this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Modern design they say? It still looks like 2010. They can't even get the spacings and paddings right.
The project is motivated by “I like Rust, lets make a whole desktop in it” not by good UX.
Depends on your point of view.
Their motivation was “we have a vision for our UX and GNOME won’t let us do it — so let’s write our own.”
It was only after deciding to write their own that they decided to write it in Rust.
They like Rust, but that is not what motivated them to make COSMIC.
My view is that if the goal was to effectively make good software they wouldn’t start from scratch.
If they used wlroots the desktop would be usable today with a good feature set.
If they used Qt or GTK they would have feature rich well supported software. (GTK4 could have been an improvement for them, it’s designed around being minimal and having platform libraries implement design choices)
They didn’t take a practical approach imo. You could argue its a long term investment but because of it it’s probably years off of feature parity. The only upside today is.. it’s written in Rust.
Sometimes old software just has too much legacy spaghetti written in to really build from though. Starting from scratch gives new ideas room to breathe and grow that might otherwise be impossible to implement in the previous framework—which while probably useful can also be stifling. See the reason why Wayland is being written to replace Xorg.
They dix not build the compositor from scratch, they built it on top of smithay, a library similar to wlroots but written in Rust.
I don't know if you've actually tried to use GTK or QT, but it's insanely painful. There is a reason almost all apps are written in Electron. Native GUI toolkits suck. If they had used GTK they would have still had an outdated and hard to maintain toolkit, and to deal with Gnome politics. Using GTK was actually the initial idea.
If we want Linux Desktop to succeed, at some point we have to build tools that people want to use. I'm glad they're doing it.
I have written apps in those toolkits. I can’t say it’s easier than the web of course but it’s not that bad.
No current distro is currently installable for blind users due to Wayland.
Thats not relevant because Cosmic isn’t either.
Linux Mint is one of the most widely-used desktop distros and it defaults to X11 (and Wayland on Cinnamon is still experimental). LM is known for not changing things until the solution is good and ready.