We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!_OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization. The new designs are developed from extensive testing and user feedback since the Pop!_OS 20.04 release, and are currently being further refined in their testing phase.
As we finalize these new designs, read on for some preliminary info on a few of the major changes COSMIC brings to Pop!_OS.
With some users deeply unsatisfied with GNOME 40, it makes sense for System76 to make this move now. One of the most basic changes in COSMIC compared to regular GNOME is that it will come with a dock – one of the most popular GNOME extensions. The fact you have to go into a special overview mode just to deal with running applications has always been a headscratcher to me and many others, and if System76 can do a good job listening to community input, this could be a real winner.
We all know Gnome 3/40 is crap. So people have forked or modified it to:
– MATE
– Cinnamon
– Ubuntu-Desktop
– Budgie
– Ubuntu Kylin DE
– Unity
– Lomiri
– COSMIC
– Manokwari
– probably many more
I wonder why these people didn’t just team up to improve (make bug free) KDE Plasma?
How is Gnome crap when all these people are rushing in to develop their own (somewhat) forks specifically based on Gnome and not something else?
Because there’s no need to fork KDE or, say, Xfce. They work fine and respect the user. The only KDE fork I know of is Trinity (KDE 3 continuation) and I don’t think anyone’s ever forked Xfce. With Gnome, some things quite obviously need to be improved upon (e.g. the lack of a taskbar or dock), so everyone thinks they can “fix” it and make their own little fork.
In that case they would of course be releasing distros running KDE instead of developing their own DEs. No, KDE is trash beyond salvation and that is why it keeps being ignored.
Why are there many cars on the road? Why are there so many styles of clothing?
Why are there Trucks and cars and motorcycles and bicycles and pedestians.
People want choice. Depending on their job, certain Linux environments are better than others.
For a long time (few months), I was doing heavy coding and intensive debugging. I use terminal mode.
With Terminal mode who needs xfce, gnome, kde, etc. I just needed a terminal like Konsole or nautilus.
If I was a web designer, it may be that KDE is not for me, but gnome is better. If I am an administrator of a network or group of systems, KDE may be a good tool.
My take, use what ever makes you comfortable in your tasks. But also take time to investigate other system interfaces. KDE people say, “when the only interface you have is KDE, everything looks like a KDE solution”. Gnome people say, “when the only interface you have is gnome, everything looks like a gnome solution”.
Take the time and use curiousity to discover other distribution interfaces. Ideas from one interface often get adopted by another.
I am for using my curiosity to broaden my “user interface knowledge”.
Isn’t that an answer on its own? KDE is too tightly wound and cannot be customized by organizations to get what they want.
On second note ubuntu and cosmic are not forks, but rather patch-sets and extensions.
Mine experience with KDE usaully end with – “Why I need to twist so many knobs to make it usable?”, while on Gnome I just need to install a couple of extensions and be done with it.
>Why I need to twist so many knobs to make it usable?”
Because KDE allows you to configure it into anything you want. Nevertheless, the defaults are already useable.
>while on Gnome I just need to install a couple of extensions and be done with it.
Sounds like more effort than just flicking through KDE’s system settings.
I have had to do searches online for how to change simple things in KDE and Windows 10. Which is generally a sign that they need to fix their UI. Windows 10 is worse, as random articles for the same thing show different answers based on the build of Windows you are running… at least KDE is consistent in its over complicated UI, where windows is just all over the place.
Gnome’s workflow is excellent and simple and stays out of your way.
KDE is more about if you like playing with themes and Desktop environments. Gnome is about getting stuff done…
ROTFL. Want to change anything in GNOME? Simple, just open a terminal and type gsettings. gibberish. yetmoregibberish .wtfigiveup imgoingbacktoausenable.desktop.
KDE has been targeting Windows-fleeing noobs with its default settings for years. (I don’t care, just saying.)
When KDE 4 was released, it featured a black default panel theme because Windows Vista had one too. Later they switched to a light panel theme when Windows 7 did it too.
Overall the user experience is probably very smooth for someone who has been spending a lot of time in Windows. But I don’t like it either and I too have to spend a fair amount of time settings things up.
You kind of have a non-argument because none of those are forks. Except for MATE, which is a continuation of GNOME 2 and not a fork, the rest are all customizations of GNOME, which is exactly what GNOME 3/40 was designed for. Clearly, this strategy has been a great success, as there are many distributions actively choosing to use GNOME with their own customization rather than KDE.
If you really consider it carefully, the strategy makes sense. Vendors now have the ability of maintaining a vendor-specific desktop that is still compatible with all other vendor’s desktop. This is very similar to what proprietary Unix vendors did in the 90s with CDE, and that was clearly successful.
Honestly, I think you might be too emotionally invested in your argument, making you blind to reality and reason.
How hard is it to keep the customizations in sync with the main GNOME release? Presumably all of these projects (that aren’t forks) want to do that, no?
Its been fine for a while, but gnome 3 was a pain for a long time as they kept breaking compatibility with every point release.
But, IMHO all of these gnome customizations are mostly because its so much more stable ( run time stable, not api stable) than kde has been for most of the kde 4.x/ 5.x series. There was a sweet spot in kde where it was fine for a while, but its gotten worse, imho. Regardless of the desktop environment I’ve tried, something gets screwed up that I can’t easily fix or deal with in the DE or command line and the only way I know to fix things quickly and easily is via gnome/gnome tweaks. its a safe default where things just work, albeit in non obvious ways that I don’t always prefer, but they work as intended.
Clearly, the customizations are not as much of a resource drain as you seem to think. Not only are there a dozen different GNOME extension sets, but their maintainers show no sign of choosing something different. Instead, the number of extensions has only increased since the original release of GNOME 3.
Again, it seems like the arguments in this thread are mostly emotional and not based in reality. The evidence strongly suggests the strategy is working. Obviously, like in all things, there’s room for improvements.
This is what sticks in my head:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735211#c19
If you read it all, you can some to some understanding of why things happened the way they did and I think most people were actively doing things with good intentions, but … sucky for users and some devs that were not informed of what was going on or the long term plan for everything.
tldr; gnome3/gtk3 was rocky for other devs trying to use it. But its been good for a while.
I agree, Thom.
You read it here first!
Since I actually like System76 laptops, I wish the System 76 company a quick and utter failure in this new endeavour of theirs. You see, if this GNOME fork becomes successful, they will have to devote more and more resources to it (taken from laptop development of course), while all the other laptop manufacturers benefit from the software for free.
System76 doesn’t make or design these laptops. They’re basically rebranded OEMs, all they do is provide the marketing/distribution/support.
Yes, System76 takes specific OEM equipment, verifies it plays nice with Linux, then sells it with guaranteed linux compatibility.
They say they do BIOS tweaks.
But anyway, the money has to come from somewhere, so this Gnome fork will result in a worse value-for-money at the very least. If it ever becomes successful, someone will notice the opportunity and launch a “System77” brand which replicates the BIOS tweaks and sells the same hardware and software for cheaper, thus ruining System 76’s market share.
Subsidizing software development with hardware sales works only if you keep at least one bit of important code proprietary and exclusive. Even Nokia was supposed to have an exclusive fork of MeeGo.
I still believe the only viable way to subsidize the development of Linux Desktop distros is via deals with search engines and online services.
kurkosdr,
Business models are hard. It’s sad to watch the software industry fall to adverting, heck even microsoft has embraced OS ads. And since consumers increasingly expect things for free, it’s becoming harder to sell software that doesn’t include advertising. I don’t have an answer, but I really don’t like advertising and it feels like it’s closing in around us all.
And these “deals” would involve selling personal information. Not at first perhaps, but it would eventually happen. At that point, why use Linux desktops anyway? What’s the difference, from a practical user’s perspective, from Windows?
System76 does more than just some BIOS tweaks and rebrand hardware. Watch some of their videos sometime. They are very open source friendly, swap out the entire bios for coreboot, rip out all they can of the Intel Management Engine (without making the machine fail to boot) and they take Ubuntu, rip out the snap crap, and install their own gnome-session with their tiling manager. I still end up removing that and installing the default one. But they do some nice tweaks for Optimus to work better than any other diatro I have used, so it is what stays on my Thinkpad P52.
The whole situation is rather problematic. Stock GNOME 3 or 40 is not something hardware companies are comfortable putting on mainstream desktop oriented computers and it is painfully obvious on why. Once you are forced and start installing some extensions and start doing some modifications, yes, then you are basically one step away from saying heck, lets do our own. Not sure if that is all that optimal. Fragmentation and complexity of interaction is the usual outcome. If GNOME people got it wrong, and still after a decade don’t to much about it, then how could a hardware company, who’s main interest for sure isn’t developing a desktop environment, how could they succeed. They can throw some fancy stuff in it, every once in a while, but overall i just don’t see on how building more complexity, atop of GNOME 3 or 40, could ever work great. Fix GNOME Shell and make it usable on desktop again, after build on that, solid foundation.
I would like to see people do what I did and just take raw Gnome (either Fedora or Debian, some distro that doesn’t feel like they need to ‘fix’ things, and use it for a month without installing a bunch of extensions. I do this every year with KDE and try a full switch over. Last time I went back to gnome because Evolution doesn’t crash with all my emails where KMail pukes hard, and KDE refused to keep running…
I noticed with raw gnome that I simply prefer having my entire screen except a small bit up top for my apllications, and any application switching is done with the Meta key and mouse click. I use the dock hidden and will click on an icon I have added to it to launch, but otherwise don’t use it for much else, so why does it need to take up screen space?
Evolution hates Gmail (or the opposite), which I use for work. Regardless, you can use Evolution with KDE, Thunderbird with GNOME (if you’re a masochist) or Kmail with GNOME (if you’re a sadomasochist) if you like.
No victim blaming, please. Users have a right to decide what they want to use and speak loud about their findings, including their first impressions. For a desktop environment a 2-3 day trial amounts to an in-depth review – a good DE should make using computers and applications easy and comfortable, if it takes time and effort to learn it, that’s neither. Longer learning times are reserved for applications where there is actually something to learn about the task underneath, like advanced image/video/document editing, coding, CAD, 3d modelling, vfx and so on.
I am sure that stock GNOME 3 and 40 does work for some people, still i bet it doesn’t work for majority of people. Have been following this story for a decade now and i feel that this is now safe to say. Basically there is a bunch of extremists involved that will support whatever decision gets made and there is the rest of the normal people involved, that if they try to provide some constructive criticism the usual response is you are doing it wrong, learn to do it the right way … Basically saying you are a moron and they are right regardless of what they do. Anyway, in my opinion this should be the other way around. Provide to majority of people a standard desktop metaphor and let minority to use extensions to tailor tweak GNOME to their needs. I have seen some news, on how GNOME developers are thinking of providing a bottom bar now. I guess still long way to go but maybe they are finally starting to realize majority of people just doesn’t want to use their current vision of stock GNOME Shell on a desktop computer. I won’t hold my breath but lets see if GNOME 40 will finally start to address the problem of forcing a non desktop shell on people computers and wondering on why it isn’t accepted and most people wouldn’t touch it with a stick.
ndrw, Geck, well said.
Looks good, and I wish all the best to them!
Only thing I have issue with is that in the mockups it looks like it’s only possible to show the dock on one monitor? It should be possible to show it on any or all of them at once.
COSMIC does look nice from the videos: clean, not too intrusive, functional; if I used a System76 machine I think I’d be happy to use it. As it is, desktop environments are a bit like cameras: the best one to use is the one you have in front of you when you need it.
The lack of customizability in Gnome is exactly the reason for its many forks. If you like Gnome in general but are unhappy with some minor details, the only way to make it behave like you want is to fork it. With KDE you just tweak some setting instead of forking.
I checked out a video (p)review of it and it actually looks quite nice. It still lacks a whitespace reducer knob, though. The window titlebars are silly thick and a third of the height of the dock is filled with nothingness. Even the settings UI has like two empty lines between every line of setting knob. They could easily fit on one screen but instead I’d have to scroll like a fool for no good reason just because UI designers all seem to have a sparseness fetish.