Pop!_OS Cosmic Desktop: NEW Linux Tools Being Added..

RUST Cosmic Desktop on Pop!_OS made by System 76 has been receiving great open source community support and contribution as new tools and apps are being added to this new Linux Desktop Environment.
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Cosmic Epoch - github.com/orgs/pop-os/projec...
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[@SavvyNik]

What other additional tools would you like to see?

[@mattvisaggio]

Right click option to create a shortcut/symlink

[@mattvisaggio]

Dropbox on demand file integration. GUI options to update/view bootloader. Logical volume manager GUI.

[@Just_Add_Coffee]

Some way to add some pizzaz to animations, ala "Burn My Windows" for GNOME.

[@jernaugurgeh451]

A weather app that actually includes my city, the 5th largest in the UK by population. (For some reason the default Gnome app doesn’t recognise Sheffield, but does have Castle Donington, a very small town with a population of less than 7,400)

[@milanutekal5083]

Internet Radio App

[@mmstick]

The PDF reader will be an official part of COSMIC once it is completed, but it may not be ready for the first release.

[@tui3264]

is it using new pdf spec ? Linux lacks that. We saw increase of pdfs with new spec as it is used by non-free readers 🥲

[@x4vvi23]

I wish there was an EPUB reader similar to ReadEra on Android but for Linux where I can just scroll pages down seamlessly instead of having page turned everytime. Additionaly I have to add that most of EPUB readers are ugly.

[@mmstick]

@@tui3264 As a Rust application, it is using lopdf for parsing an AST of the PDF contents, and then rendering directly to the window with Vulkan using the Canvas widget from iced.

[@mmstick]

@@x4vvi23 EPUB unfortunately requires embedding a web view, and Servo is not yet usable right now. Foliate should be good enough for now.

[@Moppawife]

The work you do is crazy, thanks Michael

[@SnowTheParrot]

I'm excited for Cosmic. And have been for a loooooong time.... A VERY LONG TIME.

[@louisfifteen]

Me too. System76 are very very thorough, lol.

[@danielharder7511]

Its linux Josh Peck

[@guildpilotone]

Pop!_OS is my daily driver and I have the pre-Alpha installed. Looking stronger all the time.

[@SiriusScaper]

I'm currently testing out cosmic on NixOS on my framework 13 amd laptop 😊 Big thanks to the NixOS maintainers for porting it over and having a flake available! Also big props to the system76 devs! It's getting better and better by leaps and bounds now.

[@Vancha112]

Already daily driving this DE, and it's getting better and better every day :) quality work being done on it by many talented people

[@sheikhshakilakhtar1865]

Very excited about this. Thanks for the enjoyable and informative video. Thanks to System76 and community devs for their hardwork. I hope it gains enough popularity to become another mainstream DE.

[@alternatuber6698]

POP Os should be rebranded as COSMIC Os.

[@legendboyAni]

I disagree

[@wooshbait36]

​@@legendboyAni I agree

[@michaeljaques77]

As a Pop!_OS user, I don't have much choice, but I'm excited about it, definitely!

[@GarrisIiari]

I have had it on my Arch install, and thus far what makes it interesting are its underpinnings, clean-sheet start, and S76's overall open approach to the community and to theming and development on Cosmic. From an appearance and functional standpoint, everything is very standard so far. People expecting to install this and have it feel revolutionary or "next gen" in any way are bound to be disappointed.

[@SavvyNik]

Thanks for the share!

[@vexelghost]

You had me at Fedora + Cosmic. 😮

[@mr.DorianJames]

Looks great. Especially the hybrid tiling functions.

[@KoopstaKlicca]

i'm really looking forward to cosmic! i've already been using it for my home computer :)

[@weiSane]

Cosmic has the best DE in Linux world.

[@jernaugurgeh451]

I’m fairly new to Linux (though I did briefly mess about with it in the early 2000s), but have tried out probably a dozen different distros so far and from all that experimentation the only solid conclusion I’ve come to is that COSMIC is definitely my favourite DE. It’s a good variant of Gnome with a macOS-style dock, but the addition of auto-tiling windows makes it god-tier. Really looking forward to the next Pop!_OS, though I’m currently running Fedora 40 with stock Gnome and have got on pretty well with it so far.

[@SavvyNik]

Thanks for sharing the exp

[@bonfiters]

if you want auto-tiling in stock gnome i recommend Forge, you can install it as a regular extension, been using it for the last week and it's great

[@christopherpol112]

Exact same boat - coming from macOS and using Fedora with default Gnome, and it’s so nice. COSMIC is looking good and I hope it has that same nice clean aesthetic I like with Gnome

[@bonfiters]

dunno what happened to my reply, but there's an extension called Forge that adds auto tiling to stock GNOME. it'll hold us out until cosmic arrives hehe

[@paultapping9510]

that basically sounds like what most people turn stock gnome into with extensions, and that is in no way a criticism. I like gnome, and I like it even more with a few little tweaks. From your description, Cosmic sounds like that, but out the box. Once it's matured a little more, I'll check it out.

[@mesmersie8465]

i put pop os with cosmic on my laptop and i love the look and feel of it. Can't wait for a stable release!

[@sinansarihan]

I am on windows and I want to use PopOS! with Cosmic as my daily driver. So eager to test it. I hope it comes out soon but I understand good things take time. Thanks for the video. Cant get enough of it

[@darshankumawat1764]

i can now finally be maximalist with tiling wm. super excited.

[@babakfp]

I think it would be a good idea if you build a cosmic app and stream the whole process. If you are not a developer, you will probably fail, but it could be fun!

[@chadchampion6773]

Can’t wait to use cosmic someday

I really want to try COSMIC. Honestly I wasn't really optimistic about at first, but it seems they are doing a terrific job. I hope it becomes a worthy competitor of Gnome and KDE plasma

[@NiffirgkcaJ]

I'm so excited for this! I can't wait for COSMIC to finally be released as stable so I can leave GNOME which has been slowing down my current distro.

[@somename5632]

I am on fedora and I might switch to cosmic, when its actually ready

[@noname-ll2vk]

Creating a true new desktop toolkit might prove the biggest long term benefit. Hopefully libcosmic will do a better job not breaking its API every major toolkit version update. The way Qt and Gtk have done. The trick is to make it a more reliable developer experience than Qt or Gtk. Granted that's a very low bar. Look at Sway's wlroots compositor project which spread to most smaller Wayland compositors and thus created a much larger ecosystem than sway alone would ever have had.

[@mmstick]

There will be some breaking changes, but I don't expect any of these changes to require significant effort to refactor. We need more developers to try out libcosmic and provide feedback and PRs to improve its APIs. The more feedback we get from real world use cases, the sooner we'll get to a stable API.

[@noname-ll2vk]

@@mmstick best of luck. The free software world needs another toolkit option. Ideally once libcosmic progresses, stabilizes, and is used enough realworld, it can be a toolkit that learns the value of incremental development, and reliable APIs over time. Unstable desktop APIs might well be the biggest issue Free Desktops actually have faced once you peel all the layers of the onion away.

[@ziplocpeople]

​@@noname-ll2vk sometimes you need breaking changes to make improvements though.

[@luigigrabspam4596]

the madlads at System76 really made the Kgnome meme real.

[@MithilaGames]

Which software you use to write on top of desktop, are your using pen tablet ??

[@roberto7102]

I'm excited to try it on fedora 😃

[@ww4102]

You can already

[@roberto7102]

@@ww4102 Hey thank you I did installed it from the copr repo pretty neat 😃

[@fatrat600284]

Looks better than Gnome.

[@noname-ll2vk]

Is there a test iso yet? I was hoping to do some testing on it but don't want to use much time because it's a minor update and can't justify more than booting iso in vm and getting data then uodating. But between the desktop, toolkit, and compositor this is first on my list. Time is not infinite however.

[@mmstick]

There are 60 remaining tasks on the project board for the alpha. The first public ISO will be the Pop 24.04 Alpha, shipping COSMIC Alpha 1.

[@danielkemmet2594]

I'm stoked as heck for cosmic and I'm hoping once the DE is launched they will finally start focusing on their in-house laptop.

[@mmstick]

Besides Jeremy's work on firmware, no one on the Pop!_OS team works on hardware. That's a completely separate team of people in the company.

[@danielkemmet2594]

@@mmstick right, I'm obvioulsy talking about company priorities. The lift to make a DE to go with a custom laptop is much less than making the laptop and THEN doing the DE...

[@mmstick]

@@danielkemmet2594 You seem confused. I must reiterate that the people who work on the hardware are completely different from those working on Pop!_OS. The hardware team isn't twiddling their thumbs while waiting for us to finish. They work independently regardless of what happens in Pop.

[@danielkemmet2594]

@@mmstick Fair. Enough.

[@danielkemmet2594]

@@mmstick PS, I am legit stoked for cosmix. From your fosstodon profile it looks like you're working on that. so I appreciate that .

[@n.m4497]

Beta coming this year?

[@mmstick]

Yes, within a few months.

[@user-iq6pf9in4d]

when will it be released??

[@danilaros]

Is good to have one more DE in Linux World, competition is always good and make things go forward! That been said i really think there is to much hype around Cosmic, I try it but definitely is not for me, I don’t like the looks and how some things got implemented, for now i prefer Gnome, no doubt.

[@IMaiaPT]

I see that they are allowing to develop applets like in gnome, I hope in the future there is something similar to the gnome-extensions website. Has a gnome extension developer would love to pass mine to the cosmic. Also hope they add an option were we can remove the title bar since its going to be a window manager, for many people the bar will be a waste of space in the screen.

[@mmstick]

There's now a cosmic-applet-template for those interested in making panel applets.

[@MyReviews_karkan]

I love the hype around this desktop. I want them to make one thing a reality, an option in the wallpapers settings to span a wallpaper across two monitors. It is crazy to me how this is basically non-existent in Linux beside one app called "superpaper" that hardly works on xorg and doesn't on Wayland. This needs to be an actual part of the settings.

[@mmstick]

You could create an issue for the pop-os/cosmic-bg repository, and someone could offer to add this feature.

[@MyReviews_karkan]

@@mmstick I'll do that asap. Thank you so much for answering my questions literally everywhere. You always answer my questions on reddit, Lemmy and now here. You need a big raise, my brother.

[@Xotchkass]

Does or will it have a C API or only rust?

[@mmstick]

Only Rust. The cosmic toolkit-and the iced runtime that it is built upon-leverages all of Rust's language features for maximum developer ergonomics and efficiency. This will raise the average bar of quality for applications built for COSMIC.

[@Mark98T]

I need wake up from sleep/suspend on Wayland support on laptop with ryzen apu to laptop display and nvidia gpu to hdmi display that I'm experiencing issue on ubuntu 24.04 The issue is that system failed to wake up and stuck on black screen with error text when on wayland

[@SavvyNik]

I’d love it to be like mac has that instant wake is wild

[@tui3264]

PopOS should switch to Fedora for its base

[@SavvyNik]

Ooo

[@gabe20244]

Yes please, it would be amazing

[@SnowTheParrot]

Why? So that every software dev in the world will forget make their program compatible with our package manager?

[@gabe20244]

@@SnowTheParrot ? Flatpak exists and is default on cosmic

[@themadoneplays7842]

Yes but fedora doesnt have a LTS.

[@AlexandruVoda]

I frankly have plenty of doubts about all these apps. To me this feels like scope creep. More apps means more maintenance effort. And while they are nice for cohesiveness with the desktop, they are not necessary for the desktop.

[@mmstick]

That's a common misconception, especially in respect to Rust applications developed with Elm's Model-View-Update design pattern. These applications are so much easier to develop and maintain than GTK or Qt applications. As mentioned in the Elm book, the MVU design pattern makes refactoring so simple that refactoring a complex application is as simple as a simple application. In fact, Jeremy developed all of the applications himself. A fraction of our total manpower. So you may doubt us, but people had the exact same doubts two years ago that we'd even be able to create our own GUI toolkit, and yet here we are. GNOME's pango developer thought we'd need years just to have functioning text rendering.

[@AlexandruVoda]

@@mmstick Fair, but that maintenance is not just about code, it is also about documentation, bug tracking, feature requests and people asking how to get stuff done. Even if the code is remarkably easy to refactor, the organisational side of software still consumes human hours. If System76 has enough resources to finance an entire ecosystem as part of the distro, that is mighty fine.

[@mmstick]

@@AlexandruVoda We already have 7 years of experience with developing and maintaining Pop!_OS, where we have to take customer support requests and issue reports for the entire desktop; GNOME included. This is already going to be a significant reduction in burden on that front alone now that we have the ability to resolve all of the active complaints and requests once and for all. Maintaining this is a lot easier than maintaining GNOME.

[@AlexandruVoda]

@@mmstick I see. So if you were already handling support requests for everything GNOME, then indeed, shipping apps for which you have code ownership is much preferable than getting support requests for GNOME apps you can not change.

[@Indra88155]

​@@mmstick The funny thing is that cosmic-text is the most popular crate for text rendering. Hahahha

[@GWFO]

how to install on arch I know easiest way to get cosmic is through pop is but really want to try

[@mmstick]

You will have to wait for Arch to provide binary packages.

[@whitney9070]

It's in the AUR.

[@sheikhshakilakhtar1865]

@@mmstick Can it used on non-SystemD distros? In particular, I was curious about GNU Guix.

[@mmstick]

@@sheikhshakilakhtar1865 Probably. If not, they need to submit patches to COSMIC to make that possible.

[@rohithkumarbandari]

Global menu for cosmic ?

[@mmstick]

We're accepting PRs to implement support for this, with integrations for menu bars.

[@luigigrabspam4596]

@@mmstick global menu would be so sick. cosmic is literally gonna be the best of kde and gnome in one better more stable and performant package

[@abd5139]

I will definitely give a try if there is a fedora 41 spin

[@SavvyNik]

Same here quite excited

[@willi1978]

i wonder how the gnome team feels now. they made system76 create a new desktop environment and it looks like the community is growing. with better developer experience on cosmic side, it might be the start of gnome's decline

[@darknetworld]

I feel sad for windows os as this could stream lines to way to produce app with help of users. Linux is open src and those dev must have work hard. To build and uniform all app and UI design is great. The hard part is maintain it. It come down to money and leadership.

[@gabe20244]

First? Edit: Was definitely first :D

[@SavvyNik]

Nice work!

[@derrekvanee4567]

Gnomey, aka - *Why?!*

[@JeanValjean-cp9ru]

I'm not interested if it's not rock solid and (almost) bug free..

[@SavvyNik]

That's why they're taking there time with the official release. I think we're going to have rock solid release :)

[@JeanValjean-cp9ru]

@@SavvyNik Hope so! 👍

[@mmstick]

QA regression testing begins with the beta, but it's already quite stable despite the lack of QA approvals.

[@themadoneplays7842]

Eh i still have doubts about it, theres so much here that reminds me of unity and we all know how well that went.

[@mmstick]

There's absolutely no comparison whatsoever. Unity was a X11 GNOME fork that required a lot of patches to GTK and GNOME applications. COSMIC is a completely independent Wayland desktop that doesn't rely on any forked GNOME libraries or applications.

[@Lestibournes]

Unity wasn't any kind of fork. ​@@mmstick

[@mmstick]

@@Lestibournes Go ahead and try building it. The reason why it was never successfully packaged outside of Ubuntu is because it required patching GTK and other GNOME libraries and applications. COSMIC doesn't require patching anything. It does not rely on GTK at all. All COSMIC binaries are self-contained and built from their own toolkit. So there's no overlap with GNOME packaging.

[@elieobeid77]

Cosmic is so ugly, who wants to have blue borders on their windows, and iit's not original either, if the video didn't mention cosmic, I would have thought it's a badly themed gnome, not sure what the hype is about? In a world where you can pick any desktop environment you want and modify it to your liking, you pick cosmic? really? Elementary OS looks 1000 times better btw

[@gambinante]

I still don't get it. Why develop a new DE?, What's the reasoning behind the Cosmic Desktop?. To me it seems bloated.

[@alexstone691]

All DEs fall short in some aspects, and none merge tiling and floating into one

[@clankfish]

the word bloat has lost all meaning

[@mmstick]

That's already been explained. It's also the complete opposite of "bloated". With language like that, I doubt your intentions.

[@cryofwill1416]

You are bloated