The source tweet from Carl Richell:
COSMIC and Pop 24.04 Beta will be released September 25th.
I’m looking forward to COSMIC reaching beta and then hopefully a stable release :)
I still don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve with Cosmic that GNOME or KDE didn’t do.
From what I remember they were using GNOME for pop os with some custom addons they had made (for example a tiling addon). GNOME updates will sometimes break addons and I think the pop os people got tired of this.
I actually really liked the addon as it would help you have a workflow closer to a tiling window manager.
So they are creating a DE with the features they think are important (tiling, performance, others) in mind from the start. I like the idea of this as I don’t want to commit to installing 100’s of tools for a tiling window manager like hyprland but I do want the benefits of tiling.
Also it’s written in rust which implies performance and security.
Reply to you and the poster above: yeah, I remember that plugin. I liked it so much in fact that I switched to i3 (and have been on i3) ever since. Fair enough. That makes sense.
- Pop!_OS*
- 100s* of tools
- in Rust* (note: doesn’t imply performance or security as incompetency isn’t language-specific)
From what I remember they were using GNOME for pop os with some custom addons they had made (for example a tiling addon). GNOME updates will sometimes break addons and I think the pop os people got tired of this.
That’s barely a footnote compared to the development time that writing an entire DE requires, not to mention that now they can’t piggyback off GNOME’s development anymore and they’ll have to do everything themselves. There’s a reason Ubuntu eventually abandoned Unity and came crawling back to GNOME.
rust implies performance and security
Rust implies only 1 thing, and that’s no memory leaks, assuming you don’t use “unsafe” code. It’s still very much vulnerable to logic bugs and has the same performance as c (GNOME) and c++ (KDE).
Rust implies only 1 thing, and that’s no memory leaks, assuming you don’t use “unsafe” code. It’s still very much vulnerable to logic bugs and has the same performance as c (GNOME) and c++ (KDE).
Rust actually doesn’t guarantee that there are no memory leaks. I think the more important memory safety improvements are regarding use after free, out-of-bounds accesses, null pointer issues, and double free problems.
Perhaps leaks are easier to spot in Rust with how everything is tracked? I am just guessing.
I still assume you are right that it won’t block compiling the way other memory issues would.
For me, it’s mostly interesting because it brings automatic tiling to a desktop environment. System76 has previously implemented this as an extension for Gnome, but they haven’t been too happy with that approach.
I think would also be good for the Linux Desktop community to have more than 2 strong desktop environments. Hopefully this would incentivize app developers to account for more than just a singe DE.
