KDE contributor and developer Niccolò Venerandi has published an article about COSMIC, System76’s brand new desktop environment.
It’s been almost a year since I’ve last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself: should I switch to COSMIC? The answer obviously is no, but that’s just because I got addicted to KDE Plasma, so let’s try to be more objective here.
↫ Niccolò Venerandi
Honestly, this is one of the best “reviews” I’ve seen of COSMIC, and paints System76’s hard work in a really positive light. Venerandi spots countless really nice touches he’d love to see adopted by KDE, while also hitting on what I agree is COSMIC’s biggest shortcoming at this point: there’s basically no ecosystem around it. COSMIC uses its own Rust-based toolkit instead of GTK or Qt, but of course, there’s very few other applications that actually use said toolkit.
The end result is that if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application, none of which will inherit all the nice features, touches, and graphics from COSMIC. This isn’t really a complaint about COSMIC itself or the work its developers are putting into it, but more a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit. This may very well change in the future, but for now, if you choose to run COSMIC, you’re going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop.
This won’t matter to everyone, but it sure does matter to me, and it’s the one reason why at this point I have zero interest in running COSMIC. I really hope this changes in the future – competition is good – but it’s going to be a long road.
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I have not even read the article yet but I want to comment on Thom’s thoughts.
> if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application
> if you choose to run COSMIC, you’re going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop
> a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit
> I have zero interest in running COSMIC
> I really hope this changes in the future
An inconsistent and messy desktop is not something I would advocate for. That said, the idea that the only way out of this is to use the same GUI toolkit for every app does not appeal to me either. In my view, there is already too much duplication between the GNOME and KDE worlds. The idea of a third completely parallel ecosystem does not appeal to me. And each of these individually is a weaker competitor to Windows and macOS. And that is before taking into consideration that GNOME has somewhat split with GNOME and the other GTK desktops creating yet more parallel universes of applications. Witness the Mint XApps initiative for example.
My hope for the future is that we get better at interoperability rather than creating a series of walled gardens within Open Source. And yes, I recognize that my support for Wayland is at least temporarily moving this in the wrong direction.
> if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application
When I read this, I think “I sure hope so” and I know this was not the intent of that sentence.
I have spent some time recently getting things like Motif/CDE working natively on Wayland so interoperability has been top of mind. The challenge of creating a cohesive end-user UX while also maintaining fidelity with competing visions and design decisions is non-trivial for sure.
> unpopular (as of right now) toolkit
Very small nitpick but “unpopular” makes it sound rejected when in fact it is just “new”. But I know that Thom simply meant that it has limited adoption at this point.
At this point in time, the only ecosystem that retains a mostly native look is the mac. I don’t think this applies to Windows anymore. Not even Microsoft respects it.
Browsers are sadly playing their own game but, otherwise, I think it is expected that you get some parallelism between ecosystems. I expect a desktop environment to provide a file manager, a basic text editor, a terminal emulator and other niceties that are basically the whole point of switching to a different desktop environment. Otherwise, heck, you can always run something like openbox and pick the best application you like for each one of your use cases and not care about consistency or the features provided by the DE, which is exactly what I did when I used openbox.
If you go back to the 90s, you had all these competing OSs that HAD to provide a full experience and very few applications were available across ecosystems. I remember cca 8 years ago trolling Ars Technica and filling a browser usage survey from the latest build of Firefox available for AIX. =)
Now we are mostly app-centered. No matter what desktop environment you are on, you are possibly editing your photos in GIMP, browsing on Firefox, using libreoffice (if you are on Linux), using vscode or kate or geany to do coding.
I left from Mac to Windows (for my photo stuff) and carried with me GIMP, Silverfast and Luminar Neo regardless. And when I run FreeBSD or Linux, I use Geany.
I think many folks would agree that your tools go with you and you pick DE based on it “not sucking”.
Agreed. For me its XFCE4 forever — and based on their release cycle I will be dead before GTK5 becomes an issue.
Agreed, it seems like GTK5 may be a while off yet.
For XFCE4, I have been hoping to see 4.22 by the end of the year. With luck, xfwl4 will ship in 4.22 as well (the Wayland version of xfwm4).
> I have spent some time recently getting things like Motif/CDE working natively on Wayland so interoperability has been top of mind.
Oh, this sounds interesting! Though as one of the people on the CDE team, I’m surprised I haven’t seen you in the community talking about this. I was shown by Thom on fedi a project that was doing something similar, but was more about turning CoW into a Wayland NsCDE and very much looked like it was being done with generative AI, which everyone in the community was very disappointed with…
I really do like what they do with COSMIC and I like their design ideas — especially about (not-)rounding corners. But unfortunately, they have add just another standard/tool to the QT vs. GTK battle.
Little do I know, but to me it looks like they should have forked from GTK at all cost (e. g. rewriting GTK/Adwaita and make it behave like they want it to behave). This way they would have gotten access to a large zoo of applications prompt.
@Andreas
I think “Rust native” was a really key design decision for them. The guy building RedoxOS works at System76 as well so this is clearly an engineering preference there. That pretty much excluded GTK unless they wanted to pull a “rewrite it in Rust” GTK effort into their critical path.
Of course, the fact that they are trying to reduce ties and dependency on the GNOME project was probably also a factor. GTK4 feels like a fully captured GNOME project at this point.
This is such a good review and a really great example of how to advocate for software. He spent the whole time talking about how great COSMIC was, only focused briefly at the end on why KDE is better and yet left me convinced that, while COSMIC is good, KDE is better. And I feel like I know both environments better after reading. Nice work!
> they do this through a Wayland protocol, meaning that we could push other desktops to implement the same for incompatibility.
This was a funny slip. He clearly mean “push for compatibility” but said the opposite. This is funny as “incompatibility” is a core complaint that many people have with Wayland.
I don’t want to bash on anyone, but I found the review quite funny – as it started out, and spent quite a lot of time, going over things such as “customizeable rounded corner windows radius” and “changes to display settings auto-apply instead of having to click on the save button”.
If those were the worst paper-cuts a user gets when using KDE, I’d be happy to send its devs a huge check!
However, in my experience of trying out KDE as daily driver for the first time a couple of months ago (on OpenSuse Tumbleweed), there are a million other issues, which affect productivity much more directly than rounded window corners.
Things such as the default software updater (quite a critical system component imho) having tons of interaction and useability bugs, the login screen not being auto-configured to be useable on a high-dpi screen and not being easy to configure via graphical settings apps, cursor/screen freezes here and there and everywhere, or there not being a clear-cut distinction between system management tools provided by kde and those provided by suse. I was frankly underwhelmed – the overall feeling after installation and first steps was of a less polished product than ubuntu was 15 years ago.
It feels as if there is more attention paid to eye-candy than there is to the desktop fundamentals.
Open source and scratch your own itch, I know…
I somewhat agree although I have found myself using KDE quite a lot since switching to Wayland. It is arguably the Wayland experience with the fewest papercuts.
To the reviewer’s credit, he seems to acknowledge that KDE leans towards greater complexity and seems genuinely impressed by COSMIC’s attempts to take a “less is more” cohesive approach. Whether you think the complexity of KDE is a benefit leading to greater power or a detraction resulting in lower polish is in eye of the beholder. Or perhaps you think it leads to both, but find one an acceptable cost for other.