From what I saw Cosmic has a lot of potential and looks pretty sleek too, right now I’m using KDE it’s a great desktop, but now that I have a second monitor it randomly crashes on me, I think I’ll switch to Cosmic when it reaches beta.
From a quick view, it mostly looks like ElementaryOS’s DE to me. What’s the big deal with Cosmic? I really want to know, sell it to me!
For me it is the language it’s written in: Rust. Now I can participate, fix bugs and implement new apps with the language I know the best.
Some people might also say less crashes, less vulnerabilities and all that, but for me the first part is the most important.
Yep, but QT’s object model and its being written in C++ makes it super cumbersome to use in Rust. GTK is better here due to it being written in C, but the direction it’s taking in GTK4 is not really great, and having a safe Rust UI toolkit is a huge win for the community.
Cosmic being fully Rust means I can just take one project from them, and immediately start working on it with cargo and all the familiar tools. It’s not as easy with C or C++ projects in Gnome and KDE.
I think it’s great we have some competition in this space, everybody wins.
Are you talking why for the user, or why it was developed? The main reason it exists is that System 76 like the Gnome desktop, but didn’t like stuff Gnome was doing, so they decided to make their own version from scratch in Rust. For a user, I don’t think there’s any real compelling reason to use it, especially not right now, unless you love Rust, or have the same feelings about Gnome that S76 did.
For me I’m interested in it for four main reasons:
a) It’s intuitive, even if you’ve never used Linux, while also being very customisable.
b) It’s new. The DE world at the moment is almost entirely Gnome and KDE, with some XFCE and Cinnamon. COSMIC adds to it with their own coat of paint and a very clear, professional outloom on it and clear goals.
c) It’s in Rust. I don’t know Rust, but I know it’s loved by the community and will bring in contributors as well as the bug-related stuff at compile time which is handy.
d) System76 needs to sell it. Normally I’m not a fan of companies being involved in my OS, but I like the way System76 does it: They make laptops that come pre-installed with Pop_OS! and then sell those, so while technically the hardware is their source of income they’ll have to improve their software in actually meaningful ways for it to be appealing to customers. One of the best and also worst things about the open source community IMO is that there’s a lot of very niche stuff- like how 7-zip supports selecting multiple items, compressing them, and then emailing the .zip all in one mouse click. Really cool for whoever wants to do that, but no one wants to do that.
elementary OS doesn’t even have a functioning desktop, you can’t even puts icons or folders on it let alone rearrange them its literally a glorified wallpaper with a dock. please tell me this isn’t the case for Cosmic
I actually really like not having icons on the desktop in gnome. It always ends up a collection of random garbage anyway after some time and Icd rather have that in my home directory. Now i can just press my keyboard shortcut to hide all windows and then I have a clean screen with nothing distracting me.
less functionality is bad. with a bit of gaslighting you can make anything seem like a design choice instead of admitting it’s hard to make a good and sustainable implementation for said functionality. but at least gnome has extensions and is customisable, Pantheon DE is a brick in comparison.
