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Comment by alecsm | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually excited to try Cosmic DE.

It still has some of that Gnome Shell feeling that I like but with many features I want that we'll never see in Gnome, like having the top bar on all screens. Right now if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is.

If they added independent workspaces per monitor I'll switch to it as soon as it gets out of beta.

Edit.

I just watched their workspace showcase video. We have independent workspaces per monitor [1]. Is this real life?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rGXNNUoW8&list=PL0bXfFQsIC...

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Most things can be solved with Gnome Shell extensions, but I have to admit that having to install 5-6 extensions for basic DE features, like managing where notifications show up, makes it easier to switch to something else.

Problem is exacerbated when your GNOME Shell gets updated and takes out all your extensions.

Or your extensions take out GNOME

Most things, yes. The things I mentioned, no.

Even then, Gnome updates regularly require massive updates to those extensions... Pop used to just do that in the box, but felt just having an entirely separate DE they control would be a better long run experience.

I don't understand, on Gnome when you maximize a window (drag to top) you can still see the time.

Now if you're talking about complete fullscreen, like when watching a video, I' don't understand the use case. Either you want fullscreen or you don't?

Baffled me too but I get it now, they want fullscreen on the first monitor and a clock on the second.

Ah thanks, I was so confused

I agree GP was talking about the multi monitor scenario, but I also run into trouble with just one monitor. If I'm playing a full screen game and want to know what time it is, there's no way to focus the task bar without closing the game entirely. On Windows, hitting the start button while in a fullscreen app will give focus to the taskbar so you can glance at the time and immediately return to the game.

Yeah, I lost so many Warcraft III games on Battle.net, when I accidentally pressed that pesky button, while having a pretty decent computer with 256 MB RAM. I ended up facing a separate keyboard without the key (and some others too).

Thankfully, these days when I want to play a bit (with a computer, sigh) on my Sway setup, yeah, it doesn’t react to that button.

Saying all that, yeah, I never considered that — having your game being lost to buggy and slow Windows — a feature. I wouldn’t want that even today, having 125 times more RAM than 20 years ago.

This is now solved because games don’t default to exclusive fullscreen anymore, so the windows compositor still runs on top of the game, so popping up the start menu is instant without any weird resolution/hdr changes

Ha, "instant". It will appear 30 seconds later, out of context, like a kraken from the depths.

My trinket drawer still contains five assorted Windows keys that I prised out of various keyboards for this reason. Vague plans to make a necklace.

Just because someone wants a single app to have a full screen (video, game, an IDE, etc), doesn’t mean they aren’t using their other screens/desktops for work.

Even with a single screen I sometimes want a video in full screen, while keeping an app window (email, excel, whatever) in a window in front of it.

right click -> "always on top". That's available by default

Well, that only works for GTK 3 or 4 apps. Thanks to CSDs and GNOME's refusal to implement SSDs, every app that's not either running in XWayland or a GTK3/4 app has its own decorations without the context menu with the always on top option.

There was some way of enabling always on top on non-GTK3/4 apps too, but I don't remember it off the top of my head.

You can use the alt+space shortcut to access the window context menu on any window, even if they are not a gtk/gnome app. At least on my system qt and kde apps still get some kind of ssd decoration that behaves somewhat like the gnome apps, plus access to the window context menu, though I agree things should be better than this and work more universally...

I'll probably be switching over too, from sway, once Cosmic is out of beta. I love tiling, and the only thing I miss while using sway is the lack of a single integrated settings application. It's possible to couple together individual apps to manage Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Monitors and everything else, but a single settings app is much better than babysitting a dozen separate ones.

FWIW you can run i3 as WM inside, say, XFCE, if you're not married to wayland. i3 and sway are almost identical otherwise.

I use Regolith Desktop packages to run Sway with Gnome. It's basically i3/Sway + Gnome settings, and works really well. I get the benefit of a sane DE (Sway) and somewhat easier settings and defaults

https://regolith-desktop.com/

I highly recommend regolith as well, even though the Sway session has never worked without issues for me yet. X11 is very stable.

Very cool. I'm on Fedora and not likely to switch, but it looks like there's a lot of improvements I could crib from regolith.

"Right now if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is."

This drives me crazy. I'm in a flow, distraction free via the full screen and break it to see what date or time it is. Even on a multi monitor setup. Which usually ends up meaning I get pulled out of that flow because I see a new notification on some other app or because I grabbed my phone to check that info.

Addiction issue.

But very widespread.

Do you never check your phone and realize you are now suddenly doing something completely unrelated?

Phones are focus breaking by design. It takes effort, silencing them.

I live by timers/alarms on my phone... if I don't set an alarm/timer, I'll never break focus for meetings etc.

> But very widespread.

Yes. Does that invalidate the fact?

> Do you never check your phone and realize you are now suddenly doing something completely unrelated?

How is this relevant? But, no, as it happens, I don’t.

> Phones are focus breaking by design. It takes effort, silencing them.

Maybe your phone. Those who get an addictive phone may get addicted, and it does take effort to break an addiction.

That's not on you to say, and pretty fucking tone deaf to boot.

If someone cannot look at their phone to find out the time without becoming distracted and losing their focus, that’s not a phone problem.

Maybe, but why should you have to pull out a separate device to check the time?

Even if you don't get pulled into something else, having to stop what you're doing to check the time sounds like a bad UI.

Getting a desk clock was a weirdly useful change for me, maybe try that?

Which has the added bonus of working even in fullscreen games.

I appreciate your dedication. Never once in my career have I been at "I'm so locked in, I can't spare a single second of time to look at another monitor" level of concentration :D

It is not about the time spent looking at the time, it is about being unable to ignore shiny stuff when you get out of fullscreen.

The point is, there's no clock in any other monitor because the top bar is only on the main one.

To me it's not about a couple seconds that takes me to look at my phone. It's the inability to have it on all my monitors just like all other DE. And it's not only the time. You can't access your notifications, your app indicator icons or anything you add to that top bar through extensions.

Sure - I get the point, but also have never found the top bar on another monitor to be super prohibitive to my production. It's rare that I don't have a spare moment to move the mouse to check notifications (in fact, if they were close to my full-screen work environment, I might be tempted to check them MORE frequently).

you can literally press Meta/Win key and have Gnome's overview... want something better move to XFCE :P

FWIW on KDE this is easily doable. I have my taskbars set up with per monitor taskbars as well.I can do pretty much anything while playing a game, watching a movie, etc.

Plus, you can add window rules in a nice to use GUI to automagically do it for you!

I don't get the problem with hitting [meta] checking the time real quick, then hitting [meta] and being put back into your work. I do it with full screen games all the time with almost no issues.

I accidentally upgraded to the alpha (identical laptops, picked the wrong one and jumped into it) and it's been very rough and not just around the edges. Can't wait to go to beta, hopefully this addresses most of the issues. At least even the alpha was rock solid in terms of stability, so definitely fine for daily use but I didn't enjoy the user experience.

It used to be really bad this spring, but now it's somewhat buggy but fundamentally fine. Somewhere around March games would just randomly lose focus, start stuttering, or you couldn't use fullscreen while having a secondary monitor connected, that sort of thing. Now it's mostly fine. Steam Remote Play still has issues, but this is really a niche use case.

I've been running the 6.16 kernel via mainline for a couple months and that has taken care of most of my issues with games, running ta current gen AMD gpu. Can't speak for how much of the stability increase has been the kernel vs the DE though, just been getting more solid along the way. I just switched about 5-6 months ago though.

> [in Gnome] if you have a full screen app on your main screen you can't even see what time it is.

I know in FOSS there's a ton of enthusiastic and just non professional work (nor there should be expectations of it), but still... I'd hope the user-facing interface for an OS (or any UI, really) should be designed by people with a background on design, which doesn't seem to be the case at all with this idea. It's another example of why most of us developers should not be even touching the world of laying stuff out visually :)

The truth is that the GNOME community probably has the most designers and UX-focused members in its community.

The problem isn’t lack of designers.

For all the hate it receives, Libadwaita is one of the nicest designed toolkits currently in-use that has more than a dozen applications using it.

Having an entire CSS engine at their disposal certainly does help the designers design without needing to know programming.

That surprises me. What kind of decision process ends up choosing to hide the primary clock in a desktop OS. It's funny imagine the meeting, people voting "yes" to this. Not even in the tiny screens (by comparison) of phones this has been done (probably proposed somewhere sometime, but thankfully denied).

The problem isn’t enough designers, it’s too many.

There are conflicting design goals throughout the UI. All could be good/great with a cohesive system, but there is none.

To answer your question, the same people that wanted the system to be a Tier 1 mobile/tablet UI.

You mean the designers who did something like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/1nrcvok/i_dont_see_t...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45391654

I'm using niri with quickshell now and it has a similar feel, as quickshell implements many features in a unified way as in Gnome Shell.

In niri you can have the bar on all monitors, and you can also configure a window to fill the available space and have it "think" it's full screen while the top bar is still visible (see the toggle-windowed-fullscreen setting).

Did you follow or do you have a guide or instructions for how you configured your setup?

Checkout DankMaterialShell[0], it's still in somewhat early stages of development but it supports both Niri and Hyprland. I just switched over to it from waybar in my Omarchy setup and have been loving it.

[0]: https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell

For niri I followed closely the build and "manual installation" and "example systemd setup" instructions on the website. If you do that don't forget to edit niri.service to set the correct path for the executable.

For Quickshell I basically followed the website instructions but here are my notes from when I installed on Debian Trixie:

    git clone https://git.outfoxxed.me/quickshell/quickshell

    sudo apt install cmake qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-shadertools-dev  spirv-tools pkg-config  libcli11-dev qt6-wayland-private-dev qt6-svg-dev ninja-build qt6-svg-plugins libjemalloc-dev wayland-protocols libdrm-dev libqtqmlmodels-dev 'qt6-*-private-dev' libpam0g-dev

    Do not install ddcutil: it prevents detection of the external monitor except if the monitor is turned off and on again.

    cmake -GNinja -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCRASH_REPORTER=OFF

    ignore warnings `The qml plugin 'xxx' is a dependency of 'quickshell'...`

    cmake --build build
    cmake --install build

For the Quickshell config I used Noctalia. This means installing some dependencies like fonts-roboto, then cloning the noctalia repository as a directory in ~/.config/quickshell/, and finally editing the quickshell systemd service to start it with the noctalia config (command "qs -c noctalia-shell").

I tried niri this spring and had several issues trying to get copy-pasting between Wayland and X (Xwayland) working. Think I had some other problems as well that were a dealbreaker that I can't recall at the moment. Anyway, have you had an issues like this? I assume Gnome does a lot of work to make it seamless, maybe Quickshell does something similar?

As far as I remember I just had to install wl-clipboard and xwayland-satellite. It was working fine then even before I moved from Waybar to Quickshell.

You mean like GNOME used to be usable, before the big rewrite.

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