I criticized System76's Cosmic for recreating GNOME. I was wrong. 

Nobody wants to work with Gnome development team. And Gnome development team doesn't want to work with anybody.

I think the key thing here is that making software for cosmic is a much MUCH nicer experience. Building with GDK has a lot of caveats that make creating applications more difficult in comparison. In this regard cosmic is completely different, and much more friendly to modern development. The other aspect to not overlook is how they handle graphics rendering via hybrid graphics. Cosmic can pick and choose which GPU to use to render each application. For applications that do not need 3D acceleration, they can be run on an integrated GPU, where as the dedicated GPU can be leveraged directly by specific applications that need it independently, and at the same time. This is huge for power efficiency as the dedicated GPU is not active for most computing. This especially notable in regards to laptop batteries. Lastly but also important, cosmic's ability to provide both tiling and cascading window layouts, as well as the ability to quickly switch between the two is a very attractive feature that many professionals including myself is a game changer. No need to way the trade-offs between Hyprland and Gnome or Plasma. Both layout styles are present, and with the benefit of good keyboard shortcuts. On the surface it doesn't look much different perhaps, but Bryan, I swear to you, this thing is a game changer for Linux on the desktop. I also want to add that even if you think Jeremy is abrasive (which I actually appreciate given far to often people hide their opinions these days) I will say that when it comes to enabling the user to have control over their desktop - Jeremy and team are very much embracing user control. They want this environment to be as open and configurable as possible while still providing a good experience for regular users with reasonable out of the box defaults. Convention until configuration if you will. As a software engineer with a decade and a half in this industry I don't get excited about projects often, but this one is big. These guys are moving mountains - it goes much deeper than stylesheets. We're talking a rethinking of the desktop environment from an architectural standpoint that has been needed for decades.

I suspect that Cosmic will differentiate itself Gnome more and more as time goes on; at the moment they may be more focused on getting Cosmic up and running.

Ultimately ubuntu's unity was a failure not because it went away from GNOME. But it was a failure because it was still tied to GNOME and all the issues that come from being tied to GNOME.

Tech over Tea has an interview with the president of System76 titled "CEO And Founder Of System76 | Carl Richell". There is a clip of that video titled, "COSMIC: Why Make Another Desktop Environment". Apparently, they tried to use Gnome, but found it too difficult to work with the Gnome team.

I don't care about my desktop looking unique or interesting, I just want it to work

I think there is more then political issues. Gnome have technical issues that are hard to fix like: HighDPI fractional scaling. It as fine when people did not connect two 4k monitors, now is not fine. If you fork Gnome and want to fix it, you would have to fork GTK. In reality you can't suport that. That was reason of Unity downfall. Canonical didn't created the thing from ground up. It had some perks: less work. But Canonical did not control libraries that were shared with many projects and just patched them for the distro. That was the reason you don't really had Unity outside of Ubuntu. So many patched libraries that may or may not lead to numbers of errors with apps you also have no control off. Can't suport that. I think that Cosmic is much more healthy project in that regard.

Why do you say it will fail probably ? They have money resources that allow them to have a team of like 7 full-time devs on it. When it's done, it will be less work and the team will be at ease to maintain it, not even mentioning that contributor will help. I think they have 50x more chance to succeed than almost all DEs actually.

I totally disagree with you on this. One major difference is that cosmic is a true tiling window manager och gives the best of two worlds, both tiling and a full fletch floating DE. The looks are not as similar as you say, but it looks as good as gnome. Why make it look like Windows when gnome in my opinion has pretty much nailed it when it comes to design. Also, your opinion of rust is not a feature, why write something in C or C++ when Rust can do the same in a more memory safer way? Anyway, I hope the cosmic DE will live up to my expectations and that the cosmic team won't be as difficult to work with as you fear. Thanks for sharing your opinions of things and keep up the good work.

I think you're forgetting the demographic of people who already use Pop. PopOS is a "normie" distro (not an offense, I use Pop). They have customers with their actual physical computers. Probably not great to go wild and upset those users. You're right that pretty much any DE is pretty much immediately understandable and usable, but a change is still a change.

Honestly, I have never liked the Gnome experience, but Cosmic even in it's current state is pretty exciting. The tiling is smooth, per display tile/window is good, I think it has great potential.

Cosmic is the only DE for a long long time for which I've had any interest. GTK / Qt are bloated frameworks that cave in too easily to resource-hungry trends, and all DEs seem to rely on either of them. We need a modern, cleaner and leaner GUI alternative framework. The CDE ecosystem has potential to open up a new suite of apps using Iced that break from the Gtk/Qt dominance.

FWIW, when the author of LXDE wanted to upgrade, he had the choice of going with GTK or QT. He chose QT over GTK, and I suspect it's because GTK code wasn't great and/or they were hard to work with.

I believe creating a DE, from scratch, using a memory safe language, like rust, will ultimately be cheaper than maintaining (and steering) a code base that has evolved in the worst kind of way over a long period of time. The strengths of libcosmic are already being realised, whole classes of potential (and common) bugs simply dont exist with the new stack built on rust.

Tech debt in Gnome could be more work than creating something new

I use Gnome right now and I want this System76 DE. Fedora Forums already have talks of a spin. Gnome is just difficult. Features not implemented and stuff. I am fed up with stuck feature talks.

I think Cosmic DE takes the POP shell productivity gains forward while making a framework that isn’t drastically different. Iterations in the future may move away from gnome but POP hardware users will not be too disrupted.

I wouldn't mind using CDE desktop environment.

I remember when Unity came out for Ubuntu back in the day, and everyone in the community was yelling at Canonical cause they "should have just used Gnome" to do the same thing, cause apparently Gnome is just "so flexible" and "easy to work with and modify" that they should have just done that instead.. Now, years later, the current Gnome-based Ubuntu is just a mess, it doesn't behave like Unity at all apart from the Dock being there but that also not working the same way.. and the rest of the user interface is just a mess, a chimera of multiple things smashed into one and none of it works all that well. And now there are a ton of people in forums saying that "actually, Gnome isn't that easy to work with AT ALL" and I'm just baffled at whatever those people back when Unity was announced were thinking to themselves when saying things like "just should have used Gnome".. Perhaps they didn't know what they were talking about in the slightest.

I think the reason that people aren't trying to create something that's 'new' and that looks and feels different, is that we're kind of at a point of standardization now with what people want and expect from a desktop environment. We want some kind of information panel that tells us the time, or the current battery situation of a laptop, etc. We want a menu system that's intuitive. We want a settings menu that's understandable. We might want an app tray, or to have drives mount in a certain way, but the differences should be relatively minimal for large scale adoption. These ideas have been pretty standard UI wise for like 30 years at this point. If you go too far off the path from those things, the adoption rate will be basically non-existent. Assuming that Linux had the 4% number people talk about with the Linux desktop; then we fracture that desktop by whether it's from an Arch or Debian base, then we split it out by desktop environment, package management, etc. A 'new' setup will be used by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of computer users. So on a planet of like 8 billion, you might have 4 deep in the weeds neck-beardy nerds using your new thing for a couple of weeks. (Not 4 billion; 4... and maybe yourself.) If you're lucky, some of the Linux channels will pick up what you're doing and they will talk about it favorably. After a few years, you might barely be able to fill a city bus with your user-base. Or, you come up with a stylish iteration on an old favorite (like Cinnamon did with the XP-like UI), and people use it and talk about it.

I loved gnome2 because it was highly customizeable, then gnome3 came out, and it was abundantly clear that they wanted you to use it a particular way, and customization was severely limited. At that point, I was done with gnome. I had enough of that attitude in the brief time I used Windows, and I was not interested in that. I want my desktop to work the way *I* want it to work. If your DE doesn't allow me to do that, I just won't use it.

They’re starting from a similar style to keep their product in a familiar shape, but bring a bucket of new features. They’re trying to make something that’s flexible as all hell but ground up polished.

been using the cosmic session on pop for my laptop for college almost since they announced and so-far i love it. its clean and out of my way

getting back to baseline Gnome provides a target to start with if nothing else.

thoughts about Urbit? (if not familiar, Urbit is an attempt to replace the gigacorp internet with something where that can never happen again, so ambitious they made their own declarative assembly language)

*If it looks like Gnome, walks like Gnome, and acts like Gnome, then it probably is Cosmic* 😂

problem with system76 is supply. They don't sell in Europe. They will never be treated seriously, however they check all the boxes

I remember I decided to report an issue with the Kate text editor-oh boy, I wish I didn't. It's stunning to me that people who are designing the very thing that users interact with are so defensive when it comes to criticism. Each designer should embrace criticism and feedback. It proves the point that those who are at the frontier are mostly doing this for themselves, for fun, but not for the end users.

That’s a problem all across Linux : the old projects are all getting progressively worse.

Neovim is another example of someone branching out of a project because the owner of the original one was blocking all the progress.

Starting from scratch doesn't allow you yo create something new, considering how complex a modern desktop is. But it allows you to have a better copy of Gnome. Now version 2.0 and doing new stuff, now we're talking.

*WE NEED A SYSTEM76 XFCE* ! 😊 Who's with me?

Why would a company want to build a a desktop environment and user experience for their OS distro that ships on their hardware that they can control and guide without dealing with GNOME dev team? We'll never know. Tsk.

That's why i created my own environment with compiz cairo-dock and vala-panel, i use arch btw

everyone wants to build their own generic desktop with their own generic file explorer and their own generic text editor. of course, there is nothing wrong with this if your aim is to be generic.

There are things in gnome that I love but it doesn’t feel like it’s made for desktop like cosmic is. I prefer cinnamon, cosmic and zoirin desktop. It docks, task bars at top and bottom and workspaces

interesting talk, i belive its ok to mimic or make somthing new that still look like something people know, as an example i run Linux Mint and i love it, switched for 2 years ago after have trying lots of switches back and forth with linux and windows i finally got a desktop operating system that i like. Linux Mint's Cinnamom is a great and also very stable desktop environment, it just works and the danish translation is perfect so for the first time i have a desktop that looks and feel like a windows, but still is a powerfull linux machine, i love it.

I've been a KDE user since my dad gave me an old Dell laptop on it when I was little just to shut me up. To me, it feels like I'm in Narnia when I use it. It feels like a magical land to me.

Imagine if they did diverge massively from Gnome and built their own UI as you suggest. A lot of users are going to have a rough time when they upgrade. For every person advocating for change there's probably the same number of people who will be pissed when their desktop changes after upgrading.

I like Cosmic because, among many other things, it's an opportunity to have applications with headerbars (which are beautiful, modern and all that) that can be more powerful and support menus (which we could use as global menus, why not?).

NixOS is ready to go with Cosmic

i mean it is early to criticise the project. i would give them the benefit of the doupt. building a version that is close how other environments work reduces the risk of the project in my opinion. they want to enable plugins so that other projects can create their own spins. i hope that the plugins will make it possible to create some very new exciting desktop environments. what i have seen from cosmic looks good so far though

No one does anything new kde is based on window's layout and gnome is clearly inspired by mac's gui

It's a learning experience to recreate also, to create something using a new language without recreating an already good enough user experience and just maybe extending it or improving upon it.

"They're all forming together..." Yeah that's not a mistake, that's on purpose.

I find gnome very easy to work with now that it has logouts in the main bar. I boot a vm, run my gnome specific tests, fix, validate and verify, then shutdown. All hosted in xfce. Seems easy enough 😅. Ok granted their program locater is idiotic and opaque and annoying, but luckily I only need to open a terminal. Now I will grant the gnome idea of window design violates all laws of design and usability. Particularly forcing hamburger menus into a desktp. Which means everything is hidden and requires an extra click to access. I will never see a gnome program that does not look fundamentally broken.

Get to the point Sheeesh You keep on repeating the same thing in a hundred different ways and still not getting to the point

System76 have cash, and they are a company, so yes they can do it, what i wish stron developers community using best practices and ISO standards for create nice UIs

or I could just stick with mate...a DE that does everything i want without compromising for design choices i don't like...

Gnome looks way better then Windows now. And for Windows look there's Budgie desktop. I don't understand why don't they just merge with them Budgie team? Also just to add, we all understand how Gnome team works (it will probably be worse when IBM buys Ubuntu).

I think the only reason Cosmic looks so much like Gnome its because they are using their current version experience as a starting point. I doubt it will look like the same in a few years after launch, especially with the ammount of customizability, almost KDE like they are going for. PS: Trash talk Gnome and the devs all you like, the decisions they made are paying off... mostly.

I have used Ubuntu Unity Remix and to be honest, it felt more polished than any other Ubuntu version. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Reactionary type gives a reactionary tech video. It's fine, I'll cringe even harder at this in 5 years the same way I have countless other egotistical dismissive opinions. (yes, I know)

Its just alpha. For all we know it may turn out be very different in a couple of years, especially if someone forks its and then Cosmic adopts the forks into their core design

Do you even understand what cosmic is trying to achieve here?

I used to love you on LAS.

Lunduke, you have so much against Gnome design and user experience but you never say what those deficiencies are exactly. I use Gnome and I absolutely love it. In order for me to believe you, you'd need to make a video in which you'd point out everything that's in your opinion wrong with Gnome as for now I can't really relate to what you're talking in terms of UI/UX.¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Gnome can't be modified without crashing. Zorin and Ubuntu desktops are FRANKSTEIN. Change the color of the theme and it will break.

The "extensions break catastrophically" problem can be fixed by updating the Gnome version number within the extension, or just waiting for the developer to do it for you before you upgrade Gnome. Gnome released Gnome OS to make it easier for developers to test against the latest version, and sometimes there are significant changes which developers have to accommodate, such as the recent switch to Javascript modules. But usually the developer just needs to change the Gnome target version. Also, it's not a tablet UI, it just has larger icons than other app menus. But given that people often suggest windows-95-style desktops for new users because "it's like Windows," and many people these days are used to phones rather than Windows, does it not make sense to have a desktop UI take some cues from mobile UIs?

I'm pretty sure the Gnome development team don't want to work with the Gnome development team. An inability to resolve differences is probably the number one reason why major FOSS projects get forked. As much as it is people's right to fork a project and do their own thing. I think FOSS developers really need to grow up sometimes. Put their big boy/girl pants on and swallow their pride for the sake of the project. I also think third party entities need to be realistic as to just how much influence they are going to have on a project. Open source and open development don't equate to open contribution. Your contributions may be accepted when you are trusted to make a contribution and that contribution aligns with the project's goals and philosophy etc.

This theory would hold, if it were not for the fact the System76 guys are of the same woke character type.

You're simply wrong about Gnome not being designed for desktop use, and forcing a touchscreen UI/UX... It's incredibly keyboard-centric, and equally as mouse-driven as a traditional desktop. It's just a unified experience. I'd argue that it's one of, if not the only, DE to successfully offer that unified experience.

The solution is not a GNOME fork, it's a meme rewrite, in meme language, with mediocre design guidelines BUT we got window tiling (fucking lol)

Windows and KDE have been successful because they go along with human nature and the keyboard/mouse experience is basic to PC/Mac computing. That will never change. People like doing what works for them. Vanilla GNOME is against it and people have resisted. System76 understands it and they want to return to the classic desktop familiar to their users. I’m excited to see how it will be fulfilled. They want to be aa I’ve said before, the Apple of Linux. 😊

Why anybody would use GNOME is beyond me. There are so many better options. Better in every regard.

I don't like anything about GNOME, and I know for a fact that they are breaking extensions and themes on purpose because they want you to use it their way. It all just seems like the complete opposite to the whole open source mentality.

GNOME sucks so freaking hard.

I think they shouldn't. If the chance of success is so narrow, there is no reason to rey it. Like asahi linux.

Well said bryan. That's exact thing that came to my mind when I got the news of cosmic couple of year ago. "Why not something new? why the same design? and why gnome?".

Okay, why not just use KDE? You can go crazy with modifications on it.

I understand not wanting to work with the Gnome dev team but why develop a new DE from scratch instead of forking and tweaking Gnome. If they wanted to tweak Gnome in the first place but just didn't want to work with Gnome devs they could just fork it and do the smallest amount of changes to reach their goal. That way they can re-base on newer versions of Gnome later and get all the benefits of those new versions.

Gnome team is a steaming pile of coding dog poo

I am somewhat new to Linux and Gnome was my favorite desktop environment...until I tried KDE Plasma. Totally fell in love with it. So, to Bryan's critique, the only thing I would say is, System 76 should have emulated KDE instead of Gnome to begin with.

No, no, no. You were right before. Or at least, more right/less wrong. And now you retract the more valid criticism. Cosmic is just worse gnome. Gnome without the extensions that are the only redeeming feature. Gnome but with system76's current extensions which make gnome worse* hard-coded in. Gnome but written in rust. Gnome but all wayland exclusive. Gnome but fixated on flatpaks. So worse than gnome in every way! * And let's have a look at those in detail. Let's look at the current customized gnome that ships with pop os, which is confusingly also called "cosmic": It ships with eight system extensions, six of which are by system76 and two are not. Five of those extensions make gnome worse, all of them are ones by system76. Two of those extensions improve gnome (desktop icons ng by rastersoft and app indicators by ubuntu), exactly those two that are not by system76. And the final one (pop cosmic by system76) doesn't make any difference. So, to make gnome usable, you just need to add and configure two user extensions; to make it good, you need to add another three. But for current cosmic, you also need to disable five or six extensions. And for the future cosmic those five extensions that make gnome worse, are baked in, while the extensions that make gnome usable will likely not be available. And that's in addition to the rust, wayland and flatpak fiascos.