Funny thing I was just thinking I have to replace Pop_OS! with something else because it's completely broken, or at least it is for me. I wish it worked as smooth as it did when they first released it.
I was hyped up about Cosmic DE when they announced it but not anymore. Not because anything they've done but because I'm being kind of pessimistic about the linux desktop.
It's been a solid daily driver for me at work and home for the last 4 years. I would also be interested in knowing what you feel is completely broken. The window tiling system they came up with is really quite good.
Some time ago I had to switch distros because for some reason it wouldn't wake up from locking. It happened randomly. Even after several reinstalls the problem persisted. It was related to the nvidia drivers and I wasn't the only one with that issue.
Anyway, now that's not a problem anymore but many other things are not working as expected.
- Shortcuts to switch workspace don't work if you have horizontal workspaces
- The Pop Shop waaay slower than it was to the point sometimes it becomes irresponsive when searching for something
- When I lock the screen it doesn't turn black as it's expected, it stays half awake. At night I have to unplug the external monitors to avoid having them on all night.
These things make me want to throw the computer out of the window. I'll have to look for an alternative once I finish the things I'm working on.
> When I lock the screen it doesn't turn black as it's expected, it stays half awake. At night I have to unplug the external monitors to avoid having them on all night.
Click "suspend", not "lock" and/or set to suspend after a certain amount of inactivity.
> Shortcuts to switch workspace don't work if you have horizontal workspaces
Pop doesn't really support horizontal workspaces last I checked, you needed an extension and this naturally played hell with the rest of the DE. Maybe Cosmic will fix it? IIRC this is still a Gnome thing.
> - The Pop Shop waaay slower than it was to the point sometimes it becomes irresponsive when searching for something
Never had need for the pop shop, but I wouldn't call the ad hoc app store based on flathub being slow that big of a deal.
> Click "suspend", not "lock" and/or set to suspend after a certain amount of inactivity.
That's stupid. Why would I use suspend if I want to lock the screen? Anyway, suspend is broken in linux so if I suspend there a high chance that I'll have to reboot to bring it back.
> Pop doesn't really support horizontal workspaces last I checked, you needed an extension and this naturally played hell with the rest of the DE. Maybe Cosmic will fix it? IIRC this is still a Gnome thing.
It's GNOME so horizontal workspaces are there. I'm using them but shortcuts are broken.
> Never had need for the pop shop, but I wouldn't call the ad hoc app store based on flathub being slow that big of a deal.
It's an important piece of software so it is a big deal.
I installed Pop on one of my machines recently. I can't get on with the tiling. Things I could do with a single key chord in the last tiling WM I tried I have to enter a special layout mode to do. This is enough to interrupt my flow. The key bindings didn't seem to be as configurable as I'd like either.
I use Windows for desktop and SSH into Linux/use WSL. I don’t care for Windows or M$ but it’s easy to overclock my monitor, scaling just works, and the UI isn’t buggy. I find GNOME and KDE to be much buggier than Windows 11.
Cosmic is being written in Rust which is cool, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be buggy.
the linux desktop is an unsalveagable shitshow. the only way i can stand to use it is with stable and straightforward x11 tiling window managers. DEs are just too goddamn buggy and so full of jank.
And good timing, I was just digging through some of the older/current-release cosmic code to hack the light/dark theming settings panel to have a toggle for “change at sunset”.
I don’t suppose that’s been added to the new Rust Cosmic DE yet, but one can hope.
Cosmic has fractional scaling. I'm not sure about XWayland compatibility.
> In Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, you can scale your resolution by 200%, 300%, or 400% to make these elements easier to see. However, you can also toggle the “Fractional Scaling” feature in the Displays settings for access to scaling options in 25% increments (125%, 150%, 175%, etc.). This past month, fractional scaling functionality was implemented into COSMIC DE as well.
Fractional scaling works well, but only when all your monitors are the same size. If you're a laptop user connecting to a differently sized screen it can be a challenge.
Have they announced a potential release date for Cosmic?
On a completely unrelated note, I am not a GUI/frontend guy, so that interactive Figma blew my mind. No idea it worked like that, I thought it was just for sketching out layouts.
I had the same experience after joining my current company. It's really an incredible product. Our product people routinely use it instead of PowerPoint, even when there are no app designs involved.
Looking forward to where they take the whole code gen aspect too. It seems a little half baked right now (or at least, our legacy designs aren't really set up to take advantage of it) but the idea of using all of the colours and low-level components referenced (rather than hard-coded) and assembled into high-level components or even views would be a game changer.
> Have they announced a potential release date for Cosmic?
In May of this year, System76 announced that Cosmic DE would be released in 2024, possibly to be included in the next LTS version of Pop!_OS.
> As we develop COSMIC DE for its 2024 release, Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS will continue to receive updates, such as the recently released system76-scheduler-2.0. Development efforts will be focused on COSMIC DE in lieu of 23.04 and 23.10.
I am on HN basically every day and I don't think I've ever heard of Cosmic before. Looking through search I only see 3 or 4 popular posts in the last three years.
Off the top of my head I'd say Deno was a lot more hyped when it was "in progress".
The funny thing, I am on HN every day and never heard of Cosmic until today. Never heard of Deno until I talked with a company that was leveraging it for some isolated trusted compute stuff (I shake my head at JS and trusted compute, but that's where I heard about it).
Fwiw I don't remember seeing that many posts for Cosmic DE here. In fact, it's the first time it really stands out to me. Maybe I forget, could definitely be the case.
Either way, looks like a cool project? I don't quite get the pitch yet, but sure, looks cool
As far as something of this scope, I'm not sure. I think many of us are excited because among full featured DE's we've been stuck with Gnome and KDE so long, it's nice to see something new.
Well Cosmic is written in Rust, no? I'm used to seeing plenty of Rust coverage, but this is the first time I've noticed Cosmic on HN. Honestly, I'm less interested in Cosmic itself and more interested* in seeing if Cosmic can give the toolkit it uses (Iced) a boost.
* That's an obvious personal bias as I just started dabbling in Iced (to try my hand at an ATC sim) and while it's very cool (Elm inspired) the documentation is pretty much the opposite.
Probably I am paranoid but showing battery and network status together with the rest of widgets (even configuration icon) seems like a security thread, no?
I was hyped up about Cosmic DE when they announced it but not anymore. Not because anything they've done but because I'm being kind of pessimistic about the linux desktop.