cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7224516
Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.
System76 is best known for spreading misinfo and lies about GNOME and other upstreams, selling overpriced re-branded clevos, “being made in America”, loving rust and hyping on twitter and mastodon.
Most of the “backlash” against GNOME comes from the a community that has more opinions than users or just straight up misinformation and spite.
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. They basically created the caricature of GNOME’s adwaita but now you can paint your windows in whatever barf-inducing color you want.
They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time, literally every issue that sparked that redesign was resolved upstream in both aforementioned desktops.
I trust System76 more than I do trust GNOME.
Oh nice, glad to hear you formed your own opinion and that the misinformation campaign by System76 didn’t work on you :) /s
Has their smear campaign been going since April 6, 2011 or something?
Let them kill eachother
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.
but they did release it too early as it is still quite buggy.
This is often done to get more feedback.
That’s what the alphas, betas, and user studies are for.
Pushing buggy software out as stable is a feature of modern corporate software development that should be avoided. It gives a poor impression of the software.
Why are we posting 4 year old drama? This is from November 2021…
GNOME has been shedding market share to KDE and now COSMIC is going to take a chunk of the rest.
Sour grapes.
Yep. Moved all our lab computers to KDE. Gnome’s community is actively hostile and outright disrespectful to anyone even asking about design decisions (which are way more arbitrary than they like to admit). Definitely interested in seeing where Cosmic goes.
BREAKING NEWS: GNOME developer cannot accept people doing things differently than the GNOME team. More at eleven.
GNOME guys complaining about someone trying to force unilateral decisions upon them and being totally uncoopertaive must be satire…
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.
I agree 100%. Gnome is gorgeous. I switched to KDE because they get gaming related features first, I assume because of the Valve collab.
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.
Speaking for myself, it’s because I interpret the post as using sensationalist, biased language. Right or wrong, I don’t value content that tries to manipulate the readers perception that way.
