Happy New Year, and welcome to 2024! We’re on the home stretch putting together COSMIC DE, the new desktop environment made for Pop!_OS and other distros. Basically, it’s the look, feel, and customizations.
The goal for the COSMIC DE alpha is to feel like a complete product, albeit with features still to come. With a more stable alpha, we can better collect feedback on usability and focus on completing the Settings panels. From here, we can work towards an eventual 24.04 release over the summer.
↫ System76’s blog
I’m very excited to try this out once it’s available.
As am I! I like Pop!_OS as it’s the best interpretation of GNOME I’ve ever used, but it’s still GNOME and I still can’t effectively use it day to day. I’ve had issues with my usual daily driver, KDE, so right now I’m back on Xfce but it feels so limiting after using KDE for so long. If COSMIC turns out to be as awesome as they are talking it up to be, it may be the push I need to switch to a systemd/Wayland workstation full time.
I have a feeling though, just like everything else in my digital life, I’ll end up waiting for a few years to fully commit so I don’t run into any show-stopping bugs.
I still don’t get why they don’t simply use KDE. With Plasma and plasmoids you can make KDE look like anything, I’ve once made it look like LCARS from Star Trek, so they could easily make it fit with their vision for a DE, by making a default KDE konfig.
KDE is terminally ugly. I don’t know why it has to be that way, but it has always been ugly, and it looks like it’ll just always be ugly. No, it’s not subjective – it’s objectively ugly. If it wasn’t, I bet we wouldn’t even be discussing gnome any more.
(For one easy to reach for example – why are the icons always touching each other that way – the lack of an even basic awareness of negative space is a BIG part of the problem.)
CaptainN–,
You’re “objectivity” is subjective to me, haha.
Maybe it’s because I’m not the artsy type, but I do like it better then modern gnome. Then again I kind of feel like windows 2k was the pinnacle of UI, YMMV 🙂
Not sure what you mean.
After reading how much work went i to wayland/plasma i decided to give it a shot. At first i installed ubuntu/arm server then installed the kubuntu desktop package and it seriously broke the network. Scrapped the whole thing and got back to my trusted grand daddy debian and it seems to work better than xfce in the vm. Of course even virtualized bloat can be snappy with apple silicon. As far as being ugly i dont get your point. You know you can customize it right?
It’s 100% customizable so if you managed to make it ugly, that’s on you and your konfig.
I think GTK after version 2.* is impossible to make pretty since it is CSS only, so it all feels flat and lifeless.
So i tend to avoid GTK applications as a whole as far as possible. (i used to blacklist gtk3 as standard)