Pop _OS Cosmic Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor and Multi-Window Support | Hacker News Reader

Pop _OS Cosmic Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor and Multi-Window Support

phoronix.com

73 pointsmindracer43 comments

It's interesting that they are delaying Pop_OS! releases and behind the original schedule[1] writing a new desktop environment, but so much of their updates seem to be around their text editor.

I would have prioritized having a basic, usable desktop environment, myself -- it being a release blocker and all.

Of course, it's their business and they can do what they like, and I do wish them the best. Pop_OS! was my favorite Linux distribution before they indefinitely postponed releases.

1. TBF, I believe they revised their schedule to "when it's done".

Edit: This is why they're spending time on the text editor: https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/18ike40/december_up...

Edit 2: Here's sort of a roadmap for Pop!_OS: https://github.com/orgs/pop-os/projects/23/views/1

I'm also a little confused. Cosmic is a desktop environment, but they are working on a text editor? How are these related? Or are they re-inventing all the wheels just because they can?

Exactly. With VS Code in existence, I'm not sure why they're wasting their time. This isn't a huge need for folks right now.

And VSCode is just one of many that run on Linux. This feels like some sort of a unwritten rule that if you are making a new DE you also have to make a new text editor (ElementaryOS makes Code, KDE makes Kate, Gnome makes Gnome Text Editor) which honestly is a bit ridiculous to me.

it's not as ridiculous when you install your DE as a bundle of packages

Because: https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/18ike40/december_up...

VS Code is in an entirely separate category. This is a text editor, not an extensible code editor.

Seems they want a complete ecosystem they even have a screenshot utility. [0]

[0]https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-screenshot

A desktop environment is more than a window manager. Can't remember installing a DE and not having a platform default text editor included as a core application.

So a DE is a OS? Or why would a desktop environment be responsible for platform defaults? Wouldn't that further fragment the whole Linux ecosystem, which is, imo, ultimately why it's not a great user experience?

The desktop environment plays a major role in application defaults. Can you imagine installing GNOME and getting Kate as the text editor, bundled with all of its KF5 libraries? Or installing KDE and getting GNOME Text Editor bundled with libadwaita and GNOME libraries? That's what you're asking us to do with COSMIC. Which is insane because it's not that difficult to make a text editor when you have a mature platform toolkit.

I mean I would expect an ecosystem not be so fragmented to be honest. Looking at DistroWatch it seems that for every Linux user there is a Linux distro, and seems to be going that way with DE's and text editors as well. You might think this is great - but it seems, to me at least, to have the opposite effect of no option having good quality, because nobody puts any effort together, but instead in siloes.

That's just not how software development works. The quality of the software depends on the people who own the development of that software, and the technologies they used to build that software. You're advocating that COSMIC should be a hodgepodge of random projects built with completely different frameworks with conflicting design philosophies. The end result of this is the exact opposite of good quality.

I think it's so they can figure out the application parts of the DE. Like how a lot of gnome stuff has the same menus.

I'd say that the DE is usable though. Not at feature parity, but usable. At least for anyone who lives in a browser which... is most people these days?

Very good point!

Edit: In fact, one of their engineers states as such here: https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/18ike40/december_up...

How many people (want to) write desktop apps with native libraries vs building something on electron & JS that runs the same everywhere?

Lots of them. I've read a lot of comments from the Rust community that they'd love to build native applications in Rust. This will be their moment to make something as C programmers had with GNOME, and C++ programmers had with KDE.

And it’s not just Rust. I think there’s a handful of newer languages people would love to use for writing native desktop apps, but the frameworks and tooling aren’t there.

For me that’s Swift. I don’t even need a UI framework that tries to be a silver bullet write-once-run-everywhere or one that strives to fit into the paradigm-du-jour; just give me something that’s serviceable with a decent loudout of widgets (many newer frameworks weirdly skip critical pillars like tableviews/datagrids) that I use to write per-platform UIs around a common Swift core.

I agree, I tried a few different ones and the DX & features aren't there yet. Maybe one day this will change

My next weird attempt will be VS Code plugin alternative for the `hof tui` as a gui.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNBqBWO4y08

A lot.

I mostly see electron pushed by companies/moneyed interests. Not, like, a conspiracy or anything. But because it lets them spend less while having platform support on multiple platforms.

The issues that electron apps have seem to be sufficient that a lot of more solo/smaller devs avoid if they can. Not least because it can make debugging issues a lot harder. It's also resource intensive, which can make apps feel slow.

The text editor is being developed solely by our principal engineer thus far. Application updates may be the most visually interesting thing to share in an update, but it's far from the only thing being worked on. A default text editor doesn't need to be complex, and if you look at the source code, it's very lean and readable. It's a fun side project that tests our platform toolkit, and not at all taking anything from development of the cosmic compositor or its applets.

To quote the explanation about why they're working on the editor in parallel with the desktop environment:

> As is often the case with scientific research which many people believe to be pointless, technological innovations aren't always made by achieving the end goal, but through the technologies developed to reach that goal.

> Development on COSMIC Edit has lead towards improvements to the cosmic-text library, which is used by many GUI libraries in the Rust ecosystem now. Similarly, the UX designs for the text editor improves the COSMIC interface guidelines, and puts design theories to practice. Likewise, widgets that are necessary for the editor are added to the COSMIC platform toolkit, and existing widgets and features are improved to improve the development experience for applications like this.

> No one would want to build applications for a platform that lacks widgets capable of properly displaying, formatting, and editing text. Also, we're talking about a default text editor. It's a fun side project that's being developed solely by our principal engineer. Many would also find it debilitating to have a desktop environment without a text editor preinstalled. Imagine if GNOME didn't have Gedit, and KDE didn't have Kate.

Unfortunately why I switched to Arch. I was mostly happy with pop_os!, but not happy with a slower and buggier Gnome

Link to the actual System76 blog post: https://blog.system76.com/post/the-spirit-of-cosmic-december...

You have to call it Pop exclamation mark underscore OS here.

Boggles my mind that they gave their distribution such a bizarre name with those characters. Something something there are only two hard problems in computer science...

"Linux distro with a bizarre name gets improved support for features that have worked out of the box in Windows and macOS for decades"

It's better than that - more like, "Desktop environment for Linux distro with a bizarre name gets improved support for features that have worked out of the box in other Linux DEs for decades". Which, granted, is the cost of making a new DE yourself, but still funny.

Not sure what is the point of this thread since even Linux/Windows/MacOs are bizarre names.

Those don't have a combo of typography and word choice that looks like a children's birthday party supply store's name was merged with the results of a cat walking on the keyboard.

Every day small children learn to walk, even though others have done it for millennia

Despite all the buzz around it, the name's truly kept me away. It's hard to believe people who named something so comically-terribly didn't also make a bunch of other so-bad-they-wouldn't-seem-like-plausible-parody decisions in other places.

Wait till you find out that there is even DE called 'Gnome'.

And how it's pronounced!

"The gimp" is infamous for sometimes getting it excluded from consideration.

I once had a new manager after an acquisition do a (pathetic) security audit of our servers and get vey upset at finding a binary called "finger". True story. Somewhere along the way we've lost the ability to have a word that means something "dirty" and also retains other meanings that people can use without someone immediately thinking of the dirty meaning. Though I enjoy their sort of thing, I think Beavis and Butthead and their successors (e.g. South Park) may be responsible for the evidently-recent development of such extreme sensitivity to those kinds of multiple-meaning words.

In high school I tried to use Gimp for a UI/UX class and my teacher flipped her shit and went on a 30 minute diatribe on how un-PC I was being. I tried to explain that it was in fact a popular open source software package for graphic design. That entire school was a friggin nightmare.

Have you tried it? It's better than mint, which is what I used before for an "Im too busy programming to be assed with Linux configuration" distro

Debian 12 is the way to go these days imho. Everything else is derived from it anyway.

> Debian12

"Im too busy programming to be assed with Linux configuration"

sounds like a skill issue

I frankly after switching to Debian do not miss Ubuntu/PopOS LTS much.

Hey, is there any project or guide which I can use to build and run Cosmic Desktop on Arch Linux? I don't want to argue about why this is the case, and not use the distribution package right away PoP_OS...

Read the instructions from the pop-os/cosmic-epoch repository.

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