5mo ago

Cosmic Desktop - A Review of the Latest Alpha 6

21 comments

@savvynik are you running it on actual hardware or virtual machine?
Gonna have to raise the age old question about this project, because myself and a lot of other developers are only seeing the one angle.
The question is: why?
What is this project solving that System76 is willing to pay multiple developers for? It's almost pound-for-pound a recreation of GNOME, right down to the menu system.
Rust is not a features it's a language. It also doesn't solve any issues with Gnome that I'm aware of.
The biggest issue in the Gnome world I'm aware of is the lack of parity with Windows with regards to display capabilities, and possibly the plugin system causing issues.
So I'm still wondering...why??? What's the best feature anyone can point out here? It's not resources, in fact, this Alpha performs pretty poorly on its own vs Gnome. What's the killer feature I'm missing?
- Gnome upstream is notoriously hard to work with and will insult it's users and make up bogus reasons to reject perfectly good feature requests and bugreports.
  Gnome is slow as balls. On low end hardware gnome bloody chugs compared to KDE let alone the "light weight" DEs.
  Gnome is insanely slow to implement many features.
  Gnome is hostile to working with upstream wayland protocols like window decore.
  S76 want's their desktop to look and work a certain way, and making gnome look/work like that is difficult especially when upstream is not prepared to play ball.
  Gnome devs have insulted S76 devs in public forums, have complained about S76 not funding gnome's A11y efforts despite S76 donating quite a lot to gnome over the course of 5 years, $100'000 https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/xwtns5/does_it_seem_like_gnome_wants_system_76s_cosmic/ira4e8o/
  Personally, not needing to deal with gnome developers alone is a feature. Rust is just a tool which makes developing your own DE, compositor included, very easy.
  
  I would agree with those devs, and I'm not even one of them.
  Again, to correct you, Rust is a language, not a tool.
- I've had issues where the tiled windows go all over the place before/after connecting to external monitors in GNOME Pop shell. I can't speak for the entire Cosmic project, but as an end user who wants an established DE with native tiling windows that always work as intended, I consider the project justified
  
  That's a bug. Report it. That's not a reason to do a complete rewrite of something.
  You also mention tiling, which is not the DE, it's the window manager. Easily solved.
  Neither of these issues is cause for a complete rewrite.
- See the Ubuntu Summit 2024 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwrBKccfYws
  It’s not resources, in fact, this Alpha performs pretty poorly on its own vs Gnome
  I haven't seen any benchmark where GNOME was more performant than COSMIC. Despite alpha status, it is already much more responsive than GNOME.
  GNOME uses a single thread to render all displays in a multi-display configuration. This is often so slow that they need to rely on double or even triple buffering when the frame rate lags behind the display's refresh rate. Meanwhile in COSMIC, thanks to the thread safety features of Rust, it was easy to implement thread-per-display multi-threaded rendering. This means that each display is rendered and composited independently on their own respective threads.
  GNOME's compositor also has an entire JavaScript runtime bundled inside of it, which it uses for drawing interfaces and handling application logic for those interfaces. All within the same process as the compositor, slowing down its event loop. COSMIC instead keeps the compositor process very lean, with all desktop interfaces running in their own isolated processes outside of the compositor via wayland's layer-shell protocol.
- It's way more configurable/flexible than the very rigid GNOME while still being less complex than Plasma, so it falls in a sweet spot between those two extremes.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBefrrM4pis
  Answer from system76

21 comments