A COSMIC Thanksgiving
A COSMIC Thanksgiving
Floating windows, UI implementation, and compositor improvements for the new COSMIC desktop environment.
Notable changes:
- Tracking improvements. For example, if you use the launcher to launch an application and then switch workspaces, it will still launch in the workspace you opened it from;
- Supported the ext-session-lock protocol, which authenticates the user and informs the compositor when the session should be unlocked
- XDG activation and DBus activation support
- work on HDR
- Ongoing work to package COSMIC on NixOS: tracking issue
I've been waiting for this desktop to release patiently. I can't wait to try it. I have one question that I never got to ask anywhere, how is this going to work with the whole Qt/GTK apps? Are things going to look weird like they do on (mostly) Gnome and (sometimes) KDE Plasma?
We will attempt to automatically generate themes for common toolkits, but the desktop environment has no control over how the toolkit chooses to render itself or operate.
Please don't automatically generate themes for third-party apps. If an application brings its own styles and icons, it results a weird mix of multiple styles.
If a user wants to style it themselves, they should be able to — at their own risk. But shipping (inherently broken) styles with a distro/DE misrepresents the appplication and creates unnecessary issues for the upstream developers.
You’ll likely need something separate that’ll style both of these through the settings, similar to how you would config GTK themes on Plasma, or vice versa. I haven’t checked if they do this on their on yet, but it’ll probably be handled this way eventually. Out of the box, expect any Qt or GTK apps to look like their Breeze and Adwaita defaults look, unless you’ve already changed this on your system
Gnome libadwaita apps only change between dark and light mode, which probably can be derived from COSMIC DE's settings quite easily.
For Qt I'm not sure how it looks by default, but since System76 wants to support multiple toolkits anyway, I guess they'll have a solution ready.
I truly hope so, because I'm definitely putting this DE on one of my devices.
Good job Cosmic team!
I really hope Cosmic can be the first DE to close the gap between tilling window managers and DEs we have today. Very excited for it!