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.
There are valid criticism to be made about cosmic desktop, like
- their very liberal customization options that doesn’t stop users from ruining the look of the desktop
- their insistent to theme libadwaita apps disregarding app developers wishes against supporting custom themes.
But those are just subjective criticism and it’s still in alpha. All his “criticism” amounts to is whining about the software having glitches in alpha stage.
That’s a good point and makes it worth considering
Libadwaita theming is not enabled by default. It involves going into experimental settings and I believe there is a warning about enabling it. This does not conflict with Don’t Theme My App, that initiative’s problem is that it’s a problem when distros do it, not individual users who know the downsides.
If that’s the best example of criticism to be had about COSMIC, then it’s practically flawless. Except of course, though, it isn’t. Aside from the general lack of polish, I’d argue that there’s not enough customization. E.g. things that should really be a slider or spin control (or better yet multiple sliders/spin controls) like corner radii are multiple choice button things (not to mention that the ‘square’ style is anything but.) Some of the sliders that do exist (particularly the size ones) have very few set points that make them essentially disguised drop downs. I could probably find dozens more things to criticize if I cared to sit down and nitpick everything.