Cosmic Desktop Is Slated to Debut with Pop _OS 24.04 LTS | Hacker News Reader

Cosmic Desktop Is Slated to Debut with Pop _OS 24.04 LTS

linuxiac.com

87 pointstuananh46 comments

Better source: https://blog.system76.com/post/closing-in-on-a-cosmic-alpha

Thanks, Linuxiac Cloudflare apparently blocks Indian IPs.

this is their own DE written in Rust.

Honestly, I just wish COSMIC was less ugly.

But that's just a personal preference thing. If it helps productivity and shaking up the Linux environment, that's always a plus.

I don't know about ugly, but the padding in those screenshots is insanely large. Hopefully that is customizable.

I was thinking the same thing!

The huge padding is the thing I hate the most about Gnome, and if Cosmic will have the same issue, well, then that's a bammer.

With Gnome, however, there are extensions and themes that allow to alleviate the problem, even if partially. And I don't think Cosmic will have any of those on day one (if they there's no customization built-in, that is).

With Cosmic they very much want customization. That was one of their primary goals. The very reason they build Cosmic in the first place was because Gnome made it much harder to costumize and broke all their existing plugins. They are talking about Cosmic being able to serve as a great base for costume experiences.

I am not sure if they have reach that goal, but that is their goal.

With Gnome, they are very willing to break all plugins at all times. They simply do not care for stability of plugins, its a nonissue for them.

In Gnome plugins are JS application all running in the same namespace, a single crash of those can take down everything. In Cosmic these are Rust application running in different namespaces.

Interface density is configurable

Honest question - What does Cosmic have over Gnome desktop? I'm relatively new to Linux.

I'm running Ubuntu 22.04 and find it meets my computing needs.

Paragraph 2 of the article describes why.

Supplemental reading: https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-mess-is-not-an-accident-4e...

I agree with some of the performance issues mentioned by the writer, but nothing mentioned stops me from doing my work.

I hope Cosmic helps improve the Linux desktop ecosystem.

If Cosmic creates a more cohesive Linux experience with fewer bugs then I'm glad they are doing it. Nothing stops me from doing my work but many bugs slow me down and otherwise ruin my experience.

It's worth mentioning that GNOME receives an enormous amount of hate but it's still the most widely used DE on Linux by a mile and the vast, vast, vast majority of people get along just fine.

> it's still the most widely used DE on Linux by a mile

How would we be able to tell that?

It's the default on Ubuntu and RHEL, which are the two most popular enterprise distros. Ubuntu is also the most popular consumer Linux distro.

> It's the default on Ubuntu and RHEL, which are the two most popular enterprise distros.

For servers; that's not super compelling.

> Ubuntu is also the most popular consumer Linux distro.

That's a much stronger argument, though I'd point out that Linux distros are disproportionally used by people given to customization, so the default may not be as important.

GNOME is very opinionated in its design, it's bound to draw ire. It's the more stable DE out of it and KDE, and the way they handle releases is more friendly to the enterprisey types.

Say what? Half the reason cosmic even became a project at all was the gnome releases constantly breaking plugins and extensions.

It seems reasonably stable and usually just works (except the files app), but only if you do absolutely nothing to it. Try to change anything and it becomes nightmarish.

Stable not in terms of extensions (they really need to get better at that), but in that if a feature doesn't make a version it gets pushed to the next one. A given version of GNOME is typically very stable in my experience, so long, as you said, you don't touch it. A server with a GUI it not likely something I am going to spend a lot of time mucking with the file manager. And I'm with you on the Files app, it is my least favorite part of GNOME. I typically use KDE, but in RHEL environments GNOME is the assumed DE.

Defaults have a great power, and Red-Hat sponsoring most of its development as well.

Wow, the first 3 sentences are scathing lol (in the supplemental reading)

Maybe I'm not a demanding user, but I have no major issues with Gnome. I also liked Unity. Willing to give Cosmic a try, as I use PopOS and like their approach.

Mostly I just want a desktop environment to find and launch apps, do some basic window management, and get out of the way. I got more important things to do than worry about tweaking things endlessly...

I upgraded to Ubuntu 23 a few weeks ago, in which GNOME decided to remove app menus requiring me to install a wonky extension to reclaim functionality. The top horizontal menu is still there taking up screen real estate, mind you, it’s just less useful.

These changes are annoying enough with each upgrade to make me consider switching DEs.

I tend to stick to LTS releases, but that certainly doesn't stop gnome's endless quest to remove everything!

Fine, if its suits you. Then again, if that is all you do, why use Gnome: XFCE or even LXDE will do all that fine and they are lighter than Gnome and change less.

I quite like XFCE, but I use KDE for a few reasons. It has tiling extensions and with a large monitor tiling works better for me.I like a lot of KDE applications (Dolphin and Kate in particular) and they integrate a bit better with KDE (widgets in panels, KRunner).

YMMV.

I don't care enough to install non default desktops. You are coming at it from the perspective of trying to find something that really works well for you, and that's fine.

I'm coming at it from the perspective of I really don't care, unless there is some show stopper that forces me to.

That post you linked was a crazy read, it just kept going and going. I've never really had issues with GNOME, but knowing so many users share the sentiment of it being a hostile developer environment makes me want to check out other options next time I install a Linux distro.

I am completely happy with GNOME. Sure, it needs a few add-ons to improve the UX around the dock and workspaces (most of which are pre-installed in PopOS), but I believe that customizability is a good thing. I'll most likely miss quite a few GNOME add-ons on COSMIC.

The tiling window manager is the most differentiating feature. Otherwise I find Gnome does all I need well enough.

I'm hopeful that everyone here that loves rust will have an outlet to start creating GUI apps for linux (that isn't gnome).

Make them with what GUI library?

GPUI is not mature yet, so I wouldn’t use it for anything serious, and Qt bindings support is not great.

https://iced.rs/

This is what Cosmic is written in.

Wow. Iced is also not mature, but being backed by an important project such as Pop OS gives me hope it will stick around.

Maybe it’s time to dive into Rust with Iced, and port over a Qt project I’ve been working on.

One of the things I find interesting is that it won't necessarily be tied just to popos. I believe other distros are looking into it. (Can't find references now)

If anyone is interested in the 'why', here's an old (1 year ago) thread [0] explaining why they are moving away from GTK.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/xs87ed/is_iced_repl...

The official release with 24.04 is what they are considering an alpha, I believe.

It'll be quite some time before it's "stable".

Huh, I'd swear I'd seen that too, but looking at the alpha blog post [1], they do indeed say:

> The official release of COSMIC DE will debut on Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS, which will be based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Running and testing on 24.04 gets us closer to a final, polished release.

I'm assuming, but not sure, that 24.04 will be released in April, 24, though its version might just be a reference to the Ubuntu version it's based on - it would be pretty quickly after the Ubuntu release.

Although the distinction between "official release" and "final, polished release" might indeed mean that the 24.04 release would still be alpha?

[1] https://blog.system76.com/post/closing-in-on-a-cosmic-alpha

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/noble

Geo-blocked for India.

Blanket-banning an entire country's IP ranges is such a lazy and obnoxious practice, the webmasters should be ashamed of this.

If the ISPs do their job and handle abuse emails, less people would be blocking IP ranges like this.

There's a reason in IP abuse or spam databases, certain countries light up like a christmas tree and others are not used for these purposes. If you do nothing to be a good citizen of the Internet, all the bad citizens are attracted to you as an ISP.

You shouldn't even need to email the ISP for abuse, they should just detect it themselves. But even taking actions on the emails seems too difficult for them, so I doubt we'll see anything pro-active.

My guess is that India has been blocked so that the website owner is able to join a particular ad network (in this case Mediavine) which pays well but requires primarily US traffic. So it’s easier to just block the visitors that are preventing you from joining. Ruthless but commercial decision.

... and yet most of the spam is originated from US IP addresses.

Checking the revenue analytics for my blog.

US visitors made up 66.13% of my revenue, with 14% of spam coming from US IPs.

India made up 0.14% of my revenue, with 5% of spam coming from Indian IPs.

Russia made up 0% of my revenue, with 21% of spam coming from Russian IPs.

I don't do geo-blocking on my website since my spam filter catches pretty much everything these bots are spewing out, but I can certainly see why someone might want to do it. Especially if they're wasting time/money dealing with spam or automated attacks.

How does geoblocking a website help with spam email?

What kind of abuse threats does a static site showing a bunch of ad-ridden articles get that isn't already covered in basic Cloudflare filtering?

System76 seems highly competent and ethical so this is good news

Geezus H the ads on that site

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