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Comment by dartharva | Hacker News Reader

They set out to build a superior alternative to GNOME. What I see is functionally just another GNOME.

If this was all it's going to be I don't understand what the point was.

They did like GNOME, but needed it to costumize it to fit their needs. And that what 'Cosmic' plugins do for GNOME. But with the newer version Gnome would have broken many of their plugins, a frequent issue with Gnome. They are currently selling products with Gnome as default.

So they could either spend resources continually keeping up with Gnome and adopting all their changes, or they could go away from Gnome. Gnome is increasingly pushing in their own direction, so this would increasingly get harder and more time consuming in the future.

Given what their costumers expect, it makes sense not to go into a totally different direction and invent something totally new and revolutionary. The new Cosmic should be reasonably close to the older Gnome based Cosmic.

They now have the freedom to evolve their DE away from Gnome, they are no longer constrained by Gnome applets (and their long term support) and I suspect in a couple years the difference to Gnome will be bigger then it is now. This is already visible, with the raw default version of newest Gnome (not the one Ubuntu or PopOS delivers) being quiet a bit different from what you get with Cosmic DE.

What would you have liked to see be different is maybe a more interesting question.

I seem to remember one of the points was the way GNOMEs plugin system was implemented plugins have no isolation so one bad plugin can cause all sorts of problems.

They were also limited in things they wanted to do with the default window tiling ui.

Sorry bit vague it was ages ago I listened to the talk - probably this one: https://youtu.be/ioswlaxdhSA?si=DlVQ-jDu5G3A3Iru

Did they say that they set out to do that? (not sure, genuinely asking)

I was under the impression that the point of doing this was to have control over the hardware and the software to build a complete package a-la-Apple (though nowhere as deep) because once they have the software stack too, they have the flexibility to quickly add a lot of end-user life-improvement enhancements. Maybe I was presuming too much.

I see an inferior alternative to Gnome.

You realize they created that in what? less than two years? Completely from scratch with the whole stack in Rust. GNOME is 25 yo and it's superior to a alpha software DE but only barely. So I guess it wont be long until potentially GNOME would be ridiculously inferior to COSMIC like it already is to KDE. (I have used GNOME since forever btw)

"Superior to alpha but only barely" is really hyperbolic. I use a modified Gnome via Zorin as basically a daily driver, and I have no issues with it. It's easier to use than Windows and MacOS in most cases for me.

Good for them. As a user I can much less about that though.

No, I don’t realise that, because I’m not using the product and hear about it maybe 3rd time. That’s great they’re quick to implement, the Rust initiative, etc. But as a user of Gnome (since 2, idk if that’s forever) I don’t see much of a difference, and see only an inferior (at this point) product. I don’t mean it’s bad, I haven’t used it. Visually, it looks less polished / clean. Functionally, I don’t know, looks similar, more like a replica. Hence, my comment.

COSMIC is as similar to GNOME as KDE is similar to GNOME. There is barely any similarity at all.

Imo we shouldn't expect opinionated desktop environments like GNOME (and maybe Cosmic) to be directly comparable along objective lines. When desktop environments are inflexible/opinionated, they can be well-executed but still a poor fit for some users.

Cosmic isn't trying to be a GNOME clone but to present an alternative vision. So if stock GNOME is lacking for you, Cosmic is an exciting alternative that may suit your needs as it matures. But if you're happy with GNOME, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Cosmic's design.

Yeah, but it works the other way too, isn’t it? If you’re happy with Cosmic, does it make it superior to Gnome then? For me, I like the simplicity and polish, and I like it way much more than other DEs.

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