It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community.
How does the community here feel about this distribution and the company that has brought it to us? How do you feel about the projects that they’re working on, and their goals for the distribution moving forward?
A semi-rolling distribution, with access to Ubuntu’s many PPA’s, and easily removable extensions that reveal the lovely vanilla Gnome experience, it’s great!
Also they are making a Rust desktop, which I am currently running, though not daily driving.
How are you running COSMIC? I’m on Fedora.
There’s a COPR repo
ryanabx/cosmic-epoch
And it works and seems to be regularly updated! Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
I am on Pop!_OS, I ran
sudo apt install cosmic*
.Don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much, running video games, or any OpenGL thing including 2D games and GPU-accelerated terminal emulators is a bad experience, and alt+f4 isn’t implemented, and f11 to fullscreen is janky, and theming for buttons and such is clearly alpha.
The promise of an Arabic-supporting, Rust based, GPU-accelerated terminal is too attractive, however, as I was teared between multilingual terminal, Wezterm, Alacritty and Kitty for a while.
The first is horrible at everything but supporting languages, the second is really janky, the third doesn’t support tabs, the fourth has bad theming and customization.
what are the benefits of a gpu-accelerated terminal?
Consumes less energy (CPU) while also rendering more responsively.
What GPU configuration do you have? I don’t have any of these issues. If NVIDIA, you have to wait for NVIDIA to release explicit sync Wayland drivers.
Inaccurate report,
I just ran Neovim in terminal and was used to Neovide, so I thought it was choppy.
Intel HD 630.
There is, however, a 2D game - which I am not going to disclose the name of - that’s pretty broken. (It uses Adobe Flash as an engine)
Also the steam client doesn’t maximize properly with tiling but I am sure that’s reported.
I have been daily driving Cosmic for a week now; it caused me Arch-syndrome, everyday I run
sudo apt update
hoping to get some polish to the desktop.Edit: there’s more…
Neovide’s transparency is completely broken, and shows a blank, though not a pitch black, color and screenshotting it results in seeing the text with a checkered background. (In the resulting screenshot only) (Running on Proton 8.0-5)
clipboard=unnamed plus
, the setting supposed to unify Neovim’s clipboard and system’s, doesn’t work.clipboard: error : Error: target STRING not available
I also was unable to transfer a file to my phone using Cosmic Files, but Nemo worked, though I read that’s fixed in some Blog.
Edit II: I just discovered
popdev:master
it seems to be a general unstable branch instead of just Cosmic things, but I took the risk and added it, I just have to remember to remove it once 24.04’s releasedWhat report are you referring to?
The thing you replied to; I don’t open social media often enough to reply on time, so I sent you a late reply.
Seems that you’re right. It’s almost usable currently, but it lacks some essential things for me, mainly some further snappiness and customisable key binds (old habits die hard and I’m not adapting my habits and workflow to new keybinds).
But after these get fixed, I can see myself potentially running COSMIC. This makes me even more excited for what the future will bring.
Edit: Also, sloppy focus aka focus-follows-mouse
And an option for static workspaces i.e a set number of workspaces that are constantly there, instead of dynamic workspaces that close with your windows and change your workflow because you closed the window on Workspace 4 so workspace 5 is now workspace 4 so when you go looking for the window on workspace 5, it’s not there.
It’s one of those features I always wanted to try, but always forget to look up how to actually enable and start using it, so I never actually tried it.
Highly recommend trying it, especially on a tiling window manager! (doesn’t seem to be available for COSMIC yet, and I don’t think it’s in other DEs either, but I know floating WMs like Openbox had sloppy focus iirc.