cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1042162
My first impressions with cosmic were terrible to say the least. Amongst the sea of complete dealbreaker issues (horrible stutter and lag, inability to use 240hz, mouse sensitivity not working, etc) the general implementations atm are janky to say the least, tons of empty menus, wasted space, small annoying bugs.
I do realize it’s an alpha, though, so I won’t focus on the “small bugs” that can probably be fixed in 15 mins and will be fixed… in the future.
The current design language, IMO, is one of the worst I’ve seen in a while, but I don’t wanna focus on this as it’s all subjective, after all.
In this blogpost I want to focus on the broader ideology behind it, the direction and selling points.
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Are we out of our minds? It’s a barely functional alpha. All those quotes (and those are just a few) are at best running on “hopes and prayers” and not the actual experience. What foundation? Moving floating windows? MS Windows 3.0 had that. What potential? To… add more code? Just like to… anything at this stage?!
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Cosmic is a desktop that, for now, to me, has no goal. Is not catchy. Has not much to offer. I don’t know where System76 wants to take it, but if this doesn’t change, it’s not difficult for me to imagine a future where Cosmic ends up like Unity or Mir. Forgotten and barely used.
It’s receiving a lot of overly-positive reviews based on hopes and prayers, with little to be based on reality, or what we have right now.
This, adding to the aggresive marketing, makes the developers already quite hostile to negative feedback.
Cosmic is, in my opinion, on a not-so-good path at the moment, despite what those news outlets might claim.
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Even though this is a quite negative blogpost, if any of the developers at Cosmic are reading this: Stop riding on the great reviews. Accept criticism, because you know full well Cosmic is very rough at the moment. Criticism is the thing that will drive your code forward.
I’ve tried to switch to lots of different desktop engines and distributions. Cosmic Alpha is incomplete, but I like it more as a starting place than alternatives. I’ve been using it for at least a week now.
I don’t really like Gnome with Ubuntu. I’ve tried KDE with Fedora several times, but always break the theme somehow. The most sanest DE I’ve used is XFCE, which just seems too minimalist. PopOS with Cosmic at least starts off with drivers for a modern GPU, which I can’t say for Fedora KDE which has always required some level of using the terminal to finish the install for me.
Cosmic is in rust, it seems easy to understand and follow for me. I was able to pick of current libs from it, and start hacking on stuff, which I can’t say about other DE’s because the build process for them usually seems very complex. I think Cosmic is also written specifically for Wayland, so it avoids lots of issues that all of the other current DE’s face. (Which was a motivator in my decision to use it)
I like it. I think I’m going to continue using it. I’m just left wondering if the developers for it are using it as their primary DE, because I’m not 100% convinced.