Considering the clashes system76 had with the GNOME team this seems to be going in a similar direction. Having a clearly defined way of theming applications instead of having themes just inject random css is the way to go in my opinion.
I'm really excited to finally try Cosmic DE myself!
Nice work! Glad to see it improving so much over a short period.
I am interested in how programms based on Qt or gtk/libadwaita will look/ be themed in Cosmic. Are there any news about that?
The toolkit decides how their applications look based on whatever theming engines they use. The desktop doesn't have control over that. So GTK applications use GTK themes, libadwaita applications use libadwaita themes, libcosmic applications will use libcosmic themes. We'll try to automatically generate similar-ish GTK/KDE/etc. themes if possible, but it'll depend by what specs those toollkits support in their theming.
Haven't they started working on Cosmic instead of using Gnome and gtk because Gnome devs restricted theming? It sounds weird that they'd be able to import their themes to gtk apps, when it was the trigger for their move in the first place.
Looks very nice, hopefully they'd fix the stutters visible in the tiling example before the final version. Also, I wonder if they also keep applications alive in case of compositor crash, like KDE would in Plasma 6 (but Gnome does not yet, AFAIK).
Good to know regarding the (non) stutters! Is there a mechanism to reconnect applications to the compositor after a crash so that they'd survive? (or at least a plan to make such a mechanism?)