I wanted a Sway-like experience but with a desktop experience, and so tried it.
It's surprisingly good: a DE with powerful enough window tiling.
It's now my daily driver.
Since they're backed by a sole company, I'm still not convinced on their longevity, but remain hopeful!
I'm not familiar with Pop OS, which I now realise is what the post is.
I wasted too much time tweaking Enlightenment. I remember that was fun but I don't really remember much about actually using it.
OS/2's Workplace Shell feels like the biggest lost opportunity (and has nothing to do with UNIXy stuff). I really liked Rexx and the SOM stuff felt cleaner than what became COM in Windows.
I used to be in the GNOME camp during its early days, even wrote a tiny article to The C/C++ User's Journal regarding Gtkmm, nowadays I rather use XFCE.
The original fvwm also holds a special place, that was the first I used in GNU/Linux, back in 1995, and I got to customise it quite a bit.
SOM was great, it also supported implementation inheritance, and had metaclasses concept as well.
I like COM as idea, I dislike how badly Microsoft keeps rebooting the developer experience, and isn't able to provide modern toolig as easy as it was from VB 6, Delphi, C++ Builder. For something that has become the central mechanism how Windows APIs are delivered.
- ratpoison ("tmux for X11". Ultralight, great for kiosks and similar where you barely want a WM at all)
- stumpwm (ratpoison on steroids in Lisp)
- Xmonad (A bit different tiling dynamic that some prefer. I dig it despite Haskell, not because of it)
- Qtile (Very flexible and easily hackable in python yet reasonably stable and fast. You can reproduce for example the Xmonad or i3 experiences pretty easily)
(which I use on top of Pop!_OS, oddly enough).
Although I'm happy enough with what KDE gives me that COSMIC would have to be substantially better before I'd endure the switching costs.
Now that SteamOS is officially released, I just use KDE. Maybe COSMIC will be better at touch eventually, but since it's a traditional laptop company, I'm not sure.
Please just give virtual desktops first class support and lets forget about the Activities experiment. Most users hate it.
The attitude regarding it is about as bad as Gnome forcing Overview on everyone, refusing to provide a first party dock or lightweight launcher. Despite almost every distro and 95% of Gnome users immediately installing Dash to Dock.
Took me some time and asking in their irc-channel, but actually the basic setup is super-simple, and was too 'intuitive' for an old greybeard like me :-)
You right-click on the launcher icon, or the systray and "Add or Manage Widgets", then a window appears where you can pick all sorts of widgets in a bar to the left, which then appear in a subwindow to the right. You just want the Pager, and remove any instances of that Activities Pager thing, if it is/they are already present(because you can have multiple instances in different places(leftover from earlier tries, maybe)).
What I didn't get was that you can pick that pager-widget from the subwindow, and move it anywhere you want it to in that whole taskbar-panel(outside the edit window!), by holding the mousebutton down(drag), until it is exactly where you want it, and then releasing the mouse-botton(drop).
And then "Exit Edit Mode" in the still open window, which then closes. That's all there is to it.
(Similar to how you customize the appearance of Firefox)
From then on you can configure the pager by right clicking onto it, and virtual desktops in system settings like you want them. Maybe having it appear larger with some key-combo, or whatever.
During the time I cursed it, I discovered the activity thing isn't really active anymore, they just let it there for the people who want/like it, meanwhile the real virtual desktop thing didn't get much attention, but that may change in the future?
Hopefully?
Then activate and position the Pager like I described above, and after that how it presents them.
Nonetheless I'm thinking that could be more integrated, and the pager could be larger, when howering the mouse pointer over it.
What appears is an unholy amalgamation of a launcher, a workspace strip, a window overview, workspace peeking, and a dock.
Worse yet is that every time you go in or out of this overview, an animation plays, making things fly and animate everywhere constantly, whenever you want to take any action.
Whenever someone points out to Gnome developers that most people only want to open a launcher to type "52*93" or find a contact, that they just want to mouse over a dock to have a lightweight way to see if an application is open (and to switch to it), they get irate and tell you their vision is vastly superior.
Gnome could be pretty great if the developers their attitude to their users wants and the feedback on their issue tracker wasn't extreme snark and "actually we are right". Even if clear UI defects are pointed out, no, in fact they are right.
The Gnome peoples also frustrate any attempt at improving Wayland at a more rapid clip.
There is a reason why Valve went with KDE. KDE has its own set of problems, but at least they are receptive, cooperative and friendly. I genuinely hope Valve puts enough money into KDE that Gnome with its high and mighty attitude gets completely railroaded.
Along comes a Luddite and puts icons on it, totally ruining its beauty. For fsck's sake! Just No.
Thankfully, along comes GNOME and it just says No.
I agree.
I don't think this is true. Speaking as an upstream dev, we've never been very happy with Activities, either.
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/issues/35
Clearly you've had some interaction that upset you and I apologize for that, but I've never come across any Plasma dev who felt we nailed that one (and I wrote large parts of the panels, the menu, the icon desktop, etc.) I was genuinely surprised by your comment.
It's funny to see the two things that prompted the discussion (naming desktops and per-desktop wallpapers) come up heavily under that issue you linked.
Like I mentioned in another comment, I like that KDE devs are much more constructive than Gnome devs. In that issue you can clearly see you're asking users to rephrase their feedback so it is more useful.
With Gnome, I've for example opened an issue for something that isn't according to visual HIG practices. Implementing this would lead to more visual clarity and it would look better to boot. I got told that no, actually they know better. It was pretty clear that they thought that if code or design originated from their shop, there could be no (better) alternative.
When I linked and gave mockup examples I got snarked, and when I snarked back I immediately got dressed down for rule violation by some mod figure that completely ignored their dev's initial snark. Just very, very unpleasant people.
Apologies for the rant haha. Anyway, thanks for linking that and for responding!
E.G. can you set one screen to 150% and one to 175%? (I think the answer to this is 'technically yes but then everything goes a bit blurry because they do it by rendering at 2x then downscaling')
Proper mixed dpi scaling means stuff will render pixel-perfectly instead of downscaling hacks.
I did have to get a reasonably new Gnome, Ubuntu LTS had one that was broken with fractional scaling.
Flatpak is installed by default and used by their app store, and Firefox is packaged as a deb so you can avoid the snap.
I consider it a deshittified Ubuntu.
This is more or less what I have used Linux Mint for (their Cinnamon desktop version is pretty okay, also used the XFCE one).
Nice to have more options!
They show icons for Steam, Chrome, Firefox, Zoom, etc... Does that mean they are maintaining their own fork of those applications built for COSMIC?
The version of Chrome (for example) that Google distributes uses GTK which is GNOME, no? So I was wondering if System76 forked that and made a version that uses the COSMIC API.
Qt4 and Qt5 applications are unsupported, but IgKh/CuteCosmic has a Qt6 Platform Theme that integrates with the cosmic theme system and applies that theming to Qt6 applications. Though it won't work in 24.04 because most of the KDE/Qt apps in this release are based on Qt5, and the version of Qt6 is too old.
I do not care much about "look and feel"
It benefits you when an application doesn't do surprising things. Even basic things like clicking in an edit control, it's better for you if that results in the same outcome across all apps (stuff like does it select all text? does it place the caret at the end?).
Even for command line apps, consistency is good (see https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...). Are options specified with a hyphen? Two hyphens? A slash? Are lists delimited with comma or semi-colon or something else?
I thought this was pretty obvious.