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    • missfrizzle@discuss.tchncs.de
      16·
      11 days ago

      exactly everything I need and nothing more. doesn’t need X. reasonably lightweight. no fiddly configuration needed. nice support for tiling alongside floating.

      also, very buggy (at least as of alpha.7), somewhat fickle (at least on my hardware), and I can’t remap keyboard shortcuts.

    • 1XEVW3Y07@reddthat.comEnglish
      6·
      11 days ago

      After using Autotiling from the Cosmic desktop, I can’t go back to anything else. I’ve tried distro hopping to Gnome based desktops for a few reasons, but always wind back up on Cosmic.

    • rozodru@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      10 days ago

      I actually daily drove it during Alpha for a bit but stopped using it after a couple Alpha releases because it got a bit worse with each alpha release and more slow. Haven’t tried the beta yet but will probably get around to it soon.

      Killer feature? I mean if you want GNOME or a regular DE with tiling then sure…have at it. You’re not going to get anywhere near the caliber of customization you would have with say KDE Plasma or literally any other WM out there but the trade of is you don’t have to deal with config files for the tiling aspect. It’s a buggy mess though. With each added feature the bugs just increased which is sort of expected.

      The last time I used it the shortcuts were a bit of a pain to get working correctly and the startup was slow. It does come packaged with its own file manager and terminal. The file manager isn’t anything special, but honestly the terminal isn’t that bad. If I recall the terminal doesn’t support images so if that’s something you want (like for me it is since I use Yazi) then I’d just uninstall it. I don’t think it has the option to style GTK stuff but I heard they might have changed that with the Beta.

      It’s launcher is pretty nice and you can do a lot with it. naturally app launching but also web searching, calculator, file searching, etc.

      I wish it had an option like KDE Plasma does for laptops where you can completely disable the touchpad if you have an external mouse plugged in instead of just disable while typing. But you can circumvent that if you know what you’re doing with like something like noinput cli or whatever or making a udev rule.

      I think it still needs a wee bit longer to bake. If they can work out the bugs, speed it up a bit, and make the overall size of it smaller than KDE I would switch back to it. It’s pretty simple and bare bones but I mean for wayland your only options are pretty much Plasma or GNOME so having a third option is awesome.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      13·
      11 days ago

      I tried a number of the alphas and just hate it. Like fundamentally hate it, not just because it was buggy.

      I wish System76 would just put out a 24.10 release instead of spending all their resources on this DE.

  • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
    6·
    10 days ago

    I tried one of the earlier alphas a year ago and it was too rough to daily drive, but I’ve been looking forward to beta. It’s not often we get a completely new DE so it’s very exciting.

    I installed it yesterday and have been using it for a few hours. I love how smooth and responsive it feels. You can feel the benefits of being built from scratch in Rust. I wish the UI was more customizable, since I come from KDE and have very strong preferences on desktop layout, but it’s otherwise an improvement on GNOME’s ideas, as far as I’m concerned. It will be very appealing to Mac expats, which is S76’s key audience, I think. It’s a hard sell for Windows or KDE users.

    One thing I do love versus KDE is the common sense naming conventions. The files tool is called “Files” and the terminal is called “Terminal” and the text editor is called “Text Editor.” There are no ridiculous, ambiguous names for the default apps.

    The built-in tiling features are also absolutely wonderful. They work so well, so fluidly, and so intuitively. I am going to have a hard time giving that up when I switch back to KDE.

    However, it still has a lot of rough edges and is not ready for less-technical users right now. Networking is squirrelly, the UI briefly freezes sometimes in very isolated and frustrating ways.

    I’m going to continue using it over the weekend, but I am likely going back to Fedora + KDE next week. I like the direction that COSMIC is going, but I need more customization and stability before it can be a daily driver for me.

    • neclimdul@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 days ago

      Been using cosmic ui on and off since the beta release and it is still pretty beta. Really good at this point honestly and a huge achievement for them but not without some annoying bugs for me.

      Just something to consider before jumping. You should be ready to work around some annoyances, deal with some slowness/quirks, and probably be ready to provide feedback and bug reports.