2w ago

System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 6 Desktop Environment

www.phoronix.com System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 6 Desktop Environment

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I can't wait to try the fedora spin

Why dont they focus on hardware and drivers?
The last thing we need is another DE
- It's a DE written in rust and natively supports tiling.
- Yet, this will be the future DE when all C-language is finaly replaced with Rust. Right before we start porting everything to Zig. There will be a brief moment in the middle, whre Assembler will gain traction too. Anyway, I need to get back to the time warp portal. Enjoy your timeline! Long live FLOSS

I tried this out for fun a few releases ago. It was a mess. I've kind of lost track on why this is even a thing anymore, but anyone involved want to weigh in?
- Give it a try. We are close to being finished. I don't even know why anyone would think this isn't a thing.
  
  i think COSMIC is shaping up amazing and that you and your team are doing an amazing job, for what it's worth
- Its written in Rust, is a completely new code base so not held back by tech debt, and is a clean DE while still being fairly customizable even now.
  I personally don't care why system76 felt the need to code a new DE from scratch, Im just glad they did it. It has given us a whole new ecosystem of GUI toolkits, apps, etc. for linux written in Rust.
- Its in alpha, of course its a mess 😅
  My experiences with pop haven't been amazing (just always ran into small quirks and issues that shouldnt be a thing, but I haven't messed with it all that much), but I'm pretty happy for there to be another big polished desktop environment with resources behind it, I think it makes the linux ecosystem better :)
- It's predominantly a thing because System76 wants full control over the software that they ship on their systems.
  Something I understand completely tbh - it's risky having the success of your business being dependent on another entity's software. Probably even moreso when Gnome is pretty notorious for having a desktop workflow that's very different to what you'd traditionally see, and that's controversial, potentially even alienating to some customers. So I'd probably want that control too.
  When they used Gnome, they had to compromise, and in many cases, neither of them wanted to.
  Over time, things became hostile between them. And to be honest, System76 were the more hostile of the two, IMO.
  One of the more bizarre things to happen was System76 identifying and resolving bugs, applying them in PopOS, choosing not to upstream them to Gnome (twattish, IMO, but that's their right), but where it really crossed a line IMO was System76 staff going onto bugtrackers and forum threads, advertising that XYZ was fixed in PopOS, but not in Gnome, because they actually cared about users. Quite a cynical marketing strategy.
  Another frustrating point was a Gnome developer liking PopOS's tiling implementation, then contacting PopOS to see if they'd be interested in collaborating on a similar - but dumbed down - implementation to use upstream. S76 refused to work with them, and fair enough, Gnome certainly isn't entitled to help from S76, but afterwards S76 on multiple occasions said Gnome simply didn't want more advanced tiling or were hostile to the idea- something clearly not true since Gnome expressed an interest.
  When there was design changes to Gnome 40, Jeremy Stroller of S76 became angry and said he "didn't consent" to these changes, as if Gnome should be ran by System76, not the Gnome developers themselves.
  To be honest, almost all of it comes down to Jeremy Stroller specifically. And even System76 seems to have quietly accepted that, as he has moved away from OS work to firmware work.
  But I'm getting quite off topic...
  When I've tried the PopOS alphas, it was still janky, but I'm sure it'll be far better in future, it's an alpha after all, and they're undertaking a huge job. Some of it seems really cool, and I always love fresh projects that are free of legacy cruft. I'm not sure it's for me, though.
  
  That's honestly a very revisionist version of history. Unfortunately I'm too tired to do a proper rebuttal to it. We have made many upstream contributions to GNOME. There has never been an instance of refusal to upstream anything. There has been instances of upstream not being interested in our contributions though. But that's how things go when you have creative differences with an upstream, or have technical contributions which aren't of interest to upstream's use cases. Keep in mind that just because a downstream makes something cool and interesting, it doesn't automatically mean that creation fits in with upstream's vision for their project. Hence why there's hundreds of gnome-shell extensions that aren't built into GNOME.
  
  I don't even think S76 is big enough to make complaints, honestly.
  I'm curious about how this all came about, because if they wanted control of their software, the desktop is certainly not the first place to start. Misguided is the word I'd use if that was their goal.
  I do want to understand the "why" of this, but also the "who". Do they have a team of developers working on this, or just like...one guy?

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