You can kick the alpha tires on System76's Cosmic, a new Linux desktop | Hacker News Reader

You can kick the alpha tires on System76's Cosmic, a new Linux desktop

arstechnica.com

25 pointsPaulHoule10 comments

"https://system76.com/cosmic" says "Try it out on your favorite distro!", and lists (in this order): Fedora, NixOS, Arch, openSUSE, Serpent OS, and Redox OS.

Are they making a statement about Debian?

And its also very popular derivative Ubuntu?

Isn't there own distro an Ubuntu derivative?

I've been curious about PopOS for awhile and so glad to see the development of their own desktop environment.

>And I'm the type who always remaps his Caps Lock key to Escape, but there's no place to do that yet, and the Gnome-Tweaks app won't work, either. Some of this is probably the distribution itself, some of it is

If System76 devs are reading this, please prioritize key remapping! I have years of macOS shortcuts burned into my cerebral cortex, it's a no-go for me to try and learn Linux ones, especially considering I use a Mac daily for work. Would be nice if this could even be a separate theme, so I could just download a file with macOS key bindings and edit it. A 1-1 GUI -> file config would be icing!

There's a GUI on KDE for that. I believe GNOME also has one.

It's not universal though. If I drop down to the TTY, the key mappings don't work (expectedly, but disappointing nonetheless). Some apps also don't respect that key mapping.

macOS is much more integrated and everything seems to obey whatever you config in the OS.

Gnome-tweaks + customization of terminal shortcuts is what I currently use on Ubuntu for when I need to run a Linux desktop. If key bindings could be read from a file, it would be a nice leap forward. A GUI could be built up on top of that. You could just have your key bindings in ~/.cosmicrc or ~/config/cosmic/keybindings.

KDE's configuration are in config files[0], with a GUI built on top. I'm not sure how it could be any different.

The problem is to make applications (and TTYs!) that don't know about those config files and implement their own text input systems or use frameworks or SDKs that bypass the DE's settings. I can't see how Cosmic would fix that.

I hope I'm wrong and the Linux desktop experience is better off for it, but I'm skeptical.

[0] https://userbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/Configura...

+1, this is crucial

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192303

For people who want to test it in a Fedora context before the official spin is out, this seems promising:

https://github.com/ublue-os/cosmic

I run Bazzite (another universal blue build tailored for gaming) on my desktop and I've been very happy with it. I have been keen to try out one of the other builds for my dev laptop but haven't carved out the time yet.

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