Basically title, with System76 moving from gnome to their new rust built COSMIC environment what are your thoughts?
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I’m incredibly interested in COSMIC DE! For multiple different reasons, actually.
- Rust - I’m very interested to see how performant/memory-efficient this DE will be compared with other DEs. Also, I wonder how the Iced toolkit will evolve and be adopted in other projects.
- Benefits over GNOME - I’m looking forward to seeing how much out-of-box customizability and features come with COSMIC over GNOME (which I’m currently using).
- Maintainability going forward - Since the DE basically started from scratch and is using a much better language for robust software, I wonder how much easier and faster it would be to maintain the desktop environment. This potential improved maintainability could be huge in overtaking other DEs sometime soon.
I agree completely. I’m also thrilled for the HDR support in it.
How is rust more memory efficient than c or c++?
It’s not, perhaps they meant memory-safe?
The DE might be more memory efficient given the hindsight and freedom a fresh slate brings, but not strictly due to rust.
There’s several things that make Rust more ideal for writing software that makes efficient use of resources than C or C++.
One of these is how cumbersome it is to use tagged unions in C/C++. They’re integrated as a first class citizen in Rust in the form of enums, and both the standard library and all Rust projects as a whole utilize them extensively. An example would be the
Cow<'a, T>type. The compiler also has some clever tricks like zero-sized types which can reduce the size of types which contain them.On the surface, the borrowing and ownership model is useful for guaranteeing memory safety. Yet if you take that a step further, it’s the perfect tool for finely optimizing resource usage with confidence. In comparison, defensive programming practices are the norm in C and C++ because resource management is risky. So applications written in Rust are more likely to be better optimized.
And the GNOME project doesn’t just use C/C++ right? It uses Javascript for developing all sorts of components and Python for scripting/misc utilties. That’s what I meant by more memory-efficient.
Hey, do you have plans to open any communities into Lemmy?
We created https://kbin.social/m/pop_os
I haven’t been able to contact the owner of https://lemmy.ml/c/pop_os
If the author of the community isn’t responding, I believe you can pop a request over at https://lemmy.ml/c/community_requests to have it transferred to you.
A couple of months ago our company decided to standardise on only one GNU/Linux distro and they chose PopOS. While the default desktop is better then stocj GNOME it was still far away to what I am used from the powerful, featureful and customizable KDE Plasma so after about two weeks I switched to KDE Plasma (unfortunately they have an extremely old version in their repos, but still much better).
I can only guess that Cosmic will be on pair to their current improved GNOME but will still be way lacking compared to what even an old KDE Plasma offers. And I would also much more like to see if they put more attention to keeping more updated KDE Plasma and KDE software packages in their repo. Even for Cosmic I think they would be much better of basing it on the extremely flexible and configurable KDE Plasma base and make it a heavy modification of this.
There is a community KDE spin in the works, with a more up to date plasma experience. https://fosstodon.org/@pop_os_kde_spin
What do you prefer on KDE? I’ve only tried once and found it felt messy and overcomplicated compared to COSMIC. Maybe that’s just the Mac user in me wanting fewer choices haha
I find it really fun to just customise everything
Basically how much more features it has and you miss in any other desktop. Especially in macOS, which we were forced to use at old company, I struggled with missing stuff and utterly stupid window manager. Yeah KWin window manager is especially nice in KDE Plasma. But also how much it has this LEGO-bricks like way of creating the desktop itself. All the desktop is basically constructed from small widgets and small widget containers which can behave in a very different way. So widgets (Plasmoids) are not only an addon to add to the wallpaper, they actually build up the entire desktop. And by this you can really make the desktop behave very close to what every individual person wants. Sure there are some presets that can emulate Windows or GNOME or macOS desktop, but yeah you can reconstruct that and have it your way. The similar story is there also with the apps GNOME/GTK versions usually just are to limited in functionality as far as my taste goes and I end up missing way too many.
P.S. I remembered another thing. Despite having more features and all KDE Plasma is also performing faster and is using less resources on the computers. So just another thing I like more.
Nice, thanks!
Personally, I would have preferred if they would have embraced KDE instead and dedicated resources to improve KDE even further. KDE is pretty darn good already, especially over the last year or so with all the bugfixes and feature improvements.
In any case I am happy System76 is moving away from Gnome at least, and coming up with a full-featured DE of their own rather than having to maintain hacky extensions on top of Gnome to make it usable. As a bonus, the Iced toolkit should see improvements and perhaps become the goto toolkit for Rust GUI development.
I welcome new and innovative DEs. I am tired of how some organizations handle things. I must however, acknowledge that with every additional major DE comes further fragmentation. COSMIC seems to really care and for that reason I am rooting for them. The negative effects, however, are always in the back of my mind.
I don’t think DE really causes too much fragmentation.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve never had something not run due to using cinnamon over kde.
Now, with flatpaks becoming more popular, programs should look the same across DEs. I know the design language will be different, but that’s basically how it is on Mac and windows already.
My perspective on fragmentation comes from that of a developer. It’s good that you’ve never had something not run due to DE choice, because we work hard to make sure that you can. It’s just hard to test all the different combinations and make sure they all work.
Thanks for the insight. I didn’t consider that.
Yeah same. I like the idea, the concept, and from their blog posts the execution. I just wonder if we will see an app community around rust/iced/slint or if we will be using other apps from other toolkits. (Which isn’t a bad thing, but an ecosystem is good)
My main gripe with most Linux DEs is inconsistent UI and lacking app ecosystem. For now, only GNOME is addressing these issues with GNOME Circle (I already like and use apps like Spot, Paper, Amberol, Warp, and others) while having a good-looking UI. Also, GNOME is the only DE with usable trackpad gestures. If COSMIC is going to use GTK4 for UI and implement trackpad gestures similar to these found in macOS or GNOME, it would be probably my main DE.
COSMIC is not using GTK. It has its own design language and toolkit built around the iced Rust library.
Gestures are a planned feature for cosmic-comp.
The only reason I use GNOME at all is the Pop Shell GNOME extension. They’re building that functionality into COSMIC, which is great. Long as the project doesn’t wither on the vine, I’m looking forward to taking it for a spin.
Just a clarification - it is based on GTK, right?
No, the new COSMIC will be built on rust and iced
I’m really in support of everything that System76 is doing. Outside of Framework I think they’re one of the more interesting enthusiast projects. I think what makes me particularly excited for Cosmic is that it will be under the GPL3 license, and that it will use GTK.
Likewise! Funny enough, my daily driver is a Framework laptop with Pop!_OS.
Me too, it’s a great combo with a few tweaks (for fingerprint support and power)!
I’ve implemented the fingerprint tweak among others, but what is this power tweak you speak of? ＼(◎o◎)↗
It will not be using GTK for first party applets and applications. COSMIC is being built with libcosmic, which is a cosmic-themed widget library built on top of iced. The design team also has a collaboration with Slint so that Slint can be used to make applications with the same look and feel as libcosmic.
I love the looks so far, and all of their ideas with it appeal to me. I used Plasma for a while for its customization, but felt that even the best tiling extensions were lacking. If COSMIC follows through on the tiling features, it’ll be a no-brainer for me.
Super excited for it! System76 does a lot of amazing work for the community, and I love what they’ve shown so far. I daily drive Pop OS on a pang12 system76 laptop with a Launch keyboard (bit of a fanboy haha)
It looks interesting and I’m excited to give it a spin
Pretty exited, I feel like it’s gonna be the KNOME I’ve always wanted to exist
I’m a big gnome fan. It’s been my DE for years back with v2. System76 have done a lot of hard work and I welcome more competition in the desktop space but I’m sticking with gnome.
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Rust is badass, GNOME is currently led by a group whose main activity has been to try to ruin the project as much as possible, and more desktop environments are always welcome in my book.
