this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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From a quick view, it mostly looks like ElementaryOS's DE to me. What's the big deal with Cosmic? I really want to know, sell it to me!
For me it is the language it's written in: Rust. Now I can participate, fix bugs and implement new apps with the language I know the best.
Some people might also say less crashes, less vulnerabilities and all that, but for me the first part is the most important.
Qt and gtk both have rust bindings though?
Yep, but QT's object model and its being written in C++ makes it super cumbersome to use in Rust. GTK is better here due to it being written in C, but the direction it's taking in GTK4 is not really great, and having a safe Rust UI toolkit is a huge win for the community.
Cosmic being fully Rust means I can just take one project from them, and immediately start working on it with cargo and all the familiar tools. It's not as easy with C or C++ projects in Gnome and KDE.
I think it's great we have some competition in this space, everybody wins.
I think this rust only thing is gonna screw them on the long term. You really don't want that for app development, it might be a good choice for low level stuff and security sensitive things like browsers; but other than that you're severely hampering your contribution sources and increasing the development time. Color me skeptic but I see this going the same way unity did.
More than C or C++? I've been working on very effective and performing Rust teams professionally now about a decade and I tend to disagree.
The problems come when you don't support anything other than rust. Higher level languages are better suited for trivial applications. Rust isn't exactly a very popular language either so you're not going to attract contributions from random Joe #3. Cosmic's best hope is to attract the attention of the big players and get enterprise support, because random users just don't give a shit about the security upsides of Rust and will judge the DE solely based on its looks and features.
This is a weird take. Rust is very popular and is the current heir apparent to C for systems level stuff. It's a great choice to start a new DE/toolkit.
As for the rest, you're right the end user doesn't care about the language their graphical app is in, but the developers fielding their bug reports and making fixes/features sure do.
And developers who get familiar and easy tools such as cargo, rust-analyzer and all the popular libraries working in any Cosmic project in about five minutes. And the compiler will tell you if you managed to make memory errors or data races in a very clear way. Always the same way.
You learn Rust and its tools once, and you can just jump into any of these projects and be productive.
And yes, scripting language is needed for Cosmic at some point. There are a ton of them, from RHAI to different lisps to python to javascript. Plug and play, and the interop is easy and fast.
Rust is very hyped, but it's not very popular, the TIOBE index has it at 1.5% coming in #14. Which is paltry in comparison to Python, C and C++.
As for whether or not it will replace C in systems, time will tell.
TIOBE is weighted toward languages that have existed for a long time by virtue of counting lines written / skilled engineers etc. but the speed at which Rust is climbing that list is a better indicator. Also, a lot of the languages above it wouldn't be appropriate for anything like a DE.
But you're right, it's hyped, I just think the hype is real.
Yep, windows kernel has a ton of Rust code already, even some of its syscalls are made in Rust. Linux kernel is getting a new GPU driver for NVIDIA written in Rust, and GPU driver for removed M-series also written in Rust. removed is hiring Rust devs, so is Amazon, Meta, Google...
In the startup space it's been quite good with Rust for some time. I've been writing production code with it for almost a decade. It is not a fad anymore.
A productive, safe, fast and fun language to write with excellent tooling, and we are just getting started.
They use Rust for app dev already. Pretty sure they know what they are biting off.
Are you talking why for the user, or why it was developed? The main reason it exists is that System 76 like the Gnome desktop, but didn't like stuff Gnome was doing, so they decided to make their own version from scratch in Rust. For a user, I don't think there's any real compelling reason to use it, especially not right now, unless you love Rust, or have the same feelings about Gnome that S76 did.
For me I'm interested in it for four main reasons:
a) It's intuitive, even if you've never used Linux, while also being very customisable.
b) It's new. The DE world at the moment is almost entirely Gnome and KDE, with some XFCE and Cinnamon. COSMIC adds to it with their own coat of paint and a very clear, professional outloom on it and clear goals.
c) It's in Rust. I don't know Rust, but I know it's loved by the community and will bring in contributors as well as the bug-related stuff at compile time which is handy.
d) System76 needs to sell it. Normally I'm not a fan of companies being involved in my OS, but I like the way System76 does it: They make laptops that come pre-installed with Pop_OS! and then sell those, so while technically the hardware is their source of income they'll have to improve their software in actually meaningful ways for it to be appealing to customers. One of the best and also worst things about the open source community IMO is that there's a lot of very niche stuff- like how 7-zip supports selecting multiple items, compressing them, and then emailing the .zip all in one mouse click. Really cool for whoever wants to do that, but no one wants to do that.
elementary OS doesn't even have a functioning desktop, you can't even puts icons or folders on it let alone rearrange them its literally a glorified wallpaper with a dock. please tell me this isn't the case for Cosmic
I actually really like not having icons on the desktop in gnome. It always ends up a collection of random garbage anyway after some time and Icd rather have that in my home directory. Now i can just press my keyboard shortcut to hide all windows and then I have a clean screen with nothing distracting me.
less functionality is bad. with a bit of gaslighting you can make anything seem like a design choice instead of admitting it's hard to make a good and sustainable implementation for said functionality. but at least gnome has extensions and is customisable, Pantheon DE is a brick in comparison.
Depends on what you want to do I guess. I'd rather have a clean desktop that cannot accumulate clutter like in windows where applications add shortcuts to the desktop automatically which you then have to remove manually.
linux doesn't have that problem and most of the times you're asked if you want to add a shortcut on the Desktop during the install even on Windows, i mean it's good we have options for all the use cases and workflows by having these different Desktop Environments but i think having options within the DE itself is better for the long-term adoption but it's harder to maintain which i understand. i like the UI getting used to me not the other way around