Cosmic DE update: System76's new Linux desktop environment
blog.system76.com
blog.system76.com
Fancy Zones is fantastic on Windows, corner tiling is at least a thing in most Linux DEs, and then there’s Mac.
Same way window management worked in System 7. Maybe worse because there was at least a visible grab corner back then.
I’m not sure how people use their touchpads without middle click emulation either.
> I’m not sure how people use their touchpads without middle click emulation either.
Because macOS application doesn't need and not designed for it.
I don't see value in showing the other side of the fence when someone doesn't interested on the other side.
I'm also using KDE close to 15 years at this point, since 3.5.x and I'd prefer it over anything tiling or floating because of the feature set and power it brings.
So, why someone would want to use macOS? It's not only XCode and Final Cut (I prefer Eclipse on all platforms). Omnigraffle for example. A tool which can draw diagrams and technical diagrams, Dia can't come close, or any other alternative I tried.
Same for MindNode. More powerful mind mapping solutions exist on Linux, but MindNode works like an extension of your brain. I can create gigantic maps in minutes, limited by my typing speed.
Another example is Scan Thing. It's mostly an implementation thing, but that thing works so well for extracting text and images. Well, while we're talking about text, we can talk about Prizmo, which can correct the curves of camera scanned images and then OCR them, so PDF Pen Pro, which is a power tool for editing PDFs.
There also fun novelty tools like Monodraw which I use to draw ASCII diagrams for my code, and leave it as a comment inside my codebases.
Is Linux side gloom, then? Of course not. Kid3 is irreplaceable, so Gwenview, and macOS has no equivalent of it. Many of the other tools I use on macOS are built-ins for Linux systems and work much better than their macOS counterparts by leaps and bounds. Darktable is a powerhouse for photo post-processing, and while macOS alternatives exist, they're not as good as Darktable for my use cases.
So both sides have very good applications, macOS has hardware advantage on mobile side. The main reason I keep macOS on the mobile side because it's a POSIX compliant UNIX at the core, so it can work with Linux systems reasonably well, and yes I like the hardware and having another reference point to see where the world is headed. Living in echo chambers is not good, IMHO.
Re your point about Apple laptops and *Nix Oses I 100% agree which is why I am a supporter of the Asahi Linux project. I would love to see everything-working-out-of-the-box support for my favorite distro on M1/M2 hardware so I can get a nice M1 or M2 laptop but run my favorite OS on it instead of MacOS.
If I need to find something inside a file? There's Baloo, and it's available via KRunner ır Dolphin.
KRunner is also a great comand palette, window changer, and plethora of other tools combined. I generally open Krunner and open applications and do many things over it, no need to touch to mouse.
People rave about dual pane file managers, rightly so. Dolphin is both a single pane and dual pane file manager, rolled in one.
I connect to other services (FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and whatnot), ah no tools. Dolphin has adapters for all of them. I can directly SFTP into a machine via fish:// for example.
I'm also a big music listener, so I rip some CDs from time to time? Do I need a tool? No. Open Dolphin, navigate to CD. There are folders (MP3, FLAC, OGG, etc.) drag your favorite format to your home folder. It's encoded on the fly. Metadata? It's retrieved when you insert your CD from MusicMatch service and reflected automatically. Neat. No?
More interconnectedness: Add your e-mail accounts and calendars to Akonadi. They are fetched and processed even if your mail client is not running. That's what multitasking is, if you ask me.
People think KDE's eye candy, but it has many quality of life things: Present windows with search, desktop grid with reorganization, dim inactive windows to prevent focus loss and eye fatigue. Just to name a few.
People terminal-hop, but Konsole is one of the best and fastest terminal emulators alongside GNOME's. New guys rave about speed, but this speed optimization thing is done by big boys in 2003-2004. GPU acceleration is also the same story.
KDE is not slow. If you disable windows appearance and destruction animations, things happen before you lift your finger from the button you're pressing. Animations take a bit of time, so things look slow.
KDE guys love GTK as they love Qt. Every KDE release comes with counterpart GTK renderers, so all applications look the same.
So, TWMs, i3/sway, and others are very nice things. They solve a lot of people's problems, and I support these people wholeheartedly, but KDE is an integrated solution which works well across the board. Give it a shot someday, in a VM.
Oh, you want to be pleasantly surprised? Try E17 (Enlightenment 17). That thing is really nice.
C'est la vie.
After having 2 failed recovery efforts with Time Machine I had totally given up on it in my remaining Mac life (Time Machine had known recovery issues so I always made regular regular backups as well, so fortunately I didn't lose data).
> I’m not sure how people use their touchpads without middle click emulation either.
Because there is no need for middle click on mac? Not sure when you would use it, but there is probably a different combo (maybe even superior?) for whatever action that's mapped to a middle click. There is no emulation of a scroll wheel either.
Middle click opens a link in a new tab. A quick search suggests this isnt possible on Mac OS using the touchpad, which would personally drive me crazy.
[0] No, clearly I haven't actually tried all them, don't be so pedantic.
I _very_ regularly have to sign documents though, and as OP said, nothing beats Adobe for that. I even pay the subscription so that I can have it on my phone, sign on the go, etc.
Nowadays the only place I still use GNU/Linux as desktop experience, is my aging Asus netbook.
When it dies, it will most likely be replaced by a device from Apple/Google/Microsoft ecosystems.
You need to install at least dozen applications on macOS to come near to features/capabilities of a run of the mill KDE desktop.
GNOME also improved a ton, it seems, but I'm not using it for a long long time.
macOS is lean, but doesn't have the composability and flexibility of Linux at any level. Things designed to add this composability feels bolted on loosely and limited at utility.
Most folks don't want a "go fishing experience", they want a prepared meal.
On the other hand, our parents, partners and non-technical friends use their Linux systems without ever calling us, the venerable yet dumb as a dead tree "Linux folks".
Maybe I'm on an island with everyone which makes this 2%, but these people are real, and they are not compiling things from source or throwing their machines out of windows because of frustration.
They just use their computers, be productive and live happy lives.
I can get my run of the mill KDE desktop to hang at startup by dragging a networked folder with a custom icon to the taskbar, then attempt to log in over a flaky network connection. Or if I attempt to drag too many application icons to it in the Wayland session. Don't get me wrong, I like it, I mean, I use it, but Plasma 5 is still, at best, late beta. My only hope is that, unlike its predecessor, it doesn't get abandoned and rewritten when it gets a semblance of stability.
I never restart KDE on my system, unless I upgrade my kernel, and restart the whole system.
* Unless you use large network mounts, as long as you drag icons one at a time, for a fixed screen resolution, doesn't apply to Wayland, only until the next major rewrite...
*:Unless you use with Wayland backend, since Wayland is not mature enough.
Because my installation both has large network mounts, and I sometimes drag tons* of icons around.
Also I talk with people who use KDE, and report bugs I encounter, or encourage people to report bugs when people I talk encounters them.
I'm pretty beyond "It works in my machine, so PEBKAC" at this point. I think using Linux for 20 years and managing a large fleet for 15 years helped on that front a lot. :-)
As for Desktop environments, it is very rare that I have had any game breaking events on these for a very long time. The foundations are mature and hardened nowadays.
I have had the occasional issue on a elderly T400 Thinkpad when transferring large files on Mate and Enlightenment DE but I get the feeling that is potentially a hardware issue.
A few times I have come across younger people who are sort of upset that they missed the earlier years of computing. I mean I get it, but they are so lucky to be inheriting a world of computing that is much more rock solid than anything we used to have. No configuring autoexe.bat /config.sys or the joys of Win95 just stopping for... some reason.
Also if I want to relive the early days of Linux, PinePhone has got me covered. ;)
Well, almost everything. I find microcontrollers offer some of that old spirit.
Everything System76 makes themselves is awesome.
oh, i never knew that! i thought they made everything.
for real though, who thought that having pgup and pgdn as mini keys on top of the left and right arrow keys was a good idea? and how did that get through quality assurance?
> I received your message in the support ticket that you have gotten a Framework Laptop. A great choice.
Gave me a burst of hope for official Pop!_OS Framework laptops sold through S76.
I was hopeful when they announced an all-AMD laptop recently. But unfortunately it's too small / underpowered / non-upgradeable for my needs, and I couldn't tell from the pictures if the keyboard was more to my liking.
To be fair, even Framework laptops don't have swappable keyboard types, AFAICT. So even a System76-Framework team-up wouldn't necessarily fit my needs.
but it's been thrown in a back pack and gone through several years of traveling in a back pack
A S76 QA engineer shared more details on Reddit.
> The chassis and motherboard for this product are manufactured by a company called Emdoor. The final assembly will be done in-house at System76's Denver factory (the same place Thelios and Launches are manufactured.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/10a3lqj/amd_ryzen...
Less visible downsides: only 1 TB SSD (I have 3 TB now), 16 GB RAM (I have 32) and the screen is smaller as the laptop is "12.73 x 8.44 x 0.75 in; 32.34 x 21.46 x 1.91 cm"
The only good points are that it weights almost half of mine and it's numberpad free :-)
Word is, it's HP EliteBook 845 G8
(https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/wc9d7a/hp_de...)
That said, the keyboard could be better.
I hate the trend in flat-top keys we have now. I honestly love the feel of gently recessed keys. I had an early macbook pro and the keys seemed to press against my fingertips uniformly instead of having the "hotspot" you get in the center of the flat key.
I recently switched back from Pop!_OS to Ubuntu because of really annoying bugs with the tiling window manager and especially with the suspend functionality. So I think they should not neglect their current DE.
Edit: I suppose the assumption, based on the paragraph and screenshot, is that they update depending on the arrangement of workspaces: horizontal vs vertical
The gesture works fine for me on Windows and ChromeOS (and OSX which I think was the first). It's more of a long-pull that's hard to accidentally trigger.
I plan to buy a desktop from them soon because I'm not into having a laptop now that I work from home permanently and I also want to run some games on it that you absolutely cannot run without a graphics card.
I never had problems with sleep on any of my Linux laptops. The problem is with shutdown. Shutdown is shutdown when I'm using the Noveau driver for my NVidia card but it's reboot when I'm using the NVidia driver. Unfortunately Noveau doesn't get sync right for my card with both Wayland and X11 so I have to use NVidia with X11. The few times per year that I have to poweroff I press the power button right before the BIOS screen appears.
At least version 470 of the driver fixed the brightness control keys. The didn't work for years and I remapped them as hotkeys to run xbacklight.
Markets are weird.
Edit: This is what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c
it used to be true, but sleep sucks now in the M1 line. When I leave my 14 inch mbp on sleep with 20% battery before bed I wake up to a dead battery.
I have two M1 macbooks, one that I use almost daily and another that I only use a couple times a week. None of them have had any problem with sleep or battery life, I'm actually extremely happy with them in this regard.
Speaking of Linux, on my particular HP laptops (Elitebook 840 (intel 11th gen) and 845 (zen 3)) it wipes the floor with Windows. Even though "HP Recommends Windows 11".
Main reason being that it actually stays asleep. Windows, half the time, will wake back up moments in. When it stays asleep, there's a high probability that it will somehow crash and reboot [0] or just randomly wake up while being closed in a bag.
There's no power management while the actual OS hasn't started booting [1], so you get the screen going at full blast, etc. Good times, especially in a bag or at night [2]. It also sometimes starts spinning the fan while pretending to sleep. It does indeed get rather warm, so I'm not really sure what it does.
What Windows sometimes does and Linux never does: wake from sleep to a black screen, wake from sleep to a garbled screen, sometimes with the fan blowing like a jet engine.
---
[0] No, it doesn't reboot for updates. The event log talks about unexpected shutdown. It also doesn't run out of battery, since it also happens while being plugged in.
[1] I use bitlocker with TPM + PIN, so it doesn't boot on its own
[2] I don't usually close it because the screen touches the keyboard, so it gets dirty.
On my old Intel Mac the so-called "smart sleep" would leave my laptop hot to the touch after carrying it in my backpack. Utterly useless. Even at its best it would still result in a 20% reduction in usable charge. Just give me a hibernate option, FFS.
Meanwhile, my wife's Apple laptop fails to go to sleep if it's plugged into a Dell monitor via USB-C, instead it wakes up and dings every time it's about to go to sleep.
As always in Apple world, how well something "was nailed" depends on your exact circumstances, and when something doesn't work, you have no hope of ever getting it to work.
So I'll share my number one optimization trick. Install powertop and get familiar with all the tabs it provides.
Use: sudo powertop --auto-tune
it can make a HUGE difference.
After a while all the tricks started to snowball and I was able to set up my laptop so I could swap between nvidia discrete graphics (2-3 hours off a full battery) and the integrated Intel Xe graphics (13.5 hours off a full battery). Power consumption on suspend under intel graphics is negligible. Wake is flawless. Now I find myself wishing I knew windows better so I could get the same graphics-swap-trick working under windows too (dual booted system).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17039414
(Yes there's a response in that link from S76 folks but I'm still curious on the buyer side your reasoning.)
Edited to add: the repair was free of charge.
It supports a company selling linux laptops, and they make sure everything works out of the box, and provide support. Pretty much the same reason to use their OS, which is basically just Ubuntu + drivers. It should all "just work" which is exactly what a lot of people expect from a laptop.
If you have a desktop system that's giving you problems in linux because of incomparable hardware or crappy drivers it's a pretty easy to find what component is working well for other people and swap some parts, but laptops are such a pain I don't even want to open one up if I can help it. It sounds like System 76 works with Clevo to put together certain builds they might not offer normally. Why risk getting a similarly spec'd Clevo only to find out it's got a different wireless chipset or GPU variant and now you're stuck with a bunch of of problems to try to work around.
What company does that?
It'd be nice if they made the laptops themselves, but not even Apple does that.
I'd recommend a tweak to the amount of whitespace, too. I'd prefer smaller dialogs or a larger default font (and maybe a wider one, too) to balance out the vast areas of blank space.
The Gnome desktop environment is servicable, the only issue is I which there was a shortcut on the top bar for sound selections.
Basically it seems pretty robust, and I don't have any issues.
The fact that it comes with the proprietary nvidia drivers is nice for gamers.
Main reason I stopped using it is because I dislike Gnome 3 and there isn’t much benefit to running popOS over another Linux if you don’t use their DE.
My workflow is pretty simple, I mostly want the OS out of my way, but when I have to interact with it, it's been nice.
Unfortunately I am stuck with NVDA until well, Triton has AMD support, or RocM PyTorch catches up in performance.
Only other place I can imagine going is NixOS, but I suspect PopOS+Nix might be a better balance for me.
I am running the latest PopOS and keeping packages up-to-date. I have asked support but their advice either doesn't fix the problem, or involves so much effort (reinstalling everything for example) that I never do it.
Only had a few minor issues with it over the years. The Nvidia driver gave me some problems on my discrete graphics a while ago, for which I found a solution online.
Occasionally the login screen fails to appear waking from suspend. Closing and opening the laptop lid fixes that; I haven't bothered to try to figure out what's going on.
Running on a ThinkPad T560.
I used PopOS for a while, and as a distro I thought it was nice.
Unfortunately, I encountered an unrecoverable/won't boot/have to reinstall error twice on my laptop of the time. So I went back to Ubuntu.
One anecdote, probably isolated or coincidence, but it's the sort of thing that happens to people and they never go back (but I bet I'll try it again, since swapping distros is pretty easy nowadays).
I like S76's additions to GNOME, and I'm happy to see them moving to a place where they'll no longer be stuck on GNOME's whims and wishes.
They've been positioning themselves to have a more put together and unified stack as time goes on, and this is just one part. On top of that, it seems to me that a DE is a very good place to get memory safety, so I'm glad to see someone moving that direction.
And I bet that many System76 users don't actually care about all of this either. Some do, but I'm not so sure the majority do. It's certainly not something that actually sells significant amount of machines in the mainstream market. Having a usable functional desktop does.
Emphatically not. I mean, just look at the bug tracker. Or how about this data point: my Lemur Pro (lemp11) could not suspend at all when shipped -- the model started shipping in Summer IIRC, but the relevant workaround/fix was only finally released in November. So yeah, the Coreboot/firmware field is very understaffed.
Yes go to HP/Dell/Lenovo/Apple where no one works on open firmware, i don't understand your mindset....
The leap in scale from using Clevo designs with S76 software to designing your own hardware is massive.
They worked with HP. But if you are expecting Apple MacBook Pro level devices in the Linux flavour, I think it's going to take a few more years of buying what they are selling to achieve that scale.
They have not suspended the laptops during shipment?
>you still cannot remove of disable Intel ME
Yeah right? Another good point for open firmware.
A year ago I asked on my local Linux mailing list for some hardware recommendations, and I mentioned I would like to buy something w/Linux pre-installed. A lot of people got upset with that idea.
I am done installing OSes. I never learned anything from it, and I buy a system to use it, not to configure it.
If I was going to buy a coreboot laptop it would likely be a higher end Chromebook that mrchromebox has a hack for.
You'd think they'd have clear priorities, yet they don't seem to understand firmware matters, and that there are enough Linux desktops already.
I don't like the idea of supporting a Linux distro or DE I won't use or ever care about.
Also i'm not a fan of the color scheme, they'll need to make things a little bit more vibrant
Looks like it's still the Gnome Shell, not a fan at all
Why does this urgently need to be fixed?
[1] https://images.prismic.io/blog-system76/af08494c-ad85-4e79-8... vs https://images.prismic.io/blog-system76/af08494c-ad85-4e79-8...
[2]https://images.prismic.io/blog-system76/de984d24-f265-4ebd-b... vs https://images.prismic.io/blog-system76/de984d24-f265-4ebd-b...
Sometimes, innovation springs out of reiteration. You find out new ways of doing something, with its own set of tradeoffs, by pursing different avenues.
So please direct this energy towards something productive. Maybe write your own DE, or your own IDE. Who knows what would come out of it. Certainly something better than wasting energy on aimless ranting, that is for sure.
Probably just a pipe dream though.
That's not quite right. Laptops purchased with Linux will come with a DE chosen by the vendor, and in many cases it is something custom. System 76 puts PopOS on their machines (is it a Gnome? is it something else? the screenshot looks like Gnome; but the name says Cosmic; I don't even know anymore). Tuxedo installs Tuxedo OS, which, I believe, used to be based on Budgie (they've since switched to KDE last time I heard). Anything with preinstalled Ubuntu comes with Gnome. And so on. So yeah, there is an element of forcing customers into a particular DE, unless they are determined enough to just wipe the laptop clean and install a system of their choice.
Why? You don't have to use ALL of them. Just pick one.
Sure, this may come off polemic, but I very much think that gnome is largely to blame for the fragmentation of the Linux desktop.
Gnome 3 brushed people the wrong way but blaming it for fragmentation when those 3 went away to do their 3 different things doesn't make sense.
Come on, MATE and Cinnamon ? To be consistent Cinnamon shouldn't exist and only MATE would make the cut if Gnome 3 is the problem.
Numbers I can find speak for themselves though: https://eylenburg.github.io/de_comparison.htm
There's no fragmentation, only KDE and Gnome.
Ubuntu tried to do the same more than once, but fell so hard on their face every time that it can be hard to tell that they were trying to do the same thing.
If Gnome wouldn't had poped up Linux would have a standard desktop named KDE likely today.
So the claim that they caused fragmentation seems not completely off.
Also there are quite some other DEs. Only that there are just two big ones. If one of the big ones would not exist there would be a default one with the greatest market share.
Normal people don't reinvent the wheel when there is no need for that…
There was no need to split KDE. And Gnome exist solely for political reasons. Like I said, look at the history.
In the beginning there was only KDE. And it was regarded THE Unix desktop.
No sane people worked on anything else!
But than Gnome was created as a KDE clone. Solely for political reasons…
Yes, I hope people will discover that truth.
And yes, it was the Gnome people who choose the nuclear option!
I use both GNOME and KDE daily for different use cases, and the fact that people like you who hold such views exist is downright disturbing.
That was CDE and for sure nothing like KDE or Gnome.
Look at the history again. Look at the names on the emails and posts.
It was done by people, because they wanted it done. For “solely political reasons”? But that’s exactly what politics means: making sure people get what they want. As opposed to everyone having what you want.
It did exactly this!
Gnome was created because some people didn't like the Qt license.
There had been zero technical reasons. Still people decided to start form scratch just to have a different license.
> Look at the names on the emails and posts.
Good point!
There is one very special name on that list. Someone who turned out being a Microsoft u-boot according to some very popular "conspiracy theory"…
So if you like conspiracy theories you may add "divide et impera" to the possible reasons for the existence of Gnome. ;-)
> But that’s exactly what politics means: making sure people get what they want. As opposed to everyone having what you want.
It's irrelevant what I would like to have.
The relevant question was and is what would have been best for the Linux desktop as a whole.
Do you really want to argue that the miserable split where everything gets done at least twice is a good outcome?
If KDE had not started with this flaw, I would agree with you.
For the most part, the Linux Desktop has been a majority using some variation of GNOME with a dedicated minority using KDE.
I have not used “GNOME” since the 2.x days but I have always been in the GNOME world. Even XFCE is really another base for GNOME.
I have not used KDE since the 2.x days either but current Plasma is pretty good and I do not mind it. I put Big Linux on a laptop and have not taken its version on KDE off yet.
KDE wouldn't be commercial.
Qt didn't have the ideal license back than but you could use it free.
At the point KDE would be the de facto standard Unix desktop there would have been enough power behind that to arrive in the end at the exact same compromise regarding Qt that we have now, I'm quite sure.
There was no need to split the Unix desktop forever, and cause infinite pain as a result, by invoking the nuclear option, which the Gnome people did!
And given the further background story of one of the most prominent people behind that whole story you can even construct a reasonably believable "conspiracy theory" around the things that happened… ;-)
Use a different operating system if you want your vendor to tie you up and tell you what to do. Buy a pretty toaster if you want a slick appliance— not a computer.
I'm sick of this complaint, which boils down to this: desktop Linux (taken collectively) isn't very much like a product for consumers by a vendor who wants to suck you into their ecosystem.
Guess what? That's *what's good* about the Linux desktop.
If you want a no-choice monoculture whose design better supports a thriving hellscape of proprietary crapware, you've got options already. If you want to be a consumer instead of a participant in a community and a tradition, go buy something.
I don't know why some people seem to want a "one true desktop" monoculture.
The whole reason I use Linux is because I get to make choices that make sense for me.
There's this hope that if only for the fragmentation, Linux might finally have Photoshop or whatever.
I get it. I've contended with integrating disparate GUI frameworks on my system. I appreciate what Apple's virtual monopoly on app frameworks for macOS allows them to do in terms of accessibility and integrations and UI changes, in rapid, uniform ways.
But you can't impose uniformity on the Linux desktop without draining the oasis, without killing what makes it a breath of fresh air in the first place.
> ./GuitarPro
./GuitarPro: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I bought this program several years ago while using a Mint 13 system - it won't run on Mint 20. Maybe I could set up a Docker, or copy the correct version of the libraries, or whatever - maybe it could be coaxed into working, maybe not - but while end users are likely to encounter this kind of roadblock Linux is just a non-starter as a platform for commercial software.
Many other libraries are similar. See: glibc...
At least the kernel promises not to break user space. I guess because user space keeps fucking itself.
If Adobe builds Photoshop for Red Hat and make it run only on Red Hat, people wanting to use Photoshop will install Red Hat. The big problem is what happens when Microsoft makes Excel work perfectly on Ubuntu and only on Ubuntu.
This is basically how Steam still works, pending the release of SteamOS 3.0, and it hasn't been a problem for other distros. They can sub in their own libs and repackage the thing or use an Ubuntu chroot.
This is what Snap and Flatpak are for though, and I think they'll handle it well, going forward.
But then again, their design language has recently started to be less cohesive too (or more precisely, mix of older and newer design systems are apparent).
Like, it's generally difficult to get something working/looking nicely and consistently on Linux. A somewhat exception to this rule is GNOME, but even then there's issues with KDE/Qt app theming sometimes.
Like, until 2021 (I think) I lived with a broken looking inkscape and Krita (used it as a hobby) because I gave up trying to figure out how to fix the theming, since none of the fixes suggested online worked. Then one day after some random update it started working
So, there's a lot of space for improvement and better cross compatibility between these "subsystems"
Granted, though, it's getting better. But I assume not at a pace an average user can perceive. So, i thinking that's where people get frustrated.
I guess the thing I was thinking of being cohesive were stuff like context menus, or integrating better with the window manager (or whatever it's called on Windows) than they do on Linux (since you had to integrate with the only existing one, not choose one). My earlier complaint about Krita/Inkscape is that most "labels" rendered in a colour and labels that was almost indistinguishable from the background, so I was largely working with shortcuts, or from memory and sometimes squinting to see what I'm clicking lol. It was an issue with all non-gnome apps, but I mostly used those two.
I quitr remember that on Mac it is barely better.
Now take some specialized areas such as DAW, video editing software and 3D editors and you can just throw that idea of cohesion out of the window regardless of the OS.
On Linux, if you used Gnome but ran a KDE app (or were on Gnome but ran a GTK app) you'd by default get something that looked horrendous broken visually but worked, and sometimes the visuals actually managed to break the app (ie thing being out of proportion, or invisible etc). It would look great and cohesive if you ran a GTK app on Gnome, or a KDE app on KDE, etc.
I think it's gotten much better at some point when these environments decided to support each others themes, though.
I wish they all sat down and came up with a unified theming framework for apps (maybe based on CSS, since they kinda use CSS flavours already), but have the rest be implementation details. Dunno how realistic that is, though.
Windows I think I missed the mark actually. A lot of people pointed out stuff I didn't think about or forgot about (every Office Suite release looked different, Java apps etc, branded stuff like Adobe or specialist software, etc).
I think it might be because I never really used those apps that my much, since Windows was basically only my gaming OS
It's the age of Electron, baby! For better (more frequent cross-platform support, rapid app development, empowering the masses of web devs to create desktop apps without retooling) and for worse (non-native look-and-feel, high resource consumption). Nobody really has a cohesive collection of apps on their desktops anymore, not even Mac people.
> I think people mostly complain about a lack of cohesion that Windows/macOS have.
Like we've both noted to some extent here, I think this is pretty much a thing of the past. It can be pretty good on Linux, at the same time. If you stick to KDE or Gnome (which I think are both reasonable propositions), your desktop on Linux will be way, way more cohesive than Windows has ever been in my lifetime (maybe ever).
I'll buy/build a Linux desktop when we get quality hardware and software options (where "good hardware" means more than "fast CPU! big memory!"), but for now Mac is a pretty good experience. You can't hack around the source code for proprietary programs (I've pretty much never wanted to do this on any desktop system), but you can run open source alternatives for everything except maybe some core software.
I realize I come off as extreme here, but that's really how I feel.
I think that's an obviously fair way to describe the Microsoft Store and the Google Play Store. (Idk about iOS' App Store because I don't use iOS.)
I'd also make the argument that it's a good way to describe the setup of basically any macOS power user, with their inevitable collection of brittle, mostly proprietary, solo dev apps they use to hack basic functionality back into Apple's anemic OS offering.
(Windows suffers from that latter problem, too, though it's not as egregious as macOS.)
> you can run open source alternatives for everything except maybe some core software.
The core software is pretty much what we're talking about here: DEs and/or bundled apps.
> for now Mac is a pretty good experience
I understand that many people like it and I think their reasons for liking it are mostly good. But for me, using macOS is genuinely miserable, not just a little off. And I think the kind of app ecosystem that Mac people really love, of thoughfully designed, hidden gems by very small teams or individual devs, distributed as proprietary software for a small fee... is just not that great. To an extent that Mac lovers rarely admit or don't understand, a huge proportion of those apps exist only to compensate for Apple's own oversights, which wouldn't matter so much in an open ecosystem. The rest just aren't worth the cost of a closed ecosystem, in my opinion.
Mainly a DOS/Windows user for about five or six years, then Linux for about eight or nine (mostly Gentoo and, later, Ubuntu), macOS for my serious-business desktop needs since 2011.
To this part of your comment: Wut.
I truly have no clue what you mean by this. I think I use one program that might fit this description (Spectacle—which has several active replacements I could switch to, and still works perfectly, not so much as a single glitch, bug, or bit of jank that I've ever seen, despite its having been abandoned years ago)
Meanwhile, "brittle and relying on tons of solo-dev apps to hack in basic functionality" (ok, mostly not proprietary ones, sure) is about how I would have described desktop Linux. But... I suspect we have different definitions of "basic functionality".
Power management I never have to think about or fiddle with is table-stakes for me these days, for instance—I don't got time for that shit these days, a computer that can't do that fairly competently without my telling it what to do is just broken, same as a thermostat if I had to go poke it every single time I wanted the AC or heat to kick on, then watch carefully to make sure it actually did what I wanted, would be broken.
A good default en keyboard layout (why would the default not be a good one? It boggles the mind—and sure, that's a distro concern, not a "Linux" concern, but so's everything that matters on Linux).
"Find my" or equivalent.
Low jitter and reasonably consistent latency, at least under light load.
Solid, well-considered, capable, well-functioning accessibility features.
A trackpad good enough I don't even consider taking my mouse unless I'll be gone several days.
Bluetooth audio that works well enough that I don't hate it and spend no more than a minute or two a week fiddling with (and that mostly because I also use the same devices on Windows).
Seamless password & payment sync across all my (non-server) devices, relying on biometrics on all of them so I rarely have to type a password at all.
I'd be "hack[ing] in" all of that—and far, far more—back in on Linux, if I could attain it at all, and that stuff—the stuff that I rely on weekly, if not multiple times a day—is what I regard as "the basics".
I'd also still be using exactly one of those "thoughtfully designed, hidden gems by very small teams or individual devs, distributed as proprietary software for a small fee" text editors if I went back to Linux. Sublime beats anything else I've used on Linux, and it's not a close contest—failing that, something from Jetbrains. Open source editors and IDEs would only enter the picture if I somehow couldn't get Sublime or something from Jetbrains. Meanwhile, I struggle to think of anything else in that category that I use. It's mostly first-party or open-source. If I did more multimedia or GUI design I'd probably use a few more of those small-team proprietary programs, but I don't think it's controversial to assert that those largely blow anything available on Linux out of the water (except the ones that are cross-platform because they're—ugh—electron or browser-based, so do work on Linux) so it's not like I'm missing out on the riches of open-source, at least when it comes to that kind of thing.
You must have had some very bad experience with keyboard on Linux. Just curious: what was that?
Linux has good ones, I've just never seen one as the default; if you just click through the "happy path" you'll have a crap one, and there's little guidance on which you should pick if you need to, like, actually compose text in your native human language, so the user just has to know in advance or go look up which one to select.
Mac's default, meanwhile, is (at least) nearly as good as the best Linux has, so you can start fluently typing English without having to fiddle with settings or memorize weird number sequences (sure, there's still some memorization, but much of it's simpler and closer to making sense and far more guess-able than, say, a four-digit string of numbers). Last I checked, Windows gets this wrong, too. Why either of those operating systems does that, I have no idea. That it was even incorrect didn't occur to me, somehow, until I switched to Mac and was like "why isn't the default at least this good on every platform!?"
Respectfully, this seems like a really out-of-touch perspective.
The software I use for Mac is a melange of open source and proprietary. I basically just use whatever is the least painful; sometimes that's open source, sometimes it's proprietary. Virtually every piece of software I use is high quality, and Mac doesn't really encumber my ability to use best-in-class software.
Linux desktop software is by far more brittle--it has to play nicely across a dizzying array of systems all while using crumby, buggy GUI toolkits from the 90s. Basic things like hidpi, webcam, (good) touchpad support are very unlikely to work out of the box if at all. Further still, support for popular apps can be really hit-or-miss on Linux. Not sure what the state of the world is, but for a good long time Spotify wasn't available on Linux. Yeah, I get that Spotify is proprietary and thus evil, but I don't really care about ideology, I want to be able to listen to my music without jumping through hoops (I would work around the limitation by using the web interface, but it was buggier and clearly a second-class citizen).
Like, I would love to be a Linux desktop user, and I often find myself daydreaming about how to build a Linux desktop platform that doesn't suck--it's not like I'm a MacOS partisan or anything. It's just that today, MacOS is wayyyy better than the Linux desktop. Linux can get there, but we really need to get rid of a bunch of cruft and build on a saner foundation (frankly, we should just use web APIs for building apps--something like ChromeOS but without the restrictions on what a program can do).
(I actually liked your joke— even upvoted it before I wrote my rant lol. Sometimes you just gotta let it out!)
You can move from Gnome Shell to this without having to change the software you use.
The, perhaps unrealistic and naive, thinking behind this is that if these capable people combined their efforts into one desktop environment, we'd have one great Linux desktop environment, instead of several okay desktop environments.
Cosmic exists because Gnome devs have their own roadmap that many people dislike.
EDIT: I know ChromeOS exists, but that's a lot more than a desktop environment (can't even run a compiler natively for all intents and purposes iirc).
Sometime I wonder what can they pull off if KDE team, Gnome team, XFCE team and now Cosmic team got together.
Diversity is a strength of Linux. I don't think Pepsi worries about fragmentation with their various flavors of Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and whatever other hundreds of brands they own. Sure, diversity can be a problem if there aren't enough developers to go around but I'd rather have more options than fewer.
Do you guys complain because there is more than 1 game studio? You'd rather have one movie/serie and a handful of actors director so all movies and series are made by the same team in order to not waste ressources? A single house architecture plan so that everyone live in the very same house with no customisation possible?
If Rust helps us actually improve and change things, then fine.
Chrome is actually one of the browsers that had KDE file picker integration early on. Initially it called kdialog, now it uses xdg-desktop-portal.
But anyway I should really give an RPM based distro a go at some point.
The community spreads its efforts thin into a thousand projects rather than making one amazing one.
I don't think that a FOSS community will ever converge on an amazing DE without part of it breaking apart and starting a new one, for the sake of building something even more amazing or failing on the way.