I’ve been waiting for this desktop to release patiently. I can’t wait to try it. I have one question that I never got to ask anywhere, how is this going to work with the whole Qt/GTK apps? Are things going to look weird like they do on (mostly) Gnome and (sometimes) KDE Plasma?
We will attempt to automatically generate themes for common toolkits, but the desktop environment has no control over how the toolkit chooses to render itself or operate.
Fair enough. As long as the app goes with the dark/light theme and doesn’t look super tiny on hidpi screens, I personally wouldn’t really lose sleep over it. Will there be an HIG specific to cosmic for devs who want to make apps for it?
Yes, the libcosmic toolkit automates a decent chunk of the process to building an application with our interface guidelines. If building an application with the cosmic::Application trait. Which includes the header bar, navigation bar, and context drawer.
Thank you for answering all these questions. Last question, do you know when an alpha or a beta will be released? I want to test and help out with reporting. I have a spare laptop that I can use to test.
Please don’t automatically generate themes for third-party apps. If an application brings its own styles and icons, it results a weird mix of multiple styles.
If a user wants to style it themselves, they should be able to — at their own risk. But shipping (inherently broken) styles with a distro/DE misrepresents the appplication and creates unnecessary issues for the upstream developers.
Tell that to my eyes when your application only has a blinding light mode. Theming is an accessibility feature and should be prioritized as such.
It’s 2023. Every application should have a theme engine built-in. If not, that’s on the dev. Let’s not make a movement out of a lack of interest in providing support for accessibility.
You’re so silly. If the developer doesn’t want a themeable application, then either don’t use a themeable toolkit, or hardcode the theme so that the system theme is ignored.
I want that individual users are able to theme my app. I don’t want that distributors and DEs automatically theme my app and expect that it still works the same.
It’s a bit like websites: I’m absolutely fine if a user wants to inject some CSS in my website. On the other hand, if a browser manufacturer decided to inject CSS into all websites to customize their look, it would be a nightmare for web developers.
You don’t seem to realize that this is equivalent to that. The user already made the choice to install a desktop environment which generates themes. So if you make the choice to build an application with GTK, and you want users to be able to use system themes with it, then consider it done.
To argue otherwise would make you a hypocrite. It would mean that you don’t actually want users to use themes, so you take issue with desktop environments which make it easy to do so by default. So if you want people to be able to use themes, then you shouldn’t complain when people choose to use a desktop which enables that use case.
You’ll likely need something separate that’ll style both of these through the settings, similar to how you would config GTK themes on Plasma, or vice versa. I haven’t checked if they do this on their on yet, but it’ll probably be handled this way eventually. Out of the box, expect any Qt or GTK apps to look like their Breeze and Adwaita defaults look, unless you’ve already changed this on your system
It technically still does if you use their theming app “Gradience”. I use it currently on my laptop. Pretty nifty little app. It still doesn’t theme the shell (the panel, the password box… etc), but it does theme even flatpaks most of the time
Iirc Gradience punches a hole in the flatpak sandbox for xdg-config/gtk-4.0, which usually is in .config. This makes it work and isn’t a security problem.
Gnome Shell is unaffected because it doesn’t use GTK.
It uses a custom UI framework, St, using renderer primitives built into the compositor, mutter. Whereas COSMIC is using the same libcosmic library inside the compositor, applets, and desktop applications. Thanks due to our Smithay client toolkit being used to provide a renderer for iced which supports the Wayland layer shell protocol.
So that means themes will cover everything and things will be unified, unlike how the shell is always dark on gnome? (I know they’re working on a light mode).
Yes, this can already be seen when configuring a personal theme in the Desktop > Appearances page in COSMIC Settings. Compositor elements, applets, the login and lock screens, and COSMIC applications automatically adjust in realtime to the configuration changes.
Oh, I’m not rushing anyone. I’ve just been anticipating this DE for a long while. I’m very excited for it to be released. I’ve seen some previews and it looks freaking amazing.
I have a single windows 11 system while everything else is on some form of Linux distro.
That windows system has never been connected to the internet, and it has been great without ever causing any of the typical update issues (although I update applications/components manually over an isolated NAS link).
It’s sad to see that everyday users have gotten habituated to these constant workflow braking updates. No wonder many people I know are jumping to the Apple ecosystem after getting a taste with a M2.
I remember when I went on my lunch break and came back to see my PC part way through upgrading to Windows 10, which I never agreed to. So yeah, Windows update can definitely act bizarrely.
I mean… having updates that suck is not a good solution but for sure do every update please.
Its just excrutiatingly slow, like 5min one time where Fedora Kinoite is more stable, doesnt fuck up other partitions and goes in the background while using the system!
Android (GrapheneOS) is even better with updates in the background and very low CPU usage, one reboot and you are there.
Or just regular mutable Linux distros seperating packages that dont need a reboot from packages that do.
Personal anecdote: I connected my guitar to my shitty sound card a few weeks ago, ran guitarix (because real DAWs are overwhelmingly complicated and I just want an amp, a compressor, and some reverb), and thanks to PipeWire and pipewire-jack everything ran perfectly. Low latency, no crackling, no messing with jackd or ALSA, no restarting audio daemons, I could simultaneously play audio through Firefox and hear my guitar. I dare say that that part of the audio stack is now a solved problem.
I’m not a musician though so I can’t comment on hardware support for exotic sound/midi cards or the maturity of FOSS DAWs.
As far as exotic stuff goes, I only buy stuff that’s class-compliant so I don’t have to worry about the manufacturer sunsetting support in the future. Supporting those sorts of devices should be a priority over anything with weird proprietary issues (fuck you IK Multimedia!).
There was somebody on the Linux reddit with a self hostable ebook app just a week or so. It looked slick but wasn’t really that useful for me. Might be worth a look.
I feel that I’m usually more upset that apps choose electron and I have performance issue because they didn’t spend time writing a proper lightweight desktop application. I feel like Calibre is actually one of those apps.
I could see portability across devices being useful but is the Calibre interface really going to be conducive for that?
All the other services I have running are on a server in my closet, which I access with a web browser from other devices. Calibre needing to run on my workstation is a big shift in that workflow. Especially because all the rest of my media is sitting on that server.
Also, UX of open source desktop apps is… lacking. They don’t look good, and they don’t feel good to use. But that might be because I’m picky and spoiled by decades of using a Mac.
I definitely don’t want more Electron apps. About the only things I want to run locally is a browser, a text editor, and a terminal.
That’s fair but I think one of the most critical features of Calibre for me is interfacing with my e-reader over USB to download/upload my epubs. I don’t know how that would work from a Browser app.
You can use Podman too, if that would be a problem.
Look at StirlingPDF if you want an example how to run OR are interested in a great web-UI PDF editor based off various open sourc tools, in a single interface
It’s unnecessarily annoying to set up, as the other user pointed out. But it can be set up by itself using hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre-web docker, and used standalone. The only trick is needing an empty database.
Can you explain bit more please. I have calibre-web running, downloaded empty database, added some books in the same folder as database, but nothing is showing up in calibre-web gui. Did I miss something?
My favorite part is where he admits to being mad without even knowing what Wayland is.
Edit: When I wrote the above, I didn’t really realize what Wayland even was, I just noticed that some distributions (like Fedora) started pushing it onto me and things didn’t work properly there.
You seem to use the word censor a lot. For someone who who clearly has no idea what freedom of speech means.
Let me give you a clue. Your freedom of speech in no way forces others to provide you with a platform. Just governments not to silence you. Private citizens running web sites are not governments. So have no obligation to support your ideals.
When private community moderators do not want to deal with the opinions you push. They are not removing anything from you. You are failing to sell your ideals in a way that appeals to the people you are trying to force your ideas upon.
If you want to communicate with no limits. Host your own community on your own instance. And hope you do not piss off enough people to be de federated.
I just upgraded from a 1080ti to a 7900xt last month and I just plugged it in and it worked. Then I uninstalled the Nvidia binary drivers and libraries.
I have a second-hand Thinkpad T480s that I love, I bought it for 250$ on ebay and replaced its battery because it was fried (+40$). I use it for school and it works flawlessly, around 8h of battery life in a well-configured OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. According to the specs sheet it shouldn’t be, but for some reason it is noticeably lighter than a friend of mine’s MacBook Air 2021.
What I really love about it is the ThinkDock Ultra (iirc 30$ on ebay), which lets me place the laptop on my table, and by just sliding a piece of plastic, it connects all of my peripherals in a second. I love this laptop so much that I’ll use it until it dies so hard that it can’t be fixed at all.
I routinely 100% my root volume accidentally (thanks docker), but my machine has never crashed, it does tend to cause other issues though. Does having a full /usr, /var or /tmp not cause other issues, if not full crashes?
Of course it does, it’s actually filling those that crashes the machine, not /.
When space runs out it runs out, there’s no magical solution. Separating partitions like that is done for other reasons, not to prevent runaway fill: filesystems with special properties, mounting network filesystems remotely etc.
It depends, if your docker installation uses /var, it will surelly help to keep it separated.
For my home systems, I have: UEFI, /boot, /, home, swap.
For my work systems, we additionally have separate /opt, /var, /tmp and /usr.
/usr will only grow when you add more software to your system. /var and /tmp are where applications and services store temporary files, log files and caches, so they can vary wildly depending on what is running. /opt is for third-party stuff, so it depends if you use it or not.
Managing all that seems like a lot of effort, and given my disk issues havent yet been fatal, ill probably not worry about going that far. Thanks for the info though.
Last time i used LVM was way back in fedora 8 days, when it was the default partition. It was super annoying to use, as gparted didnt support it, and live cds often had trouble with it. Having to read doco to resize it was pretty not good for a newbie to linux. Has it improved since?
I already tried an Amazon Fire tablet, Amazon. No thanks. I returned it. I don’t need a locked-down console that spies on me. Windows is well on its way to becoming that already.
I tried to get one since it was 30 bucks, so I’m not too surprised this is how they operated. They are locking down jindles real hard too. Probably going to make a lot of ewaste.
Don’t hold your breath just yet, it’s a step in the right direction but it’s far from being fully Wayland ready. I think the driver will only be fully ready some time after explicit sync protocol lands in Wayland (see gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/…/90)
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