KDE Developer talks about whats good and bad from System76's Cosmic DE

8 days ago by cannedtuna to c/linux

It's been almost a year since I've last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself:

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/52814919

From: https://www.osnews.com/...

cannedtuna 20 points 8 days ago

A pretty good write up on the cool features of Cosmic from the perspective of a KDE dev. Found it to be very interesting and informative

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panda_abyss 10 points 8 days ago

I might have to try cosmic again, last time I used it it was too buggy, but looks much improved since a year ago.

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rozodru 10 points 8 days ago

I tried Cosmic 1.9 on NixOS the other day. it's fine. The tiling toggle is very nice (always has been in all honesty) and is probably the key motivation to use it. sure you can tile in KDE or GNOME but it's janky on both regardless of which method you use. And setting up predesignated tiling spaces on KDE for each workspace is annoying but it's understandable.

Cosmic does have a lack of theme options similar to GNOME but in a way that makes sense due to GTK/QT applications. There's really no point in trying to go ham on customizing the look of Cosmic as it's going to look like a mess regardless.

It has the typical Wayland quirks/bugs. Keyboard focus is still a mess on wayland so it's not really the fault of System76 (even though KDE has managed to pretty much solve that issue). the cosmic file manager is decent, the terminal is crap, the text editor there's no point. their app store works fine.

If you want a very simple DE that is fairly stable and has by far the best tiling option on any DE currently available then you can't go wrong with Cosmic. it works. it's simple. it pretty much stays out of your way. it's not flashy it just gets the job done. If you're someone who loves Vim style navigation then you'll adore cosmic as all the keybind defaults are essentially Vim. when I used it I didn't have to change any keybinds which is VERY nice. I like it.

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ZkhqrD5o 4 points 8 days ago

Hopefully they engage with the community by now.

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artyom 4 points 8 days ago

@niccolove@fosstodon.org please for the love of my scorched retinas, bring back dark mode.

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jahtnamas 3 points 7 days ago

yeah even dark reader isn't working right on there, it just makes dark on dark

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lambalicious -12 points 7 days ago

One would ask KDE devs to do some self-reflection and look at the use of AI in KDE, before talking about what other people "do wrong".

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cannedtuna 8 points 7 days ago

…so you came straight to the comments based off the headline?

It’s a great article that basically spends the entire time praising Cosmic for all the great things it’s doing. It does contrast Cosmic with KDE because it’s written by a dev who did things like the frosted glass feature and built a bunch of popular themes for KDE, but they really sell you on Cosmic. After reading it I’m considering giving it a second try, and I’m on KDE currently.

Seriously, go read the article. It’s solid.

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lambalicious -8 points 7 days ago

Not my fault if the title lies and there's actually nothing bad about Cosmic, but that's not my point. My point is before talking bad about others, take a look at yourself.

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auzy1 4 points 7 days ago

Real developers always compare themselves with competitors. It's standard operating practice...

Our company does it all the time.

And, we always love hearing feedback about our faults too (particularly from technical people), as it allows us to identify and improve.

That being said, I'm not sure if you've actually read the article, because, they're not really talking bad at all.. It's super positive.

And, I'd even argue its BETTER than positive considering that KDE was founded in 1996, and Cosmic only started development in 2021. Most projects struggle to get off the ground (thats 90% of the effort), and to have other competitors praise you for so many things, after such a short time, I'd LOVE to be on the receiving end. Even if we disagree.

When I started a major project in 2003 which went frontpage in a lot of news sites quickly, I loved to get technical opinions. If I hadn't of been bullied so badly by (the then) toxic part of the linux community at the time, I would have continued with it. The good news is that projects like Ubuntu adapted something similar to what I was developing, so it wasn't a waste.

Fortunately, the community has massively changed, and its a lot more positive these days (except for a small number of people calling everything slop).

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jahtnamas 3 points 7 days ago

you read the title entirely wrong, mate

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