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.

…

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?!

…

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.

…

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.

  • simple@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 months ago

    So basically “there weren’t enough mean spirited reviews on Cosmic so I’ll write my own”. The OP can say he doesn’t like it without making fun of the fanbase and trashing the company for checks notes reporting people’s positive experiences.

    Sooo… Cosmic is for the tiny sliver of users that want a DE… that tiles? Or those that buy a System76 machine and never change the DE?

    Those that are fed up with GNOME and/or are looking for an alternative DE are a huge chunk of the Linux userbase. That’s literally why they created it. With Gnome reducing customizability and having 5-year old bugs never get fixed and breaking necessary extensions every update, it was warranted.

    it feels like the developers are already riding on the endorphins from all the praise and forget their software is after all in a rough state.

    Why? They have public milestones and bug trackers while things seem to move at a good pace. At no point are they just sitting on praise doing nothing.

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
      0·
      2 months ago

      As you may know, I am the creator and lead developer of Hyprland and the entire ecosystem around it. You might say I’m biased, but I try to approach this from a quite objective side.

      Cosmic is not my direct competitor - Hyprland is a compositor for advanced users, Cosmic is (what it’s meant to be, at least) a user-friendly DE.

      The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Cosmic has Wayland and tiling, it has the backing of a profitable company, and he’s very obviously salty about it.

    • imecth@fedia.io
      0·
      2 months ago

      With Gnome reducing customizability

      If you’re expecting more customization from cosmic I have bad news for you…

      having 5-year old bugs never get fixed

      Bugs aren’t prioritized by age.

      breaking necessary extensions every update

      Gnome breaks every extension on major updates, this is by design to force the extension maintainer to make sure their shit works with the latest version.

      moving off gnome was was warranted

      I strongly doubt any reason you cited was the linchpin for Cosmic moving off Gnome. It’s probably simply that they want more control and to do things their way. Gnome is a project that has thousands of people involved, with plenty of diverging opinions; getting stuff to change to fit your wants is gonna be an uphill battle each time.