in linux isn't destructive, you don't have to worry. It's just a choice you make each time you log in. I've currently got both Gnome and KDE as login options on my Pop OS...
Switching desktops in linux isn't destructive, you don't have to worry. It's just a choice you make each time you log in. I've currently got both Gnome and KDE as login options on my Pop OS installation, and neither affected the other's settings or performance.
That is true, but in my experience installing a new desktop environment can change GTK and Qt themes, icons, fonts, etc. even on your old desktop environment, which can be jarring and difficult to...
That is true, but in my experience installing a new desktop environment can change GTK and Qt themes, icons, fonts, etc. even on your old desktop environment, which can be jarring and difficult to fix. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has gotten better since I last tried it, but it’s worth being aware of.
From my experience the only things I've seen like that were pretty obvious that they were going to happen in that context. Like for example, I mainly use the default Gnome desktop on that Pop OS...
From my experience the only things I've seen like that were pretty obvious that they were going to happen in that context. Like for example, I mainly use the default Gnome desktop on that Pop OS machine, but I also prefer to use the more feature-rich Dolphin file browser. After installing KDE as an alternate DE, I noticed that all my KDE-specific apps would have their appearances change even when I switched back to Gnome. But that made sense to me, because, well, duh.
I haven't had anything break as a result though, or anything get wonky to the point of needing a fix.
Make a virtual machine! That way your main system doesn't get changed at all, and if you get bored, you can just delete it. It does mean having to install it twice if you want to use it as your...
Make a virtual machine! That way your main system doesn't get changed at all, and if you get bored, you can just delete it. It does mean having to install it twice if you want to use it as your main DE (although I wouldn't recommend it until it hits 1.0).
I applaud the effort and I'm sure it'll be a great option for somebody, but personally speaking the direction they're going with their design and UX isn't really my cup of tea. Really none of the...
I applaud the effort and I'm sure it'll be a great option for somebody, but personally speaking the direction they're going with their design and UX isn't really my cup of tea. Really none of the current crop of DEs are, which makes for a bit of a grim picture if at any point I feel it necessary to switch to Linux full-time for personal usage.
You could eschew desktop environments entirely in favor of just a window manager (or "compositor" for Wayland) and whatever auxillary programs you need. Like I use Sway, which is the Wayland...
Like I use Sway, which is the Wayland version of i3, along with a bunch of individual programs to basically build my own desktop environment.
Going this route does involve spending time discovering programs, trying them out, configuring them to your liking, etc. What you end up with in the end though is a very custom-tailored system built just for you.
If you're interested, I remember these videos being a good, if lengthy, guide on getting started with i3:
I am eagerly waiting for Cosmic DE because I'm just tired of building my own environment with a bunch of tools that in the end are always the same. I think KDE and Gnome are too much and not...
I am eagerly waiting for Cosmic DE because I'm just tired of building my own environment with a bunch of tools that in the end are always the same.
I think KDE and Gnome are too much and not prioritize tiling first. KDE is awesome, but it has a lot of moving parts and in the end both feel slow for me.
Cosmic DE is exactly what I need. I can have everything those bunch of tools and scripts done for me and use my terminal applications tiled like I already use with river without needing do everything by hand. The biggest pain is writing your own waybar/yambar/whatever bar config. And if you want to change colorscheme you have to dig a bunch of config files and write everything by hand in every app that outputs color.
I've been doing this for my entire life using Linux, since with Slackware in the 2000s. Started with fluxbox, then openbox, dwm, bspwm, sway and now river. In the end you always end up using the same tools. It is very lightweight and customizable to an extent, but the customization options are not that diverse.
So I've been on this limbo between using Plasma for some time than going back to river. I have everything set up in river. Clipboard manager with cliphist + fuzzel, screenshot with grim + slurp + fuzzel, bar with waybar, automounting with udiskie, but it is a pain setting up the same things.
Cosmic DE seems to be doing everything right. I hope they don't expand too much to the point of becoming a behemoth.
I've played with building my own in the past but had a difficult time producing a result that I was happy with. It was an attention sponge of sorts, where I found myself endlessly tweaking to...
I've played with building my own in the past but had a difficult time producing a result that I was happy with. It was an attention sponge of sorts, where I found myself endlessly tweaking to ever-diminishing returns.
Part of the problem is that window managers are disproportionately tiling or tiling-first where I'm a solidly floating-first sort of user (I've tried, tiling just doesn't work). The other is that the Linux desktop space as a whole (DEs/WMs/compositors alike) has practically no offerings for building a more Mac-style desktop; they're all Windows-like (KDE, most other DEs/WMs), tablet OS like (GNOME, Pantheon), or minimalist tiling with hints of Windows.
My ideal Linux desktop would essentially be OS X 10.9 Mavericks with the virtual desktop implementation (2D grid) of OS X 10.5 Leopard, and it's not really possible to piece this together currently. One of these days I might just write such a DE myself, but this is a task that is not for the faint of heart, especially if you want to include Wayland compatibility (Xorg/xcb looks way easier to contend with, if quirky, for someone new to writing Linux desktop software).
Fluxbox and Openbox ought to have your back here. I've tinkered with both but realized that I prefer the tiling-first paradigm so I didn't dig too deep into them. Openbox is (was?) the base for...
Part of the problem is that window managers are disproportionately tiling or tiling-first where I'm a solidly floating-first sort of user
Fluxbox and Openbox ought to have your back here. I've tinkered with both but realized that I prefer the tiling-first paradigm so I didn't dig too deep into them. Openbox is (was?) the base for Crunchbang and its successors Crunchbang++ and BunsenLabs, which was performant and customizable while still looking good. I'm sure that you've tried Fluxbox and/or Openbox in the past, but I figured I'd mention them in case you hadn't or if someone else stumbles on this thread in the future.
The other is that the Linux desktop space as a whole (DEs/WMs/compositors alike) has practically no offerings for building a more Mac-style desktop;
I don't have enough macOS experience to get it completely right, but the default XFCE layout has a dock at the bottom and menu bars at the top. You could also try elementaryOS, as it's designed to be Mac-like and is probably the closest out of the box. I know Deepin and Zorin are supposed to have Mac modes but I haven't seen enough of those to know how they really stack up.
I feel you on that opinion. The default DE settings always seem to blow everything up in size with large spacing between each item and wasted screen real estate like it's made for your...
I feel you on that opinion. The default DE settings always seem to blow everything up in size with large spacing between each item and wasted screen real estate like it's made for your grandparents. Personally, I want a compact UI where there isn't so much spacing between everything. The rounded corners on everything also make it feel like a toy rather than a professional tool. I have no doubt settings can be tweaked or modified to accomplish that though. Regardless, I'm excited that that these DE continue to be developed and iterated on. I suspect some day when OSX has gone full bore enshitified, we'll all be grateful that these open source environments exist. Edit I should add, the work done on this DE is very impressive with no shortage of skill and effort put in. I'm excited to give it a spin.
I think whitespace and rounded corners are good in moderation. There’s a fine balance to it; sharp corners and no margins can make a UI feel old, overwhelming, low effort, and/or amateurish while...
I think whitespace and rounded corners are good in moderation. There’s a fine balance to it; sharp corners and no margins can make a UI feel old, overwhelming, low effort, and/or amateurish while too much rounding and padding lends to that “toy” feeling.
Nothing is perfect of course but I think Windows 7 and OS X 10.4-10.9 were as close to perfection as any desktop has been in these regards. They felt modern and welcoming while also having good information density and meeting power users’ needs reasonably well.
Plasma doesn't really fit these characteristics, though...? It's quite dense (almost to a fault), and I suppose it does have rounded corners but they're not as prevalent as in like, GNOME. It's...
Plasma doesn't really fit these characteristics, though...? It's quite dense (almost to a fault), and I suppose it does have rounded corners but they're not as prevalent as in like, GNOME. It's not perfect but it's the most comfortable modern environment I've found - I prefer it to Windows, nowadays.
Every new DE project I see makes me think one of two things, either "it looks like KDE but less flexible" or "it looks like Gnome but more cluttered" and neither of those things are particularly...
Every new DE project I see makes me think one of two things, either "it looks like KDE but less flexible" or "it looks like Gnome but more cluttered" and neither of those things are particularly appealing.
Personally I think Gnome Shell is nearly ideal and I have little interest in moving away from it to something less invisible. But it is good that people keep trying to make new and different things.
Currently Pop!OS comes with GNOME plus some customizations, and my understanding is that the choice to build their own DE from scratch was due to an inability to build functionality they wanted...
Currently Pop!OS comes with GNOME plus some customizations, and my understanding is that the choice to build their own DE from scratch was due to an inability to build functionality they wanted within GNOME. Probably they talk more about their reasoning in earlier blog posts about the decision.
If I recall, frustrations with GNOME and GTK pulling the rug out from under devs was also a factor. GNOME doesn’t have a stable extension API which means that extensions break and need fixing...
If I recall, frustrations with GNOME and GTK pulling the rug out from under devs was also a factor.
GNOME doesn’t have a stable extension API which means that extensions break and need fixing every update or two. GTK introduces major/breaking changes relatively frequently for a UI framework as old as it is.
The latter is really unfortunate, with GTK being the one of the two popular UI frameworks with C bindings (and thus, good compatibility with a wide range of languages). Qt is better in that it doesn’t break things as often, but being written in C++, it has far fewer high quality, up to date language bindings.
These are my thoughts exactly. The limitless potential of open source is clear in the window manager world, and I would love to see something new. For example, there are tiling window managers...
These are my thoughts exactly. The limitless potential of open source is clear in the window manager world, and I would love to see something new. For example, there are tiling window managers that automatically orient windows. Both gnome and KDE have plugins for this, but they kinda suck. A desktop environment made with non-floating window management in mind would be very new, and very cool.
Cool to see this in alpha. Cautiously optimistic about this as I'm always happy to see Pop!_OS succeeding. Personally not a fan of the UI/UX design here, at least whatever was visible in the...
Cool to see this in alpha. Cautiously optimistic about this as I'm always happy to see Pop!_OS succeeding. Personally not a fan of the UI/UX design here, at least whatever was visible in the screenshots. That being said, I wish them all the best, there is some stiff competition when it comes to Linux distro user interfaces.
I do a lot of "Linux" work in terms of cloud infrastructure config and a bunch of CLI stuff on my Mac, but I know very little about how desktop GUIs work in that world. Do specific applications...
I do a lot of "Linux" work in terms of cloud infrastructure config and a bunch of CLI stuff on my Mac, but I know very little about how desktop GUIs work in that world. Do specific applications need to be explicitly made compatible with every desktop environment? What sort of breakages are likely to occur if someone switched to COSMIC today, on their daily driver?
This is probably pretty outdated, but here is a bit of info. There are 2 main UI libraries: GTK and QT. KDE uses QT, and gnome uses GTK. You need to have the supporting libraries installed on your...
This is probably pretty outdated, but here is a bit of info.
There are 2 main UI libraries: GTK and QT. KDE uses QT, and gnome uses GTK. You need to have the supporting libraries installed on your system to run any apps that use one of the UI libraries, but both can coexist peacefully. The specific desktop environments work best with apps that use their UI library, particularly with things like theming, but you can still theme apps of the other library. Some people try to make their systems use exclusively one library, but most just use both.
To sum it up, no, apps will work with any desktop environment. To integrate perfectly and not look out of place, they need to use the same UI library, but that does not affect functionality.
Hmm. I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Sometimes I feel like there's a new Linux DE being released every year, and while this is seeming pretty samey so far, I think it could have potential....
Hmm. I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Sometimes I feel like there's a new Linux DE being released every year, and while this is seeming pretty samey so far, I think it could have potential. It's very minimalist in design, which I do not like, but that could change in time. I do like the window management features it talks about. But realistically I probably won't try this out for quite some time.
TLDR: System76, a company that makes a Linux distribution named Pop!_OS (currently using GNOME as its desktop environment) released the first alpha build of their COSMIC desktop environment. It's written in Rust and aims to be secure and performant, but also customizable.
Personally I'm excited to try it this weekend. Once this becomes stable I'll probably permanently switch to Pop!_OS.
I still feel like a relative Linux newbie, but I’ve been running Pop!_os as my daily driver for about a year now.
I’m scared to try a change like this, but also excited! Luckily, I’m not doing anything critical with my desktop this weekend, so I have time to recover if I bork something.
Switching desktops in linux isn't destructive, you don't have to worry. It's just a choice you make each time you log in. I've currently got both Gnome and KDE as login options on my Pop OS installation, and neither affected the other's settings or performance.
That is true, but in my experience installing a new desktop environment can change GTK and Qt themes, icons, fonts, etc. even on your old desktop environment, which can be jarring and difficult to fix. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has gotten better since I last tried it, but it’s worth being aware of.
From my experience the only things I've seen like that were pretty obvious that they were going to happen in that context. Like for example, I mainly use the default Gnome desktop on that Pop OS machine, but I also prefer to use the more feature-rich Dolphin file browser. After installing KDE as an alternate DE, I noticed that all my KDE-specific apps would have their appearances change even when I switched back to Gnome. But that made sense to me, because, well, duh.
I haven't had anything break as a result though, or anything get wonky to the point of needing a fix.
Make a virtual machine! That way your main system doesn't get changed at all, and if you get bored, you can just delete it. It does mean having to install it twice if you want to use it as your main DE (although I wouldn't recommend it until it hits 1.0).
Ooh! Good idea! That’ll be exactly what I do for this first pass!
I applaud the effort and I'm sure it'll be a great option for somebody, but personally speaking the direction they're going with their design and UX isn't really my cup of tea. Really none of the current crop of DEs are, which makes for a bit of a grim picture if at any point I feel it necessary to switch to Linux full-time for personal usage.
You could eschew desktop environments entirely in favor of just a window manager (or "compositor" for Wayland) and whatever auxillary programs you need.
Like I use Sway, which is the Wayland version of i3, along with a bunch of individual programs to basically build my own desktop environment.
Going this route does involve spending time discovering programs, trying them out, configuring them to your liking, etc. What you end up with in the end though is a very custom-tailored system built just for you.
If you're interested, I remember these videos being a good, if lengthy, guide on getting started with i3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-S0cWnLBKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKIwOlazKI
I am eagerly waiting for Cosmic DE because I'm just tired of building my own environment with a bunch of tools that in the end are always the same.
I think KDE and Gnome are too much and not prioritize tiling first. KDE is awesome, but it has a lot of moving parts and in the end both feel slow for me.
Cosmic DE is exactly what I need. I can have everything those bunch of tools and scripts done for me and use my terminal applications tiled like I already use with river without needing do everything by hand. The biggest pain is writing your own waybar/yambar/whatever bar config. And if you want to change colorscheme you have to dig a bunch of config files and write everything by hand in every app that outputs color.
I've been doing this for my entire life using Linux, since with Slackware in the 2000s. Started with fluxbox, then openbox, dwm, bspwm, sway and now river. In the end you always end up using the same tools. It is very lightweight and customizable to an extent, but the customization options are not that diverse.
So I've been on this limbo between using Plasma for some time than going back to river. I have everything set up in river. Clipboard manager with cliphist + fuzzel, screenshot with grim + slurp + fuzzel, bar with waybar, automounting with udiskie, but it is a pain setting up the same things.
Cosmic DE seems to be doing everything right. I hope they don't expand too much to the point of becoming a behemoth.
I've played with building my own in the past but had a difficult time producing a result that I was happy with. It was an attention sponge of sorts, where I found myself endlessly tweaking to ever-diminishing returns.
Part of the problem is that window managers are disproportionately tiling or tiling-first where I'm a solidly floating-first sort of user (I've tried, tiling just doesn't work). The other is that the Linux desktop space as a whole (DEs/WMs/compositors alike) has practically no offerings for building a more Mac-style desktop; they're all Windows-like (KDE, most other DEs/WMs), tablet OS like (GNOME, Pantheon), or minimalist tiling with hints of Windows.
My ideal Linux desktop would essentially be OS X 10.9 Mavericks with the virtual desktop implementation (2D grid) of OS X 10.5 Leopard, and it's not really possible to piece this together currently. One of these days I might just write such a DE myself, but this is a task that is not for the faint of heart, especially if you want to include Wayland compatibility (Xorg/xcb looks way easier to contend with, if quirky, for someone new to writing Linux desktop software).
Fluxbox and Openbox ought to have your back here. I've tinkered with both but realized that I prefer the tiling-first paradigm so I didn't dig too deep into them. Openbox is (was?) the base for Crunchbang and its successors Crunchbang++ and BunsenLabs, which was performant and customizable while still looking good. I'm sure that you've tried Fluxbox and/or Openbox in the past, but I figured I'd mention them in case you hadn't or if someone else stumbles on this thread in the future.
I don't have enough macOS experience to get it completely right, but the default XFCE layout has a dock at the bottom and menu bars at the top. You could also try elementaryOS, as it's designed to be Mac-like and is probably the closest out of the box. I know Deepin and Zorin are supposed to have Mac modes but I haven't seen enough of those to know how they really stack up.
Sway looks amazing.
I feel you on that opinion. The default DE settings always seem to blow everything up in size with large spacing between each item and wasted screen real estate like it's made for your grandparents. Personally, I want a compact UI where there isn't so much spacing between everything. The rounded corners on everything also make it feel like a toy rather than a professional tool. I have no doubt settings can be tweaked or modified to accomplish that though. Regardless, I'm excited that that these DE continue to be developed and iterated on. I suspect some day when OSX has gone full bore enshitified, we'll all be grateful that these open source environments exist. Edit I should add, the work done on this DE is very impressive with no shortage of skill and effort put in. I'm excited to give it a spin.
I think whitespace and rounded corners are good in moderation. There’s a fine balance to it; sharp corners and no margins can make a UI feel old, overwhelming, low effort, and/or amateurish while too much rounding and padding lends to that “toy” feeling.
Nothing is perfect of course but I think Windows 7 and OS X 10.4-10.9 were as close to perfection as any desktop has been in these regards. They felt modern and welcoming while also having good information density and meeting power users’ needs reasonably well.
Plasma doesn't really fit these characteristics, though...? It's quite dense (almost to a fault), and I suppose it does have rounded corners but they're not as prevalent as in like, GNOME. It's not perfect but it's the most comfortable modern environment I've found - I prefer it to Windows, nowadays.
Every new DE project I see makes me think one of two things, either "it looks like KDE but less flexible" or "it looks like Gnome but more cluttered" and neither of those things are particularly appealing.
Personally I think Gnome Shell is nearly ideal and I have little interest in moving away from it to something less invisible. But it is good that people keep trying to make new and different things.
Currently Pop!OS comes with GNOME plus some customizations, and my understanding is that the choice to build their own DE from scratch was due to an inability to build functionality they wanted within GNOME. Probably they talk more about their reasoning in earlier blog posts about the decision.
If I recall, frustrations with GNOME and GTK pulling the rug out from under devs was also a factor.
GNOME doesn’t have a stable extension API which means that extensions break and need fixing every update or two. GTK introduces major/breaking changes relatively frequently for a UI framework as old as it is.
The latter is really unfortunate, with GTK being the one of the two popular UI frameworks with C bindings (and thus, good compatibility with a wide range of languages). Qt is better in that it doesn’t break things as often, but being written in C++, it has far fewer high quality, up to date language bindings.
These are my thoughts exactly. The limitless potential of open source is clear in the window manager world, and I would love to see something new. For example, there are tiling window managers that automatically orient windows. Both gnome and KDE have plugins for this, but they kinda suck. A desktop environment made with non-floating window management in mind would be very new, and very cool.
Cool to see this in alpha. Cautiously optimistic about this as I'm always happy to see Pop!_OS succeeding. Personally not a fan of the UI/UX design here, at least whatever was visible in the screenshots. That being said, I wish them all the best, there is some stiff competition when it comes to Linux distro user interfaces.
I do a lot of "Linux" work in terms of cloud infrastructure config and a bunch of CLI stuff on my Mac, but I know very little about how desktop GUIs work in that world. Do specific applications need to be explicitly made compatible with every desktop environment? What sort of breakages are likely to occur if someone switched to COSMIC today, on their daily driver?
This is probably pretty outdated, but here is a bit of info.
There are 2 main UI libraries: GTK and QT. KDE uses QT, and gnome uses GTK. You need to have the supporting libraries installed on your system to run any apps that use one of the UI libraries, but both can coexist peacefully. The specific desktop environments work best with apps that use their UI library, particularly with things like theming, but you can still theme apps of the other library. Some people try to make their systems use exclusively one library, but most just use both.
To sum it up, no, apps will work with any desktop environment. To integrate perfectly and not look out of place, they need to use the same UI library, but that does not affect functionality.
Hmm. I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Sometimes I feel like there's a new Linux DE being released every year, and while this is seeming pretty samey so far, I think it could have potential. It's very minimalist in design, which I do not like, but that could change in time. I do like the window management features it talks about. But realistically I probably won't try this out for quite some time.