Here we go! Congrats to the System76 team!
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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I've been using COSMIC Epoch pre-alpha for the past two months, and it definitly is on a good path. There's still many bugs, but COSMIC has gotten much better, and more featureful (e.g. I'm finally able to use my keyboard layout of choice and rebind all keys accordingly). The only major missing feature is VRR/adaptive sync, because I really don't like playing CS2 with vsync.
Sadly they switched from dynamic tiling (river, awesome) to manual tiling (sway/i3-style), but together with the window-movement-animations it's awesome. Finally there's a desktop with a compositor made with tiling in mind, and not as an afterthought.
Also I find it great how many distros already have COSMIC packages in their community repos.
Just set it up in a VM, I haven't done a deep dive yet obviously but it definitely looks very slick so far!
I've tried it and share my few thoughts:
First of all, the first time I've tried Smithay-based compositor and it is usable and even supports nvidia. It is a good thing just by itself.
The whole DE is better than I assumed. It in not much polished, but it is good as an experimental thing. I've noticed few developer's creative attempts as "compacted" menubars and dialog pop-ups. I doubt they are good but reveal author's intent to try create something new.
What I like: The application menu is nice, it also is quite modern: uses Wayland, CSD, Rust and implements modern UX.
What I not so like: UX has some weak parts: unnecessarily duplicated elements between the dock and the top panel. Icon style and preferences is not that good also. I really would like to see icon consistency across the DE which would not harm third-party apps. I also think the project need a designer in the team.
For now there are only few "native" apps. And I would prefer COSMIC will embrace existing GNU/Linux ecosystem and apps without trying to rewrite everything and creating yet another segregated platform as GNOME and KDE do.
Prior to going into the post, I was just hesitant to try it but curious. The fact that they are working on releasing Cosmic to other operating systems and how comprehensive the piece of news is (for instance, featuring a section of what's present and what's missing at this stage of development) is what may have just sold me into trying it.
pre-alpha please