GNOME guys complaining about someone trying to force unilateral decisions upon them and being totally uncoopertaive must be satire…

I was not thrilled with Cosmic after upgrading Pop! but switching DEs on Linux is very easy so it wasn’t a huge issue. I think Cosmic could be cool given more development, it just needs time. Though Pop! making it their default seems like a bad idea for them, its one of the beginner friendly distros that always gets recommended to new Linux users and now that’s going to be their first impression.

tl;dr (understandable, to be honest): on a technical level, modern GNOME prioritizes polish at the expense of flexibility, and COSMIC is focused on customizability. Bad communication aside, they have fundamentally different goals and audiences.

Acknowledging that this is a 4-year-old article, I think it’s important to read this as a very one-sided perspective. However, I am certainly not defending System76, as it does seem like some pretty poor behavior if the article is to be believed.

I’m going to look past the issues over communication and behavior, as others have already addressed that in this thread. Other than that, it seems that the main issue is arguing over the role of GNOME in the software ecosystem. How I see this is that:

• System76 is arguing for backwards compatibility and and more customizability.
• GNOME is arguing for “bulletproof” theming of apps by restricting user choice and modularity.

Honestly, I think this is pretty reflective of how the current state of the respective DEs.

GNOME is the cleanest, most polished Linux desktop environment, if you use it exactly as the designers of GNOME envision. If you want any options outside the extremely limited set GNOME provides by default, you need to rely on extensions, which are less stable and less polished, and may or may not be updated to new DE versions.

COSMIC is a clean-sheet implementation designed around modularity. It’s really the main thing they talk about. It has the advantage of being Wayland-only, and (supposedly) pretty much every element of the DE is modular, and there is a pretty substantial amount of customization available even in the fairly barebones 1.0 implementation.

In terms of COSMIC “just being GNOME with extra color options”, I disagree. I really like the UI design concept of GNOME, and ten versions ago I used it all the time. However, over the last few versions it’s become very locked-down into only supporting one narrow way of using the desktop, and I need features outside that (e.g. system tray, options for window tiling, etc.). Even with ten extensions modifying the behavior – which causes stability issues when I get a new GNOME version – I still find things which bother me and are only fixable with manual dconf editing, which means I just can’t daily-drive GNOME.

I think that’s who COSMIC is really for: someone who wants less windows-y, more intentional UI design than KDE, but with good customizability. It sucks if the creators of a pretty neat new DE were not effective participants in their previous DE, so I really hope they don’t make the same mistake with COSMIC, and manage it properly as an open source project.

Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.

Shocking, a 3 year old project is not as well established as a 20+ year old desktops. Its feature set is enough to me, but they did release it too early as it is still quite buggy.

COSMIC is very poorly designed, it might be written in the “memory-safe programming language” but it’s clear that they don’t have a design backbone

It looks “fine”. I agree that modern Adwaita looks better, but it’s not terrible. The default theme is meh, but themes like Catppuccin makes it look nice. There’s also missing things like drop shadows and animations, which I believe are toolkit limitations.

They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME

Gnome and System76 had different goals and UX ideas that were incompatible. Rather than continually patching Gnome and updating their patches to keep working, they decided to build their own thing, that’s fine.

I don’t quite get why Gnome people see this as a negative. If System76 is a poor downstream, then System76 no longer being a downstream is beneficial for them.

rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time

I think that’s a good thing in the long run. Gnome and KDE both have a significant amount of technical debt.

One of the things I love about COSMIC is how sanely it’s built, following modern programming principles.

• Rust helps avoid memory issues, helping with security and bugs
• A lot of things run as their own processes, which would typically all be running under a single process in Gnome/KDE. So even if something does crash, say the power applet or notifications applet, it won’t bring down other components like the shell.
• Clean layout of configuration, data, and state files. KDE is an absolute mess in this department. Gnome is better than KDE, but COSMIC does even better.

So while COSMIC is worse now due to its bugs and lack of features, I think it’s built on better foundations. That is, if System76 continues to invest in it. I’m not sure how profitable/unprofitable it is for them. My guess would be unprofitable.

It’s a more than 4 years old blog post.

I can’t tell much about the things that the writer complains about. But concerning Cosmic: I think a new additional DE is a win. People who like it can use it, others can skip it. More variation means more choice.

Personally: I find Cosmic still a bit barebone. It is very fast. It think it looks quite good (besides their wallpapers). It’s not yet there, where it needs to be for me to use it as a daily driver, but I find it impressive what System 76 released in their first final version.

Gnome is the most beautyful DE in my opinion, but I find it’s UX absolut horrible. I hate usining it without quite some extensions and I do absolutely not use it. Look at it, yeah. But using it is not intuitive at all for me.

Luckily, there are other DE’s I like. That’s the beauty about Linux.

It’s an old blog post, but this doesn’t look very good for System76. At the same time, GNOME (and GTK) is refusing to implement basic features. Stuff like server side window decorations, because they can’t “tolerate” SSD. The hard enforcing of Adwaita theming might make sense in GNOME, but on devices not 100% in the GNOME ecosystem, libadwaita apps have awful UX. I do not want shit like Zenity to take up 50% of my screen space for 3 words and 2 buttons, yet libadwaita enforces it.

Interesting one

I guess it is fair that nobody wants to deal with GNOME and their reluctance of theming. I like theming and despise “light” (white) themes or not well readable dark themes (that dont save any energy on non-OLED displays).

I am on KDE, using GNOME at work (it is okay but worse in like 20 aspects I regularly use). Tried COSMIC on lower end hardware and it was not great.

I like that they support theming but agree, their desktop is pretty ugly.

Tho I use GNOME with dash-to-panel and blur-my-shell as well as the breeze cursor. The default theme is kinda weird (not blurring wastes potential) and the macOS like top bar is worse to use and wastes screen space (most importantly on Laptops).

GNOME is way worse than KDE, COSMIC has a couple of nice things but is worse than GNOME still for my use cases. No surprises.

I have to stress though that statically linked binaries are not good. Many distros shipping COSMIC use those, wasting RAM, optimisations and potentially vendoring outdated dependencies.

I also believe people when they dislike C++ and say KDE has a messy codebase. So I very much hope that COSMIC (with a substantial theme) can replace KDE for me. But I highly doubt that.

More importantly is, how old DEs make the transition from C and C++ to Rust, Zig, Go or whatever else you prefer.

With Windows going all in on Javascript you can see how not to do it XD

GNOME has been shedding market share to KDE and now COSMIC is going to take a chunk of the rest.

Sour grapes.

I just switched off PopOS to Fedora because COSMIC 1.0 isn’t actually 1.0 ready

I like the cosmic look and the idea of the built in tiling manager but in practice I haven’t had a great experience with it. It’s frustrating to customize or find things and had been buggy on my systems

I’m not sure I know enough to be able to take a side, but I really enjoy Gnome even if having more customization option would be a bonus.

If Cosmic brings this without having to rely on extension, then I’m all for it.

People are gonna tell me to just use KDE, but I’ve never had a great experience with it for the few hours I’ve spent on it in desktop mode on my Steam Deck.

A bit unfair IMO by the downvoters to not explain their downvotes?

Spreading false information about Gnome claiming it is insecure sounds like a valid concern for the Gnome team.