System76 have today released the first alpha preview for you to try out COSMIC, their brand new home-grown desktop environment. Built with Rust, it should hopefully feel pretty familiar to most Linux users with a visual style that matches up to their current GNOME-based desktop.
While they're building it for their own Pop!_OS, with a alpha iso for Pop, it's designed to be cross-distro and they even have ways for you to test it out directly on a few other distributions already.
Pictured - COSMIC Alpha 1 using automatic tiling for opened windows
Their vision for COSMIC: "COSMIC began as our answer to user feedback we’ve received on improving Pop!_OS. The new desktop environment introduces a custom theming system, streamlined Auto-tiling, new core applications including an app store, and provides you more control over your workflow. Written in the Rust programming language, COSMIC is more stable, more secure, and better optimized for performance."
Keep in mind this is the first alpha build, there will likely be many bugs and unfinished features. Going by the press details they sent this is what's currently complete:
- Settings pages + applets for daily use for most users
- Applets provide many settings needs
- Connecting to bluetooth and wireless networks. Choosing audio input and output devices
- Highlight COSMIC’s unique features
- Panel and Dock Customization
- Appearance and Themes
- OS Interfaces
- Panels, Launcher, App Library, Greeter, Dialogs
- Apps
- Settings, Files, Text Editor, Store, Terminal
- Compositor features
- Auto-Tiling, Snapping (Manual-Tiling), Stacking, and Sticky Windows
- Excellent nvidia hybrid graphics support
- Fractional scaling
- Wayland native with XWayland support
And this is what's still to be done:
- Numerous Settings pages
- Frosted effect for OS interfaces
- Variable refresh rate
- Accessibility
- Initial Setup
- Need to set time manually
- Workspaces features, animations, and refinement
- Lots of COSMIC Files work
- Bug fixes and refinement
- Compositor software rendering
- Testing in VMs requires hardware acceleration
- GNOME Boxes uses software acceleration but it’s pretty smooth
- VirtualBox requires enabling VT-x/AMD-V and Enable Nested Paging
Check it out on the official website.
A promising start to what could be a really interesting Linux desktop environment, although as expected it is on the rough side being in alpha right now you can clearly see where they're going with it. I can imagine this becoming really popular.
When you've tried it be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Vasya Sovari Aug 9
Quoting: KlaasQuoting: Purple Library Guyif you use Windows or Mac, you use the single DE that comes with itI'm not sure, but I think there have been 3rd party replacement shells (is that the right term?) for Windows before.
Sort of, but those (as far as I recall) were all hacks rather than fully legit options. And if they broke, you were stuffed.
Only Linux offers a range of officially supported environments that you can more or less freely choose between, all of them for real usable and stable
Quoting: Vasya Sovarireal usable and stableThat varies. Being one of the lucky KDE SC 4 version 4.0 users I have to say that stable is a relative term.
And usability is a very objective term. I've never been happy when I had to use Unity for example.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: JarmerThis is so exciting! Been keeping my eye on this forever. I very much look forward to trying it out. Might boot up a live usb later tonight if I have the time. I think we desperately need some new blood in the de spaceThis is such an amazingly Linux thing to say. Consider--if you use Windows or Mac, you use the single DE that comes with it--not only do you have no choice, the very concept that there could be a choice does not exist. But we Linux users are so spoiled we can be saying "Oh, the bunch of choices we have are getting a bit long in the tooth, it was about time there was a new contender or two!"
Just to be clear, this is a happy thing.
haha, this is true! I think Apple does a good job with their DE on macs. I use them for work stuff and I can be very efficient and get stuff done quickly. But that's it, just utilitarian work stuff. Windows is such a bloated ad ridden spyware nightmare these days I can't even bring myself to use it, like at all. I used to use it all the time for work stuff, but moved to Macs because of those reasons.
Anyway....!!! I love linux because of the choices we get and the support of the community, and I absolutely love when interesting projects like this Cosmic come to be! yay!
rustigsmed Aug 11
edit; seems Cosmic will allow for per monitor wallpaper, we're living in the future!
Last edited by posthum4n on 12 August 2024 at 12:47 pm UTC
The title bars are hilariously oversized, the date format can't be changed, it has dynamic workspaces (which I really can't stand, I vastly prefer having dedicated workspaces for specific applications so I can just press Super+3 to go to Emacs, for example), not being able to change cursor theme is very unfortunate, the keyboard repeat delay goes from 'slow' to 'fast' without any indication what that means and without a test area it's very awkward to try and get right, no hover tooltips for the dock is also very unfortunate...
But all complaining aside, between workspaces per monitor and amazing defaults for keyboard shortcuts (almost all shortcuts use the Super key, which is exactly how I think that should be done), I think Cosmic has the potential to become one of the best desktop environments available. Really looking forward to the next release.
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