The alpha began in August of last year, and will continue to be classified as alpha until all features are finished.

The alpha began in August of last year, and will continue to be classified as alpha until all features are finished.

I’d recommend everyone to try out cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) when they get a chance. Whether you use COSMIC or not, it’s fully functional with any desktop environment. It’s packaged by default in Pop!_OS 22.04, available in Fedora 40 via ryanabx/cosmic-epoch, and the AUR.

How so? 22.04 is actively maintained and updated by Ubuntu, and is still the latest LTS release. On top of that, the most important packages in Pop!_OS are updated frequently, so we are on Mesa 24.0.3 and Linux 6.8.0. As for when COSMIC releases, you should read last month’s blog post.

All desktops use the Super key nowadays. Sway, i3, GNOME, Plasma, etc. are all using the Super key. Have been for years. The standard convention is that the Super key is reserved for system-level shortcuts handled by the window manager; and Alt key shortcuts are reserved for application-level shortcuts. Your desktop might have bound both Alt and Super because of legacy reasons.

You might be surprised how much disk space those GNOME Circle applications actually require, despite being dynamically linked to a lot of GTK/GNOME libraries. Unless they’re written in a scripting language, they’re much closer to a COSMIC application than you think.

• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.TwentyFortyEight 12 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Reversi 12 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.NetworkDisplays 13 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.eog 12 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Photos 29 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Notes 12 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gedit 20 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/app.drey.Warp 22 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.flxzt.rnote 41 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.news_flash.NewsFlash 42 MB

I don’t see the issue with an application having a static binary within the realm of 15-25 MB. Even if you had 100 applications installed, that’s only 2 GB of disk usage.

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a cosmic-applets-community package which bundles third party applets, or the gradual inclusion of popular applets into cosmic-applets. Given that an applet would only become popular if there’s a lot of need for those use cases, then it would make sense to open a path to getting them mainlined.

Yes, you can do anything with COSMIC’s dock and panel. No extensions needed. If an applet exists on the system, you can embed it into your panel or dock.

That’s already happening

I assume you meant Pop!_OS instead of COSMIC. Pop!_OS 24.04 will be based on Ubuntu 24.04.

Static linking is not an issue. Binaries may require more space on disk, but the benefit is that they are self-contained, portable, with excellent performance, and low memory usage. Binaries are compiled with LTO, so unused functions are stripped from the binary. What remains is highly optimized to that application’s use cases.

I don’t think you can say that because we haven’t published our design language yet. Only a handful of design mockups have been published so far. The screenshots here are not design mockups but a work in progress implementation. Hence the “In-progress” part of the title.

Rounded corners are a user preference in the Appearance page in COSMIC Settings.

That’s already not possible on GNOME because some GNOME applications hardcode their theme, others use libadwaita, some use GTK4 without libadwaita, some use GTK3, and there may still be a GTK2 app lingering around here and there in the repos (ie: GIMP).

Few people are going to care that there’s a GTK application installed on their COSMIC desktop. COSMIC will automatically generate GTK3/4 themes to match the system theme. We may even automatically generate a libadwaita theme, so it will look “same enough”.

None of what you stated makes sense. Most people are not using exclusively GNOME applications on GNOME, or exclusively KDE applications on KDE. Like with elementary OS, most people are running applications like Steam, Spotify, Discord, Zoom, Slack, etc. Plenty of people are using Qt and KDE applications on GNOME, or GTK and GNOME applications on KDE. You think no one uses Krita or Scribus on GNOME, or GIMP on KDE?

Thanks to Flatpak, you might even be running elementary applications on your system. Even Windows back in the late 90s and 2000s was full of desktop applications with custom proprietary interfaces. Nowadays everything’s becoming a web view bundled with a Chromium runtime, and you’re more worried about a COSMIC app ecosystem having a different UI from GTK?

COSMIC is a good thing because it’s a standardized and open source cross-platform native desktop toolkit. People can create themes for it, and those themes can be bundled alongside GTK and Qt/KDE themes. Due to the nature of how Rust libraries are developed and linked, COSMIC applications are mostly statically-linked, which even makes it trivial to put them on a USB drive and bring them to any PC.

I’m not sure why you think this is unique to COSMIC or elementary OS. Do you not realize that this is true of all operating systems? Look at Steam, Spotify, Discord, Zoom, and Slack for starters.

No, we have been making our own platform toolkit (libcosmic), which is built upon iced-rs. We are using this both for our wayland compositor applets, and our desktop applications.

GNOME was focusing on building Rust bindings for GTK for many years before Qt development picked up. The GTK bindings were usable within a year or two after Rust’s 1.0 release. Yet even today, those looking to build applications in Rust will find that GTK is the only mature toolkit right now. And if you’re doing that today, I’d recommend starting with Relm4 for the best GTK Rust experience.

Rust does not support the C++ ABI, and Qt does not provide a C interface, so much work has to be done on building the tooling for binding C++ libraries to Rust. That work is still ongoing, so some have opted to use QML instead of interfacing with Qt C++ libraries. Yet if you’re looking to use Qt or QML, you may as well use Slint instead. It’s developed by former Qt/Trolltech developers and has a similar approach as QML.

For the past two years, I have also been the lead developer of AccessKit

When COSMIC development was officially announced, we mentioned that we would be using AccessKit for accessibility support. While certain people in GNOME were spreading concern and doubts about COSMIC supporting accessibility, work was already underway to integrate AccessKit into COSMIC, successfully.

You can ask on the System76 subreddit

Every Intel-based System76 laptop ships day one with Coreboot firmware preinstalled. The System76 firmware interface is also written in Rust using Redox libraries.