Why dont they focus on hardware and drivers?
The last thing we need is another DE
I can’t wait to try the fedora spin
I tried this out for fun a few releases ago. It was a mess. I’ve kind of lost track on why this is even a thing anymore, but anyone involved want to weigh in?
Its in alpha, of course its a mess 😅
My experiences with pop haven’t been amazing (just always ran into small quirks and issues that shouldnt be a thing, but I haven’t messed with it all that much), but I’m pretty happy for there to be another big polished desktop environment with resources behind it, I think it makes the linux ecosystem better :)
Its written in Rust, is a completely new code base so not held back by tech debt, and is a clean DE while still being fairly customizable even now.
I personally don’t care why system76 felt the need to code a new DE from scratch, Im just glad they did it. It has given us a whole new ecosystem of GUI toolkits, apps, etc. for linux written in Rust.
Give it a try. We are close to being finished. I don’t even know why anyone would think this isn’t a thing.
i think COSMIC is shaping up amazing and that you and your team are doing an amazing job, for what it’s worth
It’s predominantly a thing because System76 wants full control over the software that they ship on their systems.
Something I understand completely tbh - it’s risky having the success of your business being dependent on another entity’s software. Probably even moreso when Gnome is pretty notorious for having a desktop workflow that’s very different to what you’d traditionally see, and that’s controversial, potentially even alienating to some customers. So I’d probably want that control too.
When they used Gnome, they had to compromise, and in many cases, neither of them wanted to.
Over time, things became hostile between them. And to be honest, System76 were the more hostile of the two, IMO.
One of the more bizarre things to happen was System76 identifying and resolving bugs, applying them in PopOS, choosing not to upstream them to Gnome (twattish, IMO, but that’s their right), but where it really crossed a line IMO was System76 staff going onto bugtrackers and forum threads, advertising that XYZ was fixed in PopOS, but not in Gnome, because they actually cared about users. Quite a cynical marketing strategy.
Another frustrating point was a Gnome developer liking PopOS’s tiling implementation, then contacting PopOS to see if they’d be interested in collaborating on a similar - but dumbed down - implementation to use upstream. S76 refused to work with them, and fair enough, Gnome certainly isn’t entitled to help from S76, but afterwards S76 on multiple occasions said Gnome simply didn’t want more advanced tiling or were hostile to the idea- something clearly not true since Gnome expressed an interest.
When there was design changes to Gnome 40, Jeremy Stroller of S76 became angry and said he “didn’t consent” to these changes, as if Gnome should be ran by System76, not the Gnome developers themselves.
To be honest, almost all of it comes down to Jeremy Stroller specifically. And even System76 seems to have quietly accepted that, as he has moved away from OS work to firmware work.
But I’m getting quite off topic…
When I’ve tried the PopOS alphas, it was still janky, but I’m sure it’ll be far better in future, it’s an alpha after all, and they’re undertaking a huge job. Some of it seems really cool, and I always love fresh projects that are free of legacy cruft. I’m not sure it’s for me, though.
That’s honestly a very revisionist version of history. Unfortunately I’m too tired to do a proper rebuttal to it. We have made many upstream contributions to GNOME. There has never been an instance of refusal to upstream anything. There has been instances of upstream not being interested in our contributions though. But that’s how things go when you have creative differences with an upstream, or have technical contributions which aren’t of interest to upstream’s use cases. Keep in mind that just because a downstream makes something cool and interesting, it doesn’t automatically mean that creation fits in with upstream’s vision for their project. Hence why there’s hundreds of gnome-shell extensions that aren’t built into GNOME.
It’s not revisionist at all? There’s proof of all of this.
We have made many upstream contributions to GNOME.
I never said S76 hadn’t made any. I’m sure plenty have been made.
There has never been an instance of refusal to upstream anything.
Yes there has.
https://www.tumblr.com/system76/185276928258/system76-news-a-may-with-zing
Fixes
We’ve updated the youtube-dl package to a newer version. This package, maintained by Debian and Canonical, is used for downloading videos from YouTube. Changes made by Google to the YouTube API had recently broken this package in the Ubuntu repositories, hence the update.
Sounds good, right? Yeah, it is. Except:
– they didn’t report the bug in launchpad
– they didn’t send their patch/fix to launchpad
– they didn’t get in touch with Ubuntu/Canonical about fixing the issue
These things would’ve benefited everyone, but S76 chose not to.
But it gets worse. They did an upload in their overlay PPA with the description:
‘ * Backport to Pop!_OS because Ubuntu is too slow.’
Why needlessly shit on another project like that when you could just submit the patch to upstream, or at least file a bug report? Stabbing the back of upstream like that isn’t friendly.
There are multiple cases of conduct like this.
There has been instances of upstream not being interested in our contributions though.
Of course, but I never really brought that into doubt. I alluded to it when I said Gnome were sometimes unwilling to compromise.
But don’t take my criticism of some of System76’s actions as hate. Especially not when the bulk of it comes from one person. I used PopOS for a long while and enjoyed it, and I hope PopOS, Cosmic, and S76 in general succeeds.
Your link demonstrates the exact opposite. GNOME rejected a patch for disabling mouse acceleration profiles, and I then ported that patch to Pop!_OS. It was often the case that I merged third party patches into Pop!_OS that were either rejected by GNOME, or were in an actively-open PR. In all instances where contributions could be upstreamed that we worked on personally, pull requests were given to the appropriate projects. And it is the case that many such instances were merged into GNOME, such as the keyboard settings page redesign. Our team has submitted many contributions to GTK, GNOME, and other projects over the years, so to smear us for not contributing upstream is incredibly deceitful.
Issues with youtube-dl being outdated are constantly reported on Launchpad, and are still an issue to this day because YouTube keeps changing the API. It was reported at that time as well. In fact, I have submitted several patches upstream to Ubuntu through Launchpad over the years, but unfortunately they typically go straight into limbo because developers rarely notice them, and it’s difficult to get their attention. It’s usually better to go straight to the upstream developer to get those changes merged there, and therefore the issue will be fixed in the next release of Ubuntu when they package the updated software. If Canonical is interested in any of the work we have done in Pop!_OS, they are also free to take from our GitHub repositories. It’s all open source, after all.
It speaks to me that you have certain intentions and motivations in your speech to paper over the good we’ve done over the years to focus on small nit picks. Nitpicking an obscure debian changelog that no one reads and was never presented to the user is a very poor argument. I was frustrated at the time because youtube-dl kept breaking and we kept getting issue reports on it. I was unable to get any response from Canonical, so I fixed it myself in Pop. I haven’t written anything in the debian changelog fields since then.
The link doesn’t display the exact opposite.
GNOME rejected a patch for disabling mouse acceleration profiles
We weren’t talking about mouse acceleration profiles. As I am now saying for the third time, I never said S76 didn’t try to upstream anything, or that Gnome would accept everything.
It is a fact that in that youtube-dl example, S76 fixed a bug for their own project, didn’t alert, raise a bug report, or submit a patch to upstream. It is also a fact that they then, twice, mocked upstream for not having that fix in place.
It is also a fact that that was not the only occasion of this happening.
My point has never been that S76 contributed nothing, or that upstream devs were willing to accept 100% of what S76 would send their way. I feel I made that clear.
It speaks to me that you have certain intentions and motivations in your speech to paper over the good we’ve done over the years to focus on small nit picks.
Please, let’s be civil. Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not saying S76 are bad or evil, I’m not trying to present you or your employer in a bad light. I used PopOS, and I’ve tested Cosmic a bunch of times because it’s interesting, I even wished System76 future success. There is zero hate here.
I was explaining a few of the tension points between S76 and upstream projects that came to public attention.
Nitpicking an obscure debian changelog that no one reads and was never presented to the user is a very poor argument.
It’s not nitpicking, it was a needlessly hostile remark towards upstream. It doesn’t matter if only a small amount of end users saw it, that doesn’t mean it’s not a petty remark. And end users aren’t the only people that matter, I doubt the upstream devs appreciated being ridiculed for an issue they weren’t even made aware of.
I was unable to get any response from Canonical, so I fixed it myself in Pop
S76 never contacted canonical. No bug reports or fixes were sent their way. The first they heard of it was when S76 publicly mocked them for not having the fix.
And as I said, there’s nothing wrong with fixing it yourself. That’s good. It’s the not raising a bug report to upstream, then making snide remarks about them not fixing it that I take issue with.
Again, I want to reiterate, because you seem to think I have bad intent: I do not. I like the project. But that doesn’t mean I think everyone has always been perfect. People are people. We’re human. We make mistakes and it’s fine to acknowledge that. Me doing so about a couple of S76 employee’s actions is not an attack.
I don’t know how you can keep telling me that I never contacted Canonical even though I did. Nor did anyone ever publicly mock Canonical. You are putting words in our mouths. So much contradictory and hyperbolic nonsense here. Let me guess: you read a certain hyperbolic hit piece from a Chris Davis—one of the most prominent libadwaita and stopthemingmyapp developers—whom had a personal axe to grind with us because of many heated online arguments with him over the petition, theming, and libadwaita. He created a hit piece to influence public perception of the company and intentionally used the GNOME blog to reach the widest audience for his vendetta. Even though if you dig through the details his statements are weak, if not outright false. To make matters worse, GNOME never addressed that personal blog post hosted on their website, even though we had been sponsoring and sometimes hosting GNOME events for 10 years. Leading many to conclude that this was the voice of GNOME, even if internally it was not. This is what happens if you only read the story from one side without putting equal weight on the other.
I don’t even think S76 is big enough to make complaints, honestly.
I’m curious about how this all came about, because if they wanted control of their software, the desktop is certainly not the first place to start. Misguided is the word I’d use if that was their goal.
I do want to understand the “why” of this, but also the “who”. Do they have a team of developers working on this, or just like…one guy?
There is a whole team working on COSMIC. Paid, full-time developers, UX designers, and a QA team.
They initially made a GNOME extension that contained their theming and an (optional) tiling for windows. Also some GTK apps, such as their app store frontend.
I still use it daily on my gaming pc (Pop!_OS 22.04) and it sucks. Slow, unresponsive, janky. And this is an extension that they had been maintaining for years. Apparently GNOME devs don’t really consider extension developers and it was like building on quicksand for the Pop team.
For better or worse, they made a decision to build their own fast, responsive COSMIC DE due to these frustrations with GNOME.
I am still on the old 22.04 with GNOME, but already started using the new COSMIC Store app GUI last year.
It is a HUGE leap from the old Pop!_Store and feels great.
The rest of the DE is probably not ready yet, otherwise they wouldn’t call it Alpha.
Oh and apparently they’ve made it really easy to brand the whole desktop env and are hoping for more orgs and companies to adopt it.
This is the actual truth of the matter. COSMIC is the result of many years of planning and developments in response to customer requests in Pop!_OS. Over time, the COSMIC extensions for GNOME diverged in UX to the point where it was untenable to maintain long-term, and impossible to make further progress without forking. We were going to create a modern desktop environment in Rust from the ground up regardless of whether disputes happened with GNOME Foundation / Core members, even if disagreements helped to accelerate that goal.
Today we have built a highly modular desktop environment in Rust from the ground up that anyone can use as a platform for building an operating system with thanks to the flexibility of the Wayland layer-shell protocol. You may mix and match any arrangement of layer-shell applets in any order. You can even swap out the cosmic session for a different desktop environment’s session, and vice versa load another desktop environment’s session inside of cosmic-comp.
Distribution and user theming is also significantly improved over GTK with programmatic generation of themes—automatically adapting colors at runtime to the most ideal contrasting color values via OKLCH and other related algorithms—which distributions can use to customize to their preferred branding, and app developers can freely adopt without needing to worry about user themes breaking their apps. Users also get the convenience of generating their own custom themes with COSMIC Settings, even if that means creating an abomination of conflicting colors.
We really wanted to improve upon the developer UX for Rust GUIs by creating libcosmic, and have succeeding in doing so with a toolkit based on Iced that uses Elm’s Model-View-Update paradigm. It is so much easier to build apps and applets with libcosmic compared to gtk4-rs. I have a lot of testimonials from developers who have built apps and applets with it. Some of which have also contributed a lot to cosmic and libcosmic, even if they had little or no Rust/programming experience previously.
Also, while it may be alpha, it is very usable. It is only in alpha so long as all features aren’t implemented yet. You may have to supplement a GNOME app here or there. Some bugs are also expected, but it works great otherwise. In many ways better than the 22.04 environment currently offered.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Distribution and user theming is also significantly improved over GTK with programmatic generation of themes—automatically adapting colors at runtime to the most ideal contrasting color values via OKLCH and other related algorithms—which distributions can use to customize to their preferred branding, and app developers can freely adopt without needing to worry about user themes breaking their apps. Users also get the convenience of generating their own custom themes with COSMIC Settings, even if that means creating an abomination of conflicting colors.
I’ve themed my 22.04 install to death – literally – as one would expect from a first Linux install. I’ve been clicking through multiple GUIs where only the checkboxes, dropdowns and radio buttons showed, zero labels or descriptions. Most recently the Raspberry Pi Imager.
