I personally don't get the hype around Cosmic - I'm not clear what makes it so exciting for people? It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment. It'll be interesting to see how far it moves from Gnome and if moving to Rust is actually meaningful to the end user.

I can see it's good for the Linux world that a new and modern DE is being developed. It gives users choice and may prompt innovation in the other DEs too. But maybe I'm beyond the age where new is exciting - I value stable and familiar environment, KDE in my case.

I'm not against Cosmic in any sense - I just don't quite get the level of hype I see surrounding it. Maybe it'd be more exciting if I was a Gnome user? Maybe it's solving problems I don't seems to have in KDE?

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 10 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Speaking for myself, this is why COSMIC is appealing:

nice middle-ground between oversimplified and over opinionated GNOME and KDE complexity
both floating and tiling are first class
Wayland native (no legacy)
pushing DE innovation
commercially backed
written in Rust
attractive
fast

I also love that it is driving Smithay and Iced which matures the foundations of other great projects like Niri and even RedoxOS.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 4 points 11 hours ago

KDE has vastly improved in my view and is a really great option these days. That said…

It is huge, monolithic, and difficult to modularize.

It is complex.

It occasionally has runaway resource use (eg. Indexing).

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 12 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Ive been using it for a month now, latest git version that is updated several times per day. For me, its just so nice to have a fully rust built desktop environment. Its fast, smooth animations, built in tiling window management etc. It doesnt use the gtk desktop library so everything from the ground up is rust. After having only gtk and qt for so long, its really nice to see a fresh window manager with all the advantages that comes with rust.

I havent noticed bugs, just one missing feature: the drag and drop doesnt seem to work in the cosmic file manager if one side is a nfs networked file system. But its minor stuff like that remaining. Its pretty much like gnome otherwise. I dont miss anything. All the extensions I used from gnome are already default here, like tray icons.

I think this environment has the best font rendering also. Its incredibly crisp on my 4k screen.

[–] stewarpt@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 hours ago

I mean you see how many people use windows

[–] nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de 9 points 19 hours ago

It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment.

For me, that's indeed the main reason. I actually prefer their look and feel of Gnome, but absolutely loathe quite a few of their stubborn decisions, so I currently stick with KDE (which is also great). From what I've seen and tried, Cosmic seems to try and become a mix between those two.

That, and it's neat having a DE that offers both tiling and floating and treats them as equally important.

[–] ArseAssassin@sopuli.xyz 2 points 17 hours ago

I recently installed Linux on an old laptop and decided to try out Cosmic alpha 7. I've been running I3 on my desktop and wanted a Wayland DE that keeps the tiling features, and I've been happy to find out that Cosmic alpha is 90% there despite still having some fairly significant bugs. I don't find it especially exciting, but it's functional without having to invest the time into setting up all the features of a DE inside a tiling WM.