COSMIC, System76’s Rust-based desktop that’s going to replace GNOME in Pop!_OS, is nearing its alpha release, and the Linux OEM has published another blog post detailing the latest progress it’s made. First and foremost, theming support has been further refined by adding support for theming GTK applications (both GTK3 and 4) and flatpak applications. If the user has enabled global themes, these themes will be applied automatically whenever selecting a theme to apply. Support for custom icon packs has also been added.
COSMIC now also has an application store, much like GNOME Software and KDE’s Discover, which also takes care of updating installed applications. You can now also drag windows from anywhere inside the window by holding down the super key, which is both a nice addition in general as well as a usability feature. The Settings application has also seen work, and gets a new keyboard settings panel, as well as various other smaller additions. COSMIC also now implements on-screen display toasts for things like changing volume and brightness, and plugging in power.
System76 isn’t the only one working on COSMIC – community members have implemented things like window snapping, touchpad gestures, thumbnail previews in the dock, and more. The community is also working on things like an emoi picker, and a fan control graphical user interface.
There’s a lot more in the blog post, so be sure to give it a read. I’m genuinely excited for COSMIC to hit the shelves, because I’m dying to try it out.
I’ve been following along the alpha (on Fedora). While it has promise, I feel they are trying their best to mimic the gnome expirience, and they are getting there. But “simple” things like the entire expirience being dependent on having a Vulkan support in your graphics card will severely hamper adoption (the fallback to Vulkan LLVMPipe is a horrible expirience).
This is an example of where we see if Cosmic is designed for the wider community or System76
Of course the first priority of System76 has with Pop!_OS in creating a distro for the computers they are selling (which have Vulkan support). They don’t make any money from people installing their distro on their personal systems. A distro that has a Rust based DE, is Wayland (/XWayland) only, and designed for Vulkan is a refreshing alternative in the Linux space. Moving away from certain legacy stuff and pushing forward is their contribution to the wider Linux community. There is already a million Linux distros for older systems so I think we are all set there.
Just a thought but maybe they should push further that way and license (or buy) codeweavers crossover and optimize and integrate it tightly in their distro (perhaps even restricted to a pro version of popos! dedicated to their pc offers). Obviously, it would not be 100% perfect but it would still be a nice addition for their users and since codeweavers is not open source and for closed source apps anyways, it could easily stay in a pro edition and help them differentiate it from the million distros and from the community version.
That would make sense for them to control the experience from hardware to software – like another famous company – and offers something more for their computers/customers.
thomas,
this would be anti-competitive, and has the potential to be disastrous for codeweavers and wine in the long run.
codeweavers is not just forking wine with crossover, but they are actually the top contributors to wine itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Julliard
https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/graphs/contributors
if at any point in the future, system76 gets “bored” with this project (trust me, it always happens), they will push aside the resources, and wine itself will start to wither. (or worse, will be taken up by another closed entity, like valve, which has their own agenda).
While true their priority is System76, we know a DE is a large undertaking and one that (i presume) they will want the community to assist with. Unity is a good example of a great DE that was limited to a single Distro. When you have pockets as deep/user base as large as Ubuntu had and its Still not cost-effective to maintain, System76 would have no chance.
Vulkan support isn’t there for Many modern chips like my AMD RyzenTM 7 7730U of my test machine. This is a 2023 released chip (granted a rebadge of a 2022 model). So we arn’t talking ancient hardware here. I’m all for drawing a line for legacy hardware, but chips still on sale from AMD seems a bit to high a bar if they want a community…
I think they would get a lot of converts if they implement a miller column file manager.
Like NeXTstep or macOS? Ya, that would be cool.
Great! But it’s another desktop environment with huge amounts of padding. So much wasted space on a 1920x display. I really don’t understand why.