Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment

A lot of shallow "but the buttons!" comments here... no need to be so negative.

This is the first alpha release of a full new desktop environment, built on a new GUI toolkit (based on Iced) and a new Wayland compositor, together with a suite of applications, all built from scratch in Rust .... give it some time.

Most interesting to me is the integrated tiling support.

I've been on i3/sway for many years, but a lean, lightweight and fast DE with tiling as a core feature and full proper keyboard navigation support everywhere might get me to switch. There are times where you really miss a proper DE over the hacky patchwork that a custom setup with a niche Wayland compositor entails.

I see a slightly restyled Mate desktop environment. Nothing really new, some marginal advantage like a tiny bit more visible window focus. Scrollbars still invisible. Buttons even harder to distinguish from not-buttons, and not clear how a disabled button can look when everything is so graywashed. Generally, looks like another designers take on style, not usability.

I have been following Cosmic since it's inception and Pop_Os! as well. For context, I was very against the Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 transition at the time because it destroyed so many useful and (at the time) did not replace them with an alternative. System76 is very hit-and-miss with their hardware (it's often pretty bad) but they are getting better at software over time.

As a Linux user or a developer, Cosmic is not something I can touch right now. I'm super excited for the future of it and they are making a lot of waves. They are giving Gnome the kick they need in making a functional desktop for real users. The fact that Gnome still comes out of the box with no real solution for multitasking (dock, bar, something) other than to randomly hit the super key or jam your mouse into a corner is insane. Every distro and 99% of users are installing some kind of multitasking aid (you don't count if you're using a tiling window manager)

I don't know all the specifics, but they also seem to be putting a realistic alternative to some of the plans, protocols, etc. Right now we have Gnome and KDE. KDE mostly does their own stuff and works with the FreeDesktop groups. Gnome works with them too, but more in a way of "here is what Gnome is doing you'll follow suite" kind of way. Having Cosmic as an option for people who want things closer to Gnome than KDE but don't want to deal with the "Gnome problems" will be good.

Look at how the icons at the bottom have almost zero margin to the overly rounded sides.

Why is it so hard for anyone outside of Apple to make a visually appealing GUI? It just requires a little bit of taste and sense of aesthetics. I am baffled that this hasn't happened yet. The closest thing so far is probably ElementaryOS.

I see nothing really "different" or "better" here, in terms of visuals or ease of use.

To that end... I don't see the point in imitating a desktop experience that is pretty stagnant and moving in the wrong direction (macOS; I'm a user myself) when there are the decades that preceded Y2K that could be mined for much more usable an interesting desktop experiences. There's BeOS, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST various windowing managers, OS/2, Windows 9x, the list goes on...

I still use Mac System 7.x from the mid-1990s which with a few choice extensions is basically equivalent to modern macOS windowing experience. And of course that goes back to the early 1980s with the prior System software and even the late 1970s with Apple Lisa development.

Go further! Be more daring!

All of the Linux desktop environments feel like thin skins compared to what we had in the past.

I keep hoping somebody will implement OS/2's Workplace Shell for Linux. Rexx would be nice too but I suspect most people would rather stick with a scripting language they already know.

https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/The_WorkPlace_Shell,...

https://komh.github.io/os2books/pdf/OS2_REXX.pdf

A lot of negative takes here.

My understanding is that the point of developing cosmic is to enable distros and users to address UI issues in the first place, since GNOME is too limiting.

One cool feature that I didn’t see described very well here is Cosmic allows you to group windows in tabs, but the tabs can be different applications. Kind of an interesting idea that the OS/window manager is what should be responsible for tab support, not each application.

So many negative takes here. Does it look perfect? No, it's an alpha. I think the most important thing is that it's built on a solid base that will allow it to grow into a really really great DE.

Looks like all the UIs are made with iced, a new UI library. My question, is this missing all the accessibility features found in uikits like Gtk and Qt? Does each app respect my system theme?

[Posted different version under a now flagged comment]

I would love a completely customizable desktop system.

Be able to select different window arrangers, docks, etc., for each workspace.

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Thinking bigger, something useful would be persistent and named "worksets" of workspaces, that can be closed and reopened. One workset at a time, or multiple.

It would help to be able to view/edit/access the same docs and tools in multiple windows, across workspaces, with different sizes and placements. Think the same Word doc, open in different workspaces, with disparate sizes.

I would optimize worksets for every possible context: crafting areas, development projects, regular tasks, etc.

The result would be dozens of worksets, that let me return to useful contexts months or even years between visits. So the workset manager should allow for hierarchical organization.

And I would want worksets to sync across devices, along with my regular file and app syncing.

Yup. That's it. That is all I want!

I wish ChromeOS's desktop environment gets ported and reimplemented across mainstream Linux and we're all freed from the GNOME/KDE GTK/Qt hell. It's just sad that Google's Linuxes (Android and ChromeOS) can do things like HDR, VRR, decent fractional scaling, decent font rendering, etc. but desktop Linux is still starved for these things to this day.

I am sad that they discontinued their Pop Shell gnome extension.

I use GNOME but with the animations completely turned off. That combined with the tiling shell feels really snappy and good. I am really considering forking that extension and also visually improving it a little (not a fan of their design language, though I like the modern adwaita style of gtk/gnome apps).

It's a beautiful DE. I have Pop!_OS 22.04 running in my Helios 300 PH315-53 w/NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB card. The laptop itself has horrible BIOS firmware, though. COSMIC works great, for the most part, with Pop!_OS with the exception of two issues. One is an Nvidia Driver issue, e.g. a stopped nvidia-power-services, which I resolved by rolling back to the nvidia-470 driver. The other thing that I have not been able to figure out is how to enable the Places Menu Item in the top dock bar. I don't see a setting for it either in gnome-tweaks, extensions or main settings App. I wish there were a way to have that option available in Tweaks.

Cool. I personally will keep using KDE Plasma.

Is there a desktop version? Everything appears to be excessively big and padded, as if it were designed for a tablet.

Looks great. I'm very happy that they are letting me get rid of their ugly brown UI. I might switch back to POP for this.

As most software products, this is bad at explaining what this is. It takes quite a while to mention "linux"

Looks like generic-brand macOS. All that work but that can't find anyone to give it a distinctive look?

It looks like Gnome, with the same CSD philosophy, wich is a bad sign

This is what has ruined linux desktop to me

Thanks (to whomever) for making this work on NixOS and including instructions for that!

Title: is it new though?

Why rounded corners? Why a bookmarks bar at the bottom instead of a proper taskbar? Can we please stop copying MacOS?

I bet it's going to do the "pop out when you hover the mouse near an edge" thing that MacOS does that I hate too.

Neat, any word on getting this working on Arch. I use Majaro now and KDE is okay, but I'd like to try something new.

It's very... Gnome-ish...

This looks good for an alpha. The days of Compiz Fusion and crazy desktop gizmos are far behind. I'd love Linux to be a viable gaming platform, I'd totally use this. Steam OS is a step in the right direction but nowhere near the flexibility of Windows yet.

(Please don't try to convince me otherwise. Good luck playing Fallout London on Linux, for example.)

Well... Honestly not much impressed, it's a design from another era.

For the present a desktop should be as "invisible" as possible, like old Ubuntu Unity desktop, a thin bar, a launcher, the rest search&narrow, menu included via the Unity HUD. Gnome SHell doing the opposite on purpose, copying the rest have just showcased another btrfs answer for zfs, or the reactionary behavior of some devs who refuse to operate "under the hood" instead in narcissistically in plain sight try to do their best to keep up an essentially deprecated model.

I think Cosmic could fit so well with DHH Omakub.

Disclaimer: (Incoming long rant - I was an early and often adopter of the S76 machines when I ran a dev team ~10 years ago - S76 Gazelle was my first full-time production linux-only laptop that I ran (I still have 2 of them, and they are bother broken because between model releases CLIO (the OEM) changed the screen interface connector so a dead screen on one laptop couldnt be moved to the other, and lots LOTS of internal screws would fall out an rattle around - and then S76 wanted a retarded amount $$ for a replacement power adapter - etc... and their service went poor as they grew (Hellow Penguin Computing) -- with that said:

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If you want to redo the desktop, this is a Fisher-Price level of "why should I care" -- HERE Are the features I want in a desktop redux - (ita ll about the WORKFLOWS - not the fricken applets/widgets (the applets idea is a pullover, even if they dont know it, from when Android was seeking to be a good desktop, rather than a tablet, like vision (hospital devices - could give a tech talk on this)...

But hear me out WORKFLOW or CONTEXTUAL desktopping:

I can have multiple desktops on any OS - with a click-swipe left or right I can have another desktop. Which is akin to switching a clear spot on the physical desk.

What I would want within a "new desktop environment" is that I can swap between my "coding" "gaming" "research" "kids-screen-time" "python rabbit hole" "AI Image gen" contexts... with a differing visual clues to which setting im contextualizing:

Imagine you boot to your primary "normal desktop" - its just like any OS' vanilla post-login experience. Blank, no apps open, grab a browser, open a file, go to email - whatever.

Now - I want to swap over to Context[0] - coding.

I switch to that context, I get a visual cue (sure we can load pretty backgrounds, but a subtle change to the overall visuals of the windows dressings switch showing me I am in that context - it would load appletts that give me a preset of context that important (I select a series of things to pre-load, such as "Open VS Code with these folders, and launch FF with this set of contextual tabs. From this context block reddit, [other sites] - and ssh to this machine, give me a widget that shows connections to [environment] etc - give me a summary history of previous commands I was running, current active procs within [context scpoe] etc -- so effectively I have my development desktop context available.

Then I switch to research and its opens the things I want for that - connections to whatever GPTs, rstudio/some BI tool... whateer - and a bucket of tabs and history that are appropriate.

Kids tab is a sandbox for the kids as I teach them certain things... Or a Cooking context thats related to all things cooking. has a timer widget, last recipes looked up etc...

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You get the idea.

(I wrote a white paper about this ages ago - and attempted to recruit some buddies from Goog multiple times to make the contextual computing relevant once motorola came out with that phone that could be docked with data (My white paper on the subject was written in ~2002-4 (cant recall now) -- which was that you held your environment in your mobile and you could walk up to any empty compute/gpu/KVM - slot your phone there, it is the key - it opens your context from device, and cloud, and gave your the local resources of GPU/CPU/KVM whereever you needed it. No storage on the local HW... but you could take advantage of it

(aside: A great alt model that is a modern version would be able to walk up to a heavy GPU with pre-loaded giant models - and you can plug into them for context and run your stuff locally against them and get your results - but walk away from them (think Hot-Desking but for big-ass-GPUs -- I havent thought too much about this - but its an effective analogy for when I first wrote about this)

Anyway -- What I want is a revolutiuon in HOW we see the desktop.

The analogy for a desktop, a physical desktop is dated -- now its "conscious compute contexts" -- Where the whole environment shifts to support what one is attempting to do.

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This really sounds like it could serve the above.

The sharing it with friends:: or team members -- you should be able to invite folks to a context - such that you can have a multi-user context whereby you send an @COSMIC link to a context to a colleague over slack - they load the link, and it effectively launches a "docker" context of the environment to the other user... now they have all apps and deps to jump fully into the context.

This would be useable for teaching, guiding, troubleshooting, development, collaboration...

Set a master context and its all in a repo - and when other users need to upstream a dependency to the context they simply install whatever within their context and it acts like PR to the context owner. It allows for ephemeral installatino of dependencies - and you can tick for perm inclusion - else they evap on leaving context - yet the history of the ephemerals is kept incase you want to resurrect them/include them in the master context settings.

from a window management aesthetic -- KILL ALL WHITESPACE -- meaning all the superflous padding. Stop making desktop buttons look like shit I should be using on a kiosk.

With all that said:

Im down to try it I will give it an honest go - and if any Sys76 folks are here - I still have my gazelles - and my ticket about you swapping out the connector on the same model of box still stands! Ill see if I can make an applet -- specifically I want a context applet that is imbued with RAG -- mayhaps building the applet on txtai libs so that my entire bash hist is txtAI rag'd ...

Ill try out COSMIC on a flagship OMEN 3070 gaming box and see how this works...

I really want to see if I can imbue (imbue was the name of my white paper from ~2002 on the subject) the workflows I would like...

(I've Forrest Gump'd through a lot of technical tides in my sordid life in Silicon Valley)

It sounds like the differentiator here is that it's modular for the purposes of creating unique branded experiences.

Is this in effect to position it as an Android alternative for applications in things like cars, etc?