I think it’s good they’re making a new desktop environment, but I personally wouldn’t want to be beta testing an environment on my new laptop.
I personally don’t get the hype around Cosmic - I’m not clear what makes it so exciting for people? It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment. It’ll be interesting to see how far it moves from Gnome and if moving to Rust is actually meaningful to the end user.
I can see it’s good for the Linux world that a new and modern DE is being developed. It gives users choice and may prompt innovation in the other DEs too. But maybe I’m beyond the age where new is exciting - I value stable and familiar environment, KDE in my case.
I’m not against Cosmic in any sense - I just don’t quite get the level of hype I see surrounding it. Maybe it’d be more exciting if I was a Gnome user? Maybe it’s solving problems I don’t seems to have in KDE?
Speaking for myself, this is why COSMIC is appealing:
- nice middle-ground between oversimplified and over opinionated GNOME and KDE complexity
- both floating and tiling are first class
- Wayland native (no legacy)
- pushing DE innovation
- commercially backed
- written in Rust
- attractive
- fast
I also love that it is driving Smithay and Iced which matures the foundations of other great projects like Niri and even RedoxOS.
KDE has vastly improved in my view and is a really great option these days. That said…
It is huge, monolithic, and difficult to modularize.
It is complex.
It occasionally has runaway resource use (eg. Indexing).
I agree, KDE is actually pretty amazing these days. Bizarre that the Linux ecosystem is focused around Gnome when there’s another option available that so much better.
I mean you see how many people use windows
I personally don’t get the hype around Cosmic - I’m not clear what makes it so exciting for people? It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment.
It’s likely they don’t actually have much of a problem with Gnome UX, they just want to be fully in control, rather than Gnome devs being in control of it and there having to be compromises.
Which is fair enough. Gnome DE belongs to Gnome and it’s up to them how the project is run. S76 wants to be fully in control of what they ship, so they moved.
I doubt it was made specifically to solve a Gnome or KDE user’s problem. It’s just a business decision to make them less reliant on others.
I guess people are just happy to have another major DE, and to have one built from the ground up on newer tech, without the legacy cruft that the likes of Plasma, Gnome, and Cinnamon do.
The choice to ship with a beta version of the new DE is interesting. Is it that stable now and will there be a clear upgrade path to the final release?
I’m tempted to grab the beta myself and just go for it now…
Edit: fuck it, I just upgraded my install. Not like I do much important on my computer anyways. This is really nice, almost no pain from the upgrade and other than a couple of menus staying open when I click off of them it’s been running just fine. Now to abuse it…
For System76, the choice is to keep shipping their now very long in the tooth previous version or a beta of their new one. I have no doubt the beta is the better experience.
And they are obviously stabilizing the beta rapidly now.
I’m on hyprland but wanting to move due to controversies, how is cosmic?