I criticized System76's Cosmic for recreating GNOME. I was wrong.

[@henrymach]

Nobody wants to work with Gnome development team. And Gnome development team doesn't want to work with anybody.

[@VictorFC]

Type ahead to jump on nautilus, tray icons removed, broken extensions etc. It seems that they don't want people to use too.

[@GoolagThemTube]

Especially not if you're white. They've made that perfectly clear.

[@benjaminmiddaugh2729]

@@VictorFC When Gnome 3 came out I was willing to give it a try, since I was a happy Gnome 2 user and KDE hadn't yet managed to get their act together after KDE 4. Then Gnome 3 and its software started losing features I was actively using (and still don't want to live without). Some of them are still not available, even as tweaks. I also don't agree with their design decisions in a lot of ways. So I don't use Gnome anymore. I try it every now and then and just keep bouncing off of it. I like some of the tech they have going on, but I just can't make myself use the whole package anymore.

[@PixPMusic]

It’s definitely more that the Gnome team doesn’t like any outside vision influence. Its their design guidelines or get out

[@Aoitori365]

because they are redhat's code slaves

[@RobertWHurst]

I think the key thing here is that making software for cosmic is a much MUCH nicer experience. Building with GDK has a lot of caveats that make creating applications more difficult in comparison. In this regard cosmic is completely different, and much more friendly to modern development. The other aspect to not overlook is how they handle graphics rendering via hybrid graphics. Cosmic can pick and choose which GPU to use to render each application. For applications that do not need 3D acceleration, they can be run on an integrated GPU, where as the dedicated GPU can be leveraged directly by specific applications that need it independently, and at the same time. This is huge for power efficiency as the dedicated GPU is not active for most computing. This especially notable in regards to laptop batteries. Lastly but also important, cosmic's ability to provide both tiling and cascading window layouts, as well as the ability to quickly switch between the two is a very attractive feature that many professionals including myself is a game changer. No need to way the trade-offs between Hyprland and Gnome or Plasma. Both layout styles are present, and with the benefit of good keyboard shortcuts. On the surface it doesn't look much different perhaps, but Bryan, I swear to you, this thing is a game changer for Linux on the desktop. I also want to add that even if you think Jeremy is abrasive (which I actually appreciate given far to often people hide their opinions these days) I will say that when it comes to enabling the user to have control over their desktop - Jeremy and team are very much embracing user control. They want this environment to be as open and configurable as possible while still providing a good experience for regular users with reasonable out of the box defaults. Convention until configuration if you will. As a software engineer with a decade and a half in this industry I don't get excited about projects often, but this one is big. These guys are moving mountains - it goes much deeper than stylesheets. We're talking a rethinking of the desktop environment from an architectural standpoint that has been needed for decades.

[@Vancha112]

Lets hope the elm architecture in the way that cosmic is going to use it will make for a bit more standardized way of building apps. I personally really can't wait to give it a go and see the things people make with it. :)

[@NikolaiCherepanov]

I can’t wait until they finish COSMIC so I can ditch pop OS for bog standard Debian and putting COSMIC DE on top of it.

[@geostokes8573]

Hard agree with OP comment.

[@HyuLilium]

Now if it's going to be just as configurable as Gnome is on NixOS, it's going to be very interesting

[@SethKnox]

I suspect that Cosmic will differentiate itself Gnome more and more as time goes on; at the moment they may be more focused on getting Cosmic up and running.

[@goaserer]

For system76 it makes sense to start with similar look and feel as the current DE. As they sell and support systems they probably would not want to have an upgrade step that changes everything and could worst case hinder their paying customers daily driving. It's not a hobby project after all. I'm with you that it will probably diverge more as time goes on

[@jstormclouds]

it is already very different.

[@screaminjesus]

I don't care about my desktop looking unique or interesting, I just want it to work

[@sbrazenor2]

I basically said this in a longer, more convoluted way. The reason the top DEs are where they are is because they have been consistently offering the experience people want for so long. I want an environment that's stable, that is intuitive, and that mostly just stays out of my way while I'm using it.

[@esra_erimez]

This. 👆

[@GoolagThemTube]

I do, because freedom is awesome. I rather have a less stable system with more freedom than the other way around. Luckily though, with Linux you have a choice. If you want something that "just werks" then use vanilla Gnome. If you want more freedom and are okay with a little less stability you can use KDE Plasma for example.

[@ashishhembrom3905]

impossible to do as a linux user.

[@lordkordus8139]

Exactly

[@esra_erimez]

Tech over Tea has an interview with the president of System76 titled "CEO And Founder Of System76 | Carl Richell". There is a clip of that video titled, "COSMIC: Why Make Another Desktop Environment". Apparently, they tried to use Gnome, but found it too difficult to work with the Gnome team.

[@andyp123456]

Also an interview with developer Jeremy Soller! Both very interesting to listen to.

[@Reichstaubenminister]

thispersondoesnotexist

[@tato-chip7612]

Ultimately ubuntu's unity was a failure not because it went away from GNOME. But it was a failure because it was still tied to GNOME and all the issues that come from being tied to GNOME.

[@MrQuay03]

I miss Unity so much, it was amazing on laptop

[@famousmwofficial8046]

​@@MrQuay03it was amazing on desktop too. Unity 8 was going to be a game changer they should not have given up

[@noferblatz]

FWIW, when the author of LXDE wanted to upgrade, he had the choice of going with GTK or QT. He chose QT over GTK, and I suspect it's because GTK code wasn't great and/or they were hard to work with.

[@meskes4059]

QT is an all around nicer looking toolkit, imo

[@kpcraftster6580]

Which is a shame because lxde was good and lxqt isn't.

[@Mark-np5ss]

@@kpcraftster6580LXQt, I think, just isn't very self-sufficient and it's a fusion of two different projects, which means it isn't a 1 to 1 copy of LXDE. There's also little reason to use it over LXDE.

[@rupen42]

I think you're forgetting the demographic of people who already use Pop. PopOS is a "normie" distro (not an offense, I use Pop). They have customers with their actual physical computers. Probably not great to go wild and upset those users. You're right that pretty much any DE is pretty much immediately understandable and usable, but a change is still a change.

[@RobertWHurst]

No, I don't think that's true. I know many software engineers that use PopOS. The initial reason was the tiling window mode, but honestly the current release is a much more polished version of Ubuntu without the annoyances of canonical. I think this next release is going to be even more compelling given that cosmic will be replacing Gnome. The hybrid graphics mode is very compelling.

[@rupen42]

@RobertWHurst Maybe I expressed myself badly. I'm not saying _only_ less techsavvy people use Pop. I'm also a software engineer that uses Pop. But PopOS is recommended right alongside Ubuntu as a first Linux distro and they have computers that come with PopOS preinstalled. They have less flexibility to make wild changes than Fedora. Fedora users users will just install whatever DE they want if they don't like a change. I'm guessing half of the PopOS users don't even know what a DE is. And a good chunk of those users are customers they offer tech support to.

[@implicitmatrix1312]

I very much agree with this sentiment. I'm far from a normie user (I run arch with i3 on my main machine), but on my laptop, I run PopOS, because I need it to just work with sane defaults. I don't want them to do something wild with cosmic because I use PopOS for when I don't want to have to think about my OS.

[@parawizard]

Tech debt in Gnome could be more work than creating something new

[@benjaminwestcott5622]

Honestly, I have never liked the Gnome experience, but Cosmic even in it's current state is pretty exciting. The tiling is smooth, per display tile/window is good, I think it has great potential.

[@Legion-495]

I use Gnome right now and I want this System76 DE. Fedora Forums already have talks of a spin. Gnome is just difficult. Features not implemented and stuff. I am fed up with stuck feature talks.

[@Diegorskysp17]

As a new Linux user, I find Gnome frustrating. It's beautiful and simple, but for desktop it's infuriating. The lack of minimize and maximize buttons on windows, being unable to access apps without having to leave the desktop, the app drawer having massive icons with massive spacing... it's clear it's been designed for touchscreens and/or laptops, while KB+M totally deprioritized, IMO. I know a lot of my grievances can be solved with Extensions... but they shouldn't? Particularly because they can (and will) break with the next Gnome release. Really looking forward to Cosmic.

[@jonnyso1]

@@Diegorskysp17 The massive icons (Which are also like that on the new Cosmic btw) are for acessibility reasons, which Gnome takes more seriously than any other DE (Although the trnasition to Wayland kinda ruined that, they'll need to reimplement a bunch of stuff). The samaller your screen the more jarring it is, but I got used to it. The minimize button I really don't know why they insist on it to be honest. There were things that weren't implemented simpply because no one stepped up to do it, like the image thumbnails on Nautilus beeing implemented like last year or something like that. Other things have very good reasons to be the way they are, somethings just take time, code doesn't write itself. That beeing said, I'm also looking forward to Cosmic.

[@patlen1237]

@@Diegorskysp17 The weirdest part about GNOME seemingly being designed for touchscreens is that it's a terrible experience on them, I tried to use it on a 2 in 1 and it's a complete mess in tablet mode. From random apps (built-in ones) not supporting touch and selecting all the UI text if you try to scroll, to needing to use your entire hand to open the app drawer it's just a horrible experience.

[@reatcas]

Yeah, honestly I don't like the gnome bar with shadows and animations and all that on my desk. That's a tablet UI forcing into desktop computer. Gnome should just include a setting to switch between desktop mode and touch mode.

[@jandrews377]

I believe creating a DE, from scratch, using a memory safe language, like rust, will ultimately be cheaper than maintaining (and steering) a code base that has evolved in the worst kind of way over a long period of time. The strengths of libcosmic are already being realised, whole classes of potential (and common) bugs simply dont exist with the new stack built on rust.

[@mmstick]

People have been underestimating the potential of the Rust ecosystem, and how a desktop environment leveraging it will easily steamroll the competition. GNOME and KDE have to develop everything from scratch to make any progress in any area, whereas COSMIC can rely on the collective efforts of Rust library developers globally. There are more quality open source Rust libraries today than there is for C or C++. For example, GNOME had to create a custom rendering library for GTK4, whereas COSMIC globally uses gfx-rs/wgpu, which is a standardized cross-platform rendering library that's developed by game, game engine, and web engine developers. No one outside of GNOME uses pango for text layout and rendering, but many UI libraries and game engines are using cosmic-text + glyphon in the Rust ecosystem. Likewise, GNOME had to develop their own custom async runtime in GLib to have asynchronous programming capabilities, whereas most of the Rust ecosystem uses tokio, including COSMIC. Tokio now powers the most performance-sensitive web services around the globe. Developed, maintained, and used by big names like Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Google. GLib's can hardly compete with that.

[@wielkiptok]

I think there is more then political issues. Gnome have technical issues that are hard to fix like: HighDPI fractional scaling. It as fine when people did not connect two 4k monitors, now is not fine. If you fork Gnome and want to fix it, you would have to fork GTK. In reality you can't suport that. That was reason of Unity downfall. Canonical didn't created the thing from ground up. It had some perks: less work. But Canonical did not control libraries that were shared with many projects and just patched them for the distro. That was the reason you don't really had Unity outside of Ubuntu. So many patched libraries that may or may not lead to numbers of errors with apps you also have no control off. Can't suport that. I think that Cosmic is much more healthy project in that regard.

[@exhumedlegume8870]

"I think there is more then political issues. Gnome have technical issues that are hard to fix [...]" What if I told you one probably contributed to the other? All of the people who just wanted to work on the software and keep their politics out of it got kicked out as [insert political boogeymen] and all that's left are the ideologues who don't know how to code...

[@hooflung128]

I think Cosmic DE takes the POP shell productivity gains forward while making a framework that isn’t drastically different. Iterations in the future may move away from gnome but POP hardware users will not be too disrupted.

[@sbrazenor2]

I think the reason that people aren't trying to create something that's 'new' and that looks and feels different, is that we're kind of at a point of standardization now with what people want and expect from a desktop environment. We want some kind of information panel that tells us the time, or the current battery situation of a laptop, etc. We want a menu system that's intuitive. We want a settings menu that's understandable. We might want an app tray, or to have drives mount in a certain way, but the differences should be relatively minimal for large scale adoption. These ideas have been pretty standard UI wise for like 30 years at this point. If you go too far off the path from those things, the adoption rate will be basically non-existent. Assuming that Linux had the 4% number people talk about with the Linux desktop; then we fracture that desktop by whether it's from an Arch or Debian base, then we split it out by desktop environment, package management, etc. A 'new' setup will be used by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of computer users. So on a planet of like 8 billion, you might have 4 deep in the weeds neck-beardy nerds using your new thing for a couple of weeks. (Not 4 billion; 4... and maybe yourself.) If you're lucky, some of the Linux channels will pick up what you're doing and they will talk about it favorably. After a few years, you might barely be able to fill a city bus with your user-base. Or, you come up with a stylish iteration on an old favorite (like Cinnamon did with the XP-like UI), and people use it and talk about it.

[@PixPMusic]

They’re starting from a similar style to keep their product in a familiar shape, but bring a bucket of new features. They’re trying to make something that’s flexible as all hell but ground up polished.

[@PixPMusic]

Gnome just. Doesn’t take feedback seriously. It is what it is.

[@rocksquared]

Why do you say it will fail probably ? They have money resources that allow them to have a team of like 7 full-time devs on it. When it's done, it will be less work and the team will be at ease to maintain it, not even mentioning that contributor will help. I think they have 50x more chance to succeed than almost all DEs actually.

[@antonkazlouski4307]

I remember I decided to report an issue with the Kate text editor-oh boy, I wish I didn't. It's stunning to me that people who are designing the very thing that users interact with are so defensive when it comes to criticism. Each designer should embrace criticism and feedback. It proves the point that those who are at the frontier are mostly doing this for themselves, for fun, but not for the end users.

[@gwojcieszczuk]

I wouldn't mind using CDE desktop environment.

[@reality-drift122]

been using the cosmic session on pop for my laptop for college almost since they announced and so-far i love it. its clean and out of my way

[@Ferkiwi]

Cosmic is the only DE for a long long time for which I've had any interest. GTK / Qt are bloated frameworks that cave in too easily to resource-hungry trends, and all DEs seem to rely on either of them. We need a modern, cleaner and leaner GUI alternative framework. The CDE ecosystem has potential to open up a new suite of apps using Iced that break from the Gtk/Qt dominance.

[@itdepends604]

lol I thought you were advocating for the Common Desktop Environment

[@FourOf92000]

thoughts about Urbit? (if not familiar, Urbit is an attempt to replace the gigacorp internet with something where that can never happen again, so ambitious they made their own declarative assembly language)

[@felderup]

a parallel adhoc wireless system could be done, it'd need doors(old bbs thing :P) to the regular net and it'd need to be REALLY simple and cheap to expand. perhaps the infrastructure could be based on lora with small solar panels to hang in trees like those old led 'throwies', cheap enough to be disposable, they can charge up over a few hours of light, nearby nodes could split the hours they work.

[@SvexTheDragon]

I remember when Unity came out for Ubuntu back in the day, and everyone in the community was yelling at Canonical cause they "should have just used Gnome" to do the same thing, cause apparently Gnome is just "so flexible" and "easy to work with and modify" that they should have just done that instead.. Now, years later, the current Gnome-based Ubuntu is just a mess, it doesn't behave like Unity at all apart from the Dock being there but that also not working the same way.. and the rest of the user interface is just a mess, a chimera of multiple things smashed into one and none of it works all that well. And now there are a ton of people in forums saying that "actually, Gnome isn't that easy to work with AT ALL" and I'm just baffled at whatever those people back when Unity was announced were thinking to themselves when saying things like "just should have used Gnome".. Perhaps they didn't know what they were talking about in the slightest.

[@dtaggartofRTD]

getting back to baseline Gnome provides a target to start with if nothing else.

[@itdepends604]

I think that a lot of the complaints people have with 'mobile UI's on laptops/desktops' is largely a generational thing. Most people of lunduke's generation most likely had their first interaction with GUI's like those in windows 95, classic mac, etc, while Gen Z is pretty likely to have their first interactions with phones/tablets, and this completely affects what people consider to be intuitive and good design. Also consider that a lot of older UI's were designed to be ran at resolutions as low as 800x600, while nowadays almost every screen is at least 1080p. This means there's just a lot more room to space things out while still displaying enough on screen (this seems to be peoples main complete with the more modern UI's). IMO older style UI's are better for professional applications with lots of options (eg. DAWs, video editors, etc.) while I prefer newer style UI's for casual internet browsing and other less productive uses of time. Also I really don't agree with the idea that cosmic is not doing anything different from GNOME. Cosmic if done well has the opportunity to introduce tiling window managers to the masses, as well as introduce a bunch of technical improvements, as well as fixing the lack of theming (my biggest gripe with GNOME currently). That said, the developers clearly like and are influenced by the GNOME workflow/interface. GNOME itself imo is a great example of doing something very different then the traditional desktop environments UI/UX wise, and producing and interface which is heavily despised by some but imo pretty damn great if you get used to the GNOME way of doing things (I kinda see it as almost a better version of the modern macos interface).

[@BernardoHenriquez]

That's why i created my own environment with compiz cairo-dock and vala-panel, i use arch btw

[@sbrazenor2]

Yeah, well, I use Gentoo and my opinion on what you're doing is... [compiling...] 🤣

[@AndrewBaba]

problem with system76 is supply. They don't sell in Europe. They will never be treated seriously, however they check all the boxes

[@RobertWHurst]

You don't need a system76 machine to run cosmic. You don't even need PopOS. My understanding is that it will work on other distros as well. I've even heard that there is work to make it work on fedora already.

[@sbrazenor2]

You can use their software without buying one of their machines. It's not like MacOS. (While Hackintoshes exist, I think as Apple goes deeper into Apple silicon, that's going to be a thing of the past) The machine I run Pop OS! on is just something I built years ago and it runs perfectly fine.

[@rottenmeat5934]

That’s a problem all across Linux : the old projects are all getting progressively worse.

[@henriquepicanco97]

I like Cosmic because, among many other things, it's an opportunity to have applications with headerbars (which are beautiful, modern and all that) that can be more powerful and support menus (which we could use as global menus, why not?).

[@mmstick]

COSMIC will support global menus at some point in the near future, and the menu bars will be used for simpler integration with them.

[@jackevansevo]

Imagine if they did diverge massively from Gnome and built their own UI as you suggest. A lot of users are going to have a rough time when they upgrade. For every person advocating for change there's probably the same number of people who will be pissed when their desktop changes after upgrading.

[@wespertalk]

It's a learning experience to recreate also, to create something using a new language without recreating an already good enough user experience and just maybe extending it or improving upon it.

[@wilsonfreitas8418]

Neovim is another example of someone branching out of a project because the owner of the original one was blocking all the progress.

[@Sal-T]

I loved gnome2 because it was highly customizeable, then gnome3 came out, and it was abundantly clear that they wanted you to use it a particular way, and customization was severely limited. At that point, I was done with gnome. I had enough of that attitude in the brief time I used Windows, and I was not interested in that. I want my desktop to work the way *I* want it to work. If your DE doesn't allow me to do that, I just won't use it.

[@WildVoltorb]

What DE are you currently using now?

[@Sal-T]

@@WildVoltorb XFCE with compiz. Easy to configure how I want without imposing themselves on me.

[@sillonbono3196]

Starting from scratch doesn't allow you yo create something new, considering how complex a modern desktop is. But it allows you to have a better copy of Gnome. Now version 2.0 and doing new stuff, now we're talking.

[@willi1978]

i mean it is early to criticise the project. i would give them the benefit of the doupt. building a version that is close how other environments work reduces the risk of the project in my opinion. they want to enable plugins so that other projects can create their own spins. i hope that the plugins will make it possible to create some very new exciting desktop environments. what i have seen from cosmic looks good so far though

[@androth1502]

everyone wants to build their own generic desktop with their own generic file explorer and their own generic text editor. of course, there is nothing wrong with this if your aim is to be generic.

[@outforbeer]

There are things in gnome that I love but it doesn’t feel like it’s made for desktop like cosmic is. I prefer cinnamon, cosmic and zoirin desktop. It docks, task bars at top and bottom and workspaces

[@QHawk7]

*If it looks like Gnome, walks like Gnome, and acts like Gnome, then it probably is Cosmic* 😂

[@danielkemmet2594]

"They're all forming together..." Yeah that's not a mistake, that's on purpose.

[@kimeraevent]

Why would a company want to build a a desktop environment and user experience for their OS distro that ships on their hardware that they can control and guide without dealing with GNOME dev team? We'll never know. Tsk.

[@etherweb6796]

The problem with Cosmic for me is it is under heavy development and it uses Rust which is just awful as far as compilation goes - I'm a fan of built in tiling, but I'll stick with something like sway that can compile in under a minute.

[@esra_erimez]

I've been a KDE user since my dad gave me an old Dell laptop on it when I was little just to shut me up. To me, it feels like I'm in Narnia when I use it. It feels like a magical land to me.

[@schreiberstein]

I have used Ubuntu Unity Remix and to be honest, it felt more polished than any other Ubuntu version. 🤷🏼‍♂️

[@georgehelyar]

For the first point of making something that looks different, you just need enough customisability to let other people try different things with it. Gnome is very bad for customisation because it can only be done through extensions, which are generally pretty hard to keep maintained, and then the extensions get abandoned. Even theming barely works, so it all looks the same. I know cosmic already works much better for tiling than gnome does, even with extensions. Personally I'm stuck on Ubuntu 2204 with gnome because my work uses intune, but that is the sacrifice I had to make to be able to use Linux at all.

[@remylafitz]

or I could just stick with mate...a DE that does everything i want without compromising for design choices i don't like...

[@PeterDoingStuff]

interesting talk, i belive its ok to mimic or make somthing new that still look like something people know, as an example i run Linux Mint and i love it, switched for 2 years ago after have trying lots of switches back and forth with linux and windows i finally got a desktop operating system that i like. Linux Mint's Cinnamom is a great and also very stable desktop environment, it just works and the danish translation is perfect so for the first time i have a desktop that looks and feel like a windows, but still is a powerfull linux machine, i love it.

[@QHawk7]

*WE NEED A SYSTEM76 XFCE* ! 😊 Who's with me?

[@birdstrikes]

NixOS is ready to go with Cosmic

[@Little-bird-told-me]

Its just alpha. For all we know it may turn out be very different in a couple of years, especially if someone forks its and then Cosmic adopts the forks into their core design

[@noname-ll2vk]

I find gnome very easy to work with now that it has logouts in the main bar. I boot a vm, run my gnome specific tests, fix, validate and verify, then shutdown. All hosted in xfce. Seems easy enough 😅. Ok granted their program locater is idiotic and opaque and annoying, but luckily I only need to open a terminal. Now I will grant the gnome idea of window design violates all laws of design and usability. Particularly forcing hamburger menus into a desktp. Which means everything is hidden and requires an extra click to access. I will never see a gnome program that does not look fundamentally broken.

[@orlovskyconsulting]

System76 have cash, and they are a company, so yes they can do it, what i wish stron developers community using best practices and ISO standards for create nice UIs

[@claytonstangeland]

I like anything getting away from C and C++.

[@ollicron7397]

Cosmic is not new at all, they've been working on this since they came out, and honestly it's not bad.

[@jonnyso1]

I think the only reason Cosmic looks so much like Gnome its because they are using their current version experience as a starting point. I doubt it will look like the same in a few years after launch, especially with the ammount of customizability, almost KDE like they are going for. PS: Trash talk Gnome and the devs all you like, the decisions they made are paying off... mostly.

[@mmstick]

Any similarities with GNOME are only superficial on the surface layer. If you actually spend some time interacting with it and customizing your desktop, it's completely different from GNOME. GNOME doesn't officially support desktop layout and panel customization. Nor does it support applets. Or even theming on the level that COSMIC is providing to users.

[@jonnyso1]

@@mmstick yeah, what i said. Or more accuratte, it lookas a loot like "cosmic the gnome extension" because thats their starting point.

[@DrWrapperband]

I used to love you on LAS.

[@Aoitori365]

No one does anything new kde is based on window's layout and gnome is clearly inspired by mac's gui

[@leonidas14775]

The linux ecosystem needs more unique killer apps and less reinventing the wheel. Only Apple and Microsoft can afford to spend billions doing that.

Lunduke, you have so much against Gnome design and user experience but you never say what those deficiencies are exactly. I use Gnome and I absolutely love it. In order for me to believe you, you'd need to make a video in which you'd point out everything that's in your opinion wrong with Gnome as for now I can't really relate to what you're talking in terms of UI/UX.¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@kpcraftster6580]

Gnome 3 made the same mistake as m$ did with windows 8. They created an interface that was based around the mobile device paradigm and targeted touch screens. Gnome 40 did less to correct its defaults for that mistake than windows 8.1, but neither was sufficient on its own. However, windows 8 and 8.1 could be fixed with tools like stardock's start8, whereas gnome can be fixed with extensions like dash-to-panel and arcmenu.

[@shaunpatrick8345]

@@kpcraftster6580 apart from having large icons in the app launcher, what makes it a tablet UI? All of their promo videos show it being used on a desktop or laptop; they do not regard it as a mobile UI and neither do its users. Floating windows make it a desktop UI more than large icons make it a mobile one.

[@kpcraftster6580]

@@shaunpatrick8345 See my repeatedly hidden/deleted response to you, on the topic of desktop icons and desktop directory, (start) menus, panels, docks and dash.

[@colemickens]

Reactionary type gives a reactionary tech video. It's fine, I'll cringe even harder at this in 5 years the same way I have countless other egotistical dismissive opinions. (yes, I know)

[@amigaworkbench720]

Gnome looks way better then Windows now. And for Windows look there's Budgie desktop. I don't understand why don't they just merge with them Budgie team? Also just to add, we all understand how Gnome team works (it will probably be worse when IBM buys Ubuntu).

[@shaunpatrick8345]

The "extensions break catastrophically" problem can be fixed by updating the Gnome version number within the extension, or just waiting for the developer to do it for you before you upgrade Gnome. Gnome released Gnome OS to make it easier for developers to test against the latest version, and sometimes there are significant changes which developers have to accommodate, such as the recent switch to Javascript modules. But usually the developer just needs to change the Gnome target version. Also, it's not a tablet UI, it just has larger icons than other app menus. But given that people often suggest windows-95-style desktops for new users because "it's like Windows," and many people these days are used to phones rather than Windows, does it not make sense to have a desktop UI take some cues from mobile UIs?

[@TheSwissGabber]

Why anybody would use GNOME is beyond me. There are so many better options. Better in every regard.

[@gronki1]

Gnome user for 8 years. Why would I use anything else?

[@shaunpatrick8345]

Nothing gets out of the way like Gnome does, and that's a common requirement people cite. There's no distractions, and the overview is the best thing on any desktop.

[@sevurueva5138]

Do you even understand what cosmic is trying to achieve here?

[@NormanF62]

Windows and KDE have been successful because they go along with human nature and the keyboard/mouse experience is basic to PC/Mac computing. That will never change. People like doing what works for them. Vanilla GNOME is against it and people have resisted. System76 understands it and they want to return to the classic desktop familiar to their users. I’m excited to see how it will be fulfilled. They want to be aa I’ve said before, the Apple of Linux. 😊

[@w3w3w3]

i preffer gnome de to windows though...

[@erics7004]

Gnome can't be modified without crashing. Zorin and Ubuntu desktops are FRANKSTEIN. Change the color of the theme and it will break.

[@aikiwolfie]

I'm pretty sure the Gnome development team don't want to work with the Gnome development team. An inability to resolve differences is probably the number one reason why major FOSS projects get forked. As much as it is people's right to fork a project and do their own thing. I think FOSS developers really need to grow up sometimes. Put their big boy/girl pants on and swallow their pride for the sake of the project. I also think third party entities need to be realistic as to just how much influence they are going to have on a project. Open source and open development don't equate to open contribution. Your contributions may be accepted when you are trusted to make a contribution and that contribution aligns with the project's goals and philosophy etc.

[@isrbillmeyer]

Get to the point Sheeesh You keep on repeating the same thing in a hundred different ways and still not getting to the point

[@GebaseerdeKikker]

This theory would hold, if it were not for the fact the System76 guys are of the same woke character type.

[@rhone733]

I actually wanted to buy one of their systems until I saw that ungodly price tag.

[@tirtharajsinha9088]

Well said bryan. That's exact thing that came to my mind when I got the news of cosmic couple of year ago. "Why not something new? why the same design? and why gnome?".

[@mmstick]

COSMIC is the first tiling desktop environment, so it is already new. It is absolutely not the same design, nor is like GNOME. It has a radically different architecture than GNOME or any other desktop environment. The theme system is also unique in that it does not use CSS, but layers contrasting elements using OKLCH. Just because it has a modular desktop architecture that can mimick GNOME's layout, that doesn't make it GNOME any more than you can mimick GNOME's layout with KDE Plasma.

[@progste]

Don't trust rust!

[@GoolagThemTube]

GNOME sucks so freaking hard.

[@danielton9577]

I don't like anything about GNOME, and I know for a fact that they are breaking extensions and themes on purpose because they want you to use it their way. It all just seems like the complete opposite to the whole open source mentality.

[@ximplex1]

You're simply wrong about Gnome not being designed for desktop use, and forcing a touchscreen UI/UX... It's incredibly keyboard-centric, and equally as mouse-driven as a traditional desktop. It's just a unified experience. I'd argue that it's one of, if not the only, DE to successfully offer that unified experience.

[@microlinux]

I think they shouldn't. If the chance of success is so narrow, there is no reason to rey it. Like asahi linux.

[@edhahaz]

The solution is not a GNOME fork, it's a meme rewrite, in meme language, with mediocre design guidelines BUT we got window tiling (fucking lol)

[@ivailogeimara]

I understand not wanting to work with the Gnome dev team but why develop a new DE from scratch instead of forking and tweaking Gnome. If they wanted to tweak Gnome in the first place but just didn't want to work with Gnome devs they could just fork it and do the smallest amount of changes to reach their goal. That way they can re-base on newer versions of Gnome later and get all the benefits of those new versions.

[@NormanF62]

That’s not what they want to do. Even Budgie, which until now has been tightly integrated into the GNOME stack, is doing a major overhaul for 11, relying on the EFL and Iced toolkits. When you have a fundamental disagreement with the GNOME developers on where to go, investing in new desktop technologies allows them to deliver what their users want. That day is now upon us.

[@xthebumpx]

Because Gnome's technological base in not something people want to be using.

[@fu886]

you don't choose to use gnome codebase you are forced to maintain it.

[@thelinuxlearningcurve5394]

Gnome team is a steaming pile of coding dog poo

[@PremiereStoss-qm9un]

I am somewhat new to Linux and Gnome was my favorite desktop environment...until I tried KDE Plasma. Totally fell in love with it. So, to Bryan's critique, the only thing I would say is, System 76 should have emulated KDE instead of Gnome to begin with.

[@brostoevsky22]

Then they should've used KDE like Tuxedo Computers and their distro Tuxedo OS.

[@kpcraftster6580]

No, no, no. You were right before. Or at least, more right/less wrong. And now you retract the more valid criticism. Cosmic is just worse gnome. Gnome without the extensions that are the only redeeming feature. Gnome but with system76's current extensions which make gnome worse* hard-coded in. Gnome but written in rust. Gnome but all wayland exclusive. Gnome but fixated on flatpaks. So worse than gnome in every way! * And let's have a look at those in detail. Let's look at the current customized gnome that ships with pop os, which is confusingly also called "cosmic": It ships with eight system extensions, six of which are by system76 and two are not. Five of those extensions make gnome worse, all of them are ones by system76. Two of those extensions improve gnome (desktop icons ng by rastersoft and app indicators by ubuntu), exactly those two that are not by system76. And the final one (pop cosmic by system76) doesn't make any difference. So, to make gnome usable, you just need to add and configure two user extensions; to make it good, you need to add another three. But for current cosmic, you also need to disable five or six extensions. And for the future cosmic those five extensions that make gnome worse, are baked in, while the extensions that make gnome usable will likely not be available. And that's in addition to the rust, wayland and flatpak fiascos.

[@rhone733]

I'd say that we need a new kernel to run that new desktop but, given how Linux was taken in so many different directions at the same time, we'd probably just end up with the same mess.

[@gronki1]

I honestly think that Wayland and flatpak are the future

[@kpcraftster6580]

@@gronki1 I think agnostic packages are the future, but not the direction flatpaks have (recently) taken. Nor snaps, for that matter. Something like nix, guix or appimages seems more promising. As for wayland, maybe one day in the distant future it will become usable, but that's still decades away.

[@shaunpatrick8345]

Desktop icons make it good? Sorry, files belong in the file manager, apps belong in the app launcher, and nothing at all belongs hidden behind your windows. What system 76 did with splitting the overview into 3 and adding a redundant extra search box was truly bad though.

[@kpcraftster6580]

@@shaunpatrick8345 Desktop icons do not make it good, they help make it less bad. Files belong in the file manager. Programs belong in the menu. Programs also belong pinned to the panel as desired. And any files and shortcuts that the user desires on the desktop belong on the desktop! Otherwise why have a desktop directory. Why even have a desktop at all. You are reinventing windows 8. Any design that does not default to having desktop icons, is simply a bad design. That is why such designs fail and either go back to having desktop icons by default or fall into disuse.