I looked at the #rust based, #Cosmic #desktop #environment, by #System76. This is branded "alpha" right now, but I'm flabbergasted by the users online, who think that "by summer" that thing will be ready for general use.
News flash, it won't.
It generally takes 2-3 years minimum after the official release for a brand new DE (with a brand new #API & libs) to become truly useful to most people. DEs aren't adopted unless matured. Hamper your expectations, lads.
@eugenialoli Yep
My opinion is that System76 has probably bitten off more than they can chew. The reality is that I'm using a Lenovo P16s right now as my daily driver because the Pangolin I bought from S76 last year was a total dumpster fire. Trackpad stopped working a few days in - which was apparently a common issue.
In any event, I wish they would focus more on their core business than PopOS and Comsic and whatever else they are working on.
I just want better hardware from them.
@JayLittle @eugenialoli Sent a Pangolin back last year because of trackpad issues. Didn't stop working, just felt and sounded like one piece of metal tapping another.
@Corb_The_Lesser @eugenialoli Yeah I'm sorry that you had that experience. Thankfully System 76 accepted my request to return the hardware and within a couple of weeks, gave me a full refund.
I have been buying from Linux laptop vendors for years (Tuxedo, Purism and System76) and I gotta be honest: My Lenovo beats them all.
1. All firmware can be easily updated using lvfs in any Linux distro.
2. Lenovo addresses Linux specific issues.
3. Sleep / Wake is perfect.
4. I can buy spare parts.
@Corb_The_Lesser @eugenialoli Disclaimer: I bought the late 2022 model of the P16s with 6850U and a 680M Integrated GPU, so Lenovo has had plenty of time to resolve any issues.
In addition I upgraded the battery on my unit from 57whr to 82whr. Then I purchased a backup keyboard replacement for it as the keyboard is always the first thing to go on my laptops it seems.
I look forward to using this thing for years.
@JayLittle My experience with S76 was the same. Full refund, no hassles. Nice company.
Aren't all Linux laptop vendors selling OEM hardware from folks like Clevo?
@Corb_The_Lesser Sadly yes. Though in the case of the S76 Pangolin I believe it comes from another OEM... Endoor or something?
@eugenialoli I tend to agree more with your perspective than the hype train I more commonly see, but I'm somewhere in the middle. I wasn't in the S76 world when Pop! first released, but I imagine they'll take a similar tack as then: the default DM and greeter will support both COSMIC and GNOME and many users will be directed to use GNOME when their use case is not yet supported well by COSMIC. They are their community of devs are not dumb, don't rule out clever backwards compat solutions.
All that hype is because cosmic is written in rust.
It's been repeating so many times the mantra of `memory safety` that most people think that anything in rust is stable and safe by nature, no matter the state of the project
@visone @eugenialoli I think this is one of the biggest mistakes people make when evaluating the #rustlang hype.
The memory safety is really just circumstantial to most people that write Rust. The actual community hype revolves around just how easy it is to write scalable, maintainable, and performant software when compared to things like C.
It’s the main reason so many things are (so quickly) rewritten in Rust. The language makes it easy once you learn it.
Maybe for a dev who understand the pros and cos of each language but for the rest of mortals is just the highlight....
Yeah my main point is that it makes software easier to write though. Even on big projects it’s found to be easier than GoLang.
This article from Google shows that their C++ devs felt 2x+ more productive even in the first 4 months of learning Rust. https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/31/rust_google_c/
So I wouldn’t be surprised if Cosmic destroys some of the DE lifecycle expectations just because of its convenience in development.
But that doesn't mean that a new project is ready for produccion just after it's first alpha, a new DE build from the gound up no less, even if it's written in rust . And that was the meaining of my comment
@visone Agreed. I wasn’t trying to imply that it was. Just meant to elaborate that the hype is only there on the product level because historically (only over the last few years or so) it’s been shockingly easy to rewrite existing C libraries and entire subsystems in Rust that so many things have been. Leading to many companies and Open Source projects completely rewriting their entire code base in Rust.
@eugenialoli Agreed. What's nice about it is that they are doing the work to mature the #rust ecosystem into a good option for coding GUIs.
@eugenialoli
There are two corrections to make here.
First, this is not branded as an alpha yet. The first alpha release will be at the end of May in the form of a Pop!_OS 24.04 image.
Second, the expected release timeframe is not "by summer", but at the end of summer, or soon after.
See the System76 blog for monthly updates on COSMIC. These and other items were mentioned there. https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-more-alpha-more-fun
@eugenialoli Also, third party developers have already started building applets and apps with libcosmic.
@mmstick The point remains that users expect the DE to be a daily driver by this year (some believe it to be summer), while reality is always different in such situations. A DE needs to mature first, and that takes a lot of time.
@eugenialoli Development is currently ahead of schedule. I don't see why it wouldn't be ready. Time is an arbitrary and meaningless metric for maturity. It will release when it is ready.
@mmstick But I agree with you on this. What I don't agree with is the many users who post left and right on youtube, twitter and lemmy as if Cosmic would be ready for their use case this year. I'm talking about THEIR crazy expectations, not S76's.
@eugenialoli By that logic, GNOME still isn't mature after all these years because it doesn't meet everyone's expectations. So many extensions upon extensions to bend it into a somewhat suitable workflow.
@mmstick Semi-agreed on that. In fact, it was going to be my next post here. Gnome sucks with its defaults and requires extensions that break all the time to make it suitable.
However, Gnome is mature in terms of what it wants to be, its API is mature for example. GTK is mature too. Its code is mature. So it's not an apples to apples comparison with cosmic and what I'm trying to say here.
@eugenialoli Given that COSMIC will not release until it is what we want it to be, and GNOME is always changing what they want in their UI every 6 months, I dismiss the notion that it will not be mature.
@mmstick I dismiss the notion that gnome changes their ui every 6 months. They have been boneheaded for 10+ years now to provide a mobile UI to desktop users. Their changes are miniscule (just enough to break extensions).
@eugenialoli The ongoing GTK4 and libadwaita-fication of core applications has been a very drastic change just within the last year or so.
The quick settings update was also a big change, as well as horizontal workspaces and defaulting to the overview on login.
GNOME 46 released with experimental support for VRR, and still lacks support for DRM leasing and a number of useful Wayland protocols. GTK4 lacks subpixel rendering and wlr-layer-shell protocol support. So is it really mature?
@eugenialoli The fact that extensions still break every six months already says it doesn't have a stable API for creating applets with.
Meanwhile, COSMIC does already support VRR and DRM leasing. Fractional scaling is supported by the toolkit and compositor, including scaling below 100%. The toolkit supports wlr-layer-shell as all applets are built with it, which is a stable API to build for. It even supports subpixel glyph rendering.
So in some ways, COSMIC is more mature.
@mmstick You speak of flashy modern features, not about nitty gritty every day usability of how the whole thing comes together. We're not talking about the same thing. Are you trying to obfuscate my arguments sideways?
The *majority* of users don't care about VRR, DRM, or even fractional scaling. They care about their file manager being able to right click and open a root terminal there (just an example). The SIMPLE STUFF is what makes the difference when trying to adopt a new DE. Not VRR.
@eugenialoli Quite the opposite. I am correcting your mistaken assumptions here. The defensiveness towards legitimate facts leads me to doubt that you are acting in good faith. It was already suspicious that you used a screenshot of a mockup from the blog instead of your own.
Nautilus does not support opening a terminal unless installing an extension. If you had actually tried COSMIC, you would have known that it does already provide an option to open a terminal.
@mmstick The open a new terminal was only an example to illustrate what I'm talking about. My point was that it's the small things that determine the fate of a DE, not the flashy things. As for gnome not supporting what I mentioned, what else is new? Gnome sucks in many ways. That's why we're looking past that and towards other DEs. My post was, again, towards users who think everything will be great by summer already. My experience is that it will take a few years AFTER the official release.
@eugenialoli It's a poor example that gives the impression that it is not implemented. And once again, you are mistakenly assuming that COSMIC is releasing by summer, which is not correct. Honestly, your experiences with other desktops don't matter. Those desktops are not COSMIC, and were not developed by our team.
@mmstick You are putting words in my mouth. I never said that *I* believed that it will be released by summer. My post was a reaction on *various* comments on youtube and Lemmy in the last couple of months. A lot of people are expecting Cosmic to run high THIS year (most of them, by summer!). And so I posted to caution them that it takes time to mature a DE and a new API.
@mmstick Does your DE have a fingerprint reader setup tool? Controls for keyboard lights? Can the file manager connect to a local Win or Mac network? Does it have a good bluetooth front-end, and a way to deal with phones? A UI to start/stop services, login items, and modify users and groups? All the while their UI is consistent from app to app?
That's the stuff needed for a DE to be mature. VRR etc is welcome, but it's not a top priority. It's just a way to market it further. But not the base.
@eugenialoli GNOME does not have native support for KDE Connect, and it does not support controlling keyboard brightness. It doesn't have a UI for managing system services. And the UI consistency is a weird statement to make.
The COSMIC files app is using gvfs, so it will support connecting to remote file systems. Keyboard brightness controls are already implemented and functional. The UI is consistent between apps already (same toolkit after all). Other things will come in due time.
I agree with this, GNOME desktop as a whole looks like it lacks a sense of direction: new technologies come out of nowhere only to disappear into thin air a few years later, changes get introduced to underlying lower-level things and sometimes breaking changes — it looks more like a testing ground for ideas of a myriad of people rather than something mature. Here on the other hand — the fact that Alacritty (which is a great and mature terminal emulator) was picked as a base for terminal alone indicates that very sound choices are being made. And the fact that Rust was picked as language shows, like it was already said above, that it will allow you to implement things properly in a relatively short time.
It is true that user experience is very different from the technological base — but it's an ongoing process and it's better when it's built on top of solid foundation, not on something that remains freeform perpetually.
I'm not a typical DE user — far from it in fact: just give me a good term like Alacritty and something simple to manage windows like Sway and I'm all set, but I've heard good things about how System 76 approaches user experience, so I'm looking forward to what you come up with in COSMIC.
@eugenialoli You can test it out yourself easily on Fedora: https://ostechnix.com/install-cosmic-desktop-environment-fedora/ A lot of the settings show "TODO" but already you can be surprised how pleasant it already is, even before reaching alpha.