Sometimes

flatpak remote-modify --enable flathub

is necessary.

What might be better than turning it off is a onboarding screen that shows you how it works and you test it while the install completes.

There’s a million more important things it could show you instead

It can conflict with some programs. A lot of modern design programs make use of middle click drags to move around a canvas.

That caused problems for me and it took me days to realize it was middle click paste causing the issue of all these random segments of text appearing all over the canvas.

It was also annoying to disable. I was using Chromium at the time and you simply cannot disable it, even by disabling it in Gnome. I had to use Firefox exclusively when using that design program since at least Firefox has a hidden option to disable it.

Hardware/driver bugs are one thing, but COSMIC has plenty of purely software/logical bugs discoverable on any hardware.

That’s what the alphas, betas, and user studies are for.

Pushing buggy software out as stable is a feature of modern corporate software development that should be avoided. It gives a poor impression of the software.

Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.

Shocking, a 3 year old project is not as well established as a 20+ year old desktops. Its feature set is enough to me, but they did release it too early as it is still quite buggy.

COSMIC is very poorly designed, it might be written in the “memory-safe programming language” but it’s clear that they don’t have a design backbone

It looks “fine”. I agree that modern Adwaita looks better, but it’s not terrible. The default theme is meh, but themes like Catppuccin makes it look nice. There’s also missing things like drop shadows and animations, which I believe are toolkit limitations.

They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME

Gnome and System76 had different goals and UX ideas that were incompatible. Rather than continually patching Gnome and updating their patches to keep working, they decided to build their own thing, that’s fine.

I don’t quite get why Gnome people see this as a negative. If System76 is a poor downstream, then System76 no longer being a downstream is beneficial for them.

rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time

I think that’s a good thing in the long run. Gnome and KDE both have a significant amount of technical debt.

One of the things I love about COSMIC is how sanely it’s built, following modern programming principles.

• Rust helps avoid memory issues, helping with security and bugs
• A lot of things run as their own processes, which would typically all be running under a single process in Gnome/KDE. So even if something does crash, say the power applet or notifications applet, it won’t bring down other components like the shell.
• Clean layout of configuration, data, and state files. KDE is an absolute mess in this department. Gnome is better than KDE, but COSMIC does even better.

So while COSMIC is worse now due to its bugs and lack of features, I think it’s built on better foundations. That is, if System76 continues to invest in it. I’m not sure how profitable/unprofitable it is for them. My guess would be unprofitable.

It’s not atomic or cloud native either if you want to be strict with definitions.

The old Cosmic was built on top of Gnome using extensions, but the new Cosmic was written from scratch. It largely mimics the look of old Cosmic, but has introduced a few new things.

There are desktops try do mimic the look of MacOS, but none I’ve used actually felt like using MacOS. The first time I used MacOS, I was shocked at how many quirky things it does, the way it operates. No Linux desktop prepared me for that.

The only thing MacOS and Gnome have in common is a top bar and app grid. Other than that, MacOS is closer to Windows than Gnome.

• Windows and MacOS have always visible panel showing favorite apps and open apps, Gnome dosen’t
• Windows and MacOS have appindicators on panels, Gnome doesn’t

And to further differentiate Gnome from MacOS,

• Gnome’s UX is closer to Windows. There are many, many reasons why, but some are: don’t need to click a window to focus it before you can interact with it, fullscreening behaviors, assumes Windows-style keyboard layout
• No global menu, Gnome doesn’t even use that paradigm.

Honestly the closest DE to MacOS is Cosmic. The launchers work similarly, the overviews work similarly, it has the option to handle minimized windows similarly to MacOS, uses menubars (but not global).

Nope, just stopped using it as my main drive. It becomes read-only far less often when only used as additional storage and less strenuous reading/writing.

I assume it is a firmware bug because both my original and replacement drive had the same issue.

Check dmesg logs and SMART check the drive.

I had two crucial drives that would go read only, some sort of firmware bug I guess.

I went for the simplest option

1. Installed a distro (in this case Debian)
2. Installed tailscale on the server, logged in
3. Installed tailscale on my other devices, logged in
4. Used sshfs to mount the desired directory on the server to my client
5. SSH in once a week or so to run updates

Found it very simple. Avoided the tedious setup of samba and samba had weird reliability issues for me when copying large files. Took a bit to learn how ssh works, but very much so worth it.

Flatpak recently got a method of preinstalling flatpaks.

A flatpak cannot install a snap on your system. Apt can install a snap because when apt installs and updates packages, it can also run scripts as root. That’s insecure and potentially dangerous, so flatpak doesn’t have that ability.

All of those, apart from loop devices, are not technical limitations, but results from Canonical’s poor management and monopolistic desires.

Snap is interesting for me it can do more things than flatpak and has some really interesting sandboxing features coming up such as permission prompts for filesystem access.

But Canonical management is a significant hindrance. The Snap Store simply cannot be trusted after so much malware got in and they still have not improved their processes. So many snaps including Canonical’s own, are still using core22 for some reason. And there’s the broken snaps Canonical pushed on users.

I would love to see a snap repo that takes the best parts of Flathub and Fedora Flatpaks. Because as a technology, I think snap beats flatpak (if you’re using AppArmor). But it’s Canonical’s poor management that really drags it down.

You can tinker for the most part, it’s just done differently. In the Universal Blue world, that would be creating your own OCI container using their image template or blue build.

The nice thing is that it makes the OS much more reproducible than imperative commands and scripts.

Not a security issue, copyright/license issues.

In my experience, many Gnome apps make doing complex tasks pretty easy compared to third party apps. However, it is at the cost of customization and questions like “why can’t I do this???”

But in general, Gnome’s simple design works for me, most things feel clean and polished. I don’t need the vast majority of features offered.

In the cases where Gnome’s default aren’t powerful enough, often times the KDE equivalent isn’t good enough for me either despite offering more features and customization.

As an example, Gnome Text Editor vs Kwrite and Kate. GTS has the basics I need like line numbers (Apple’s text editor does not have this…) and that fits 80% of my needs. But what about more advanced things? Well, no markdown support but I don’t think Kate has that either. What about coding? I’d rather use a dedicated IDE than Kate or GTS.

The bar is meant to be very minimal and not distracting.

It takes up space, sure, but it’s close to the minimal height while still having easily readable time up top

You can purchase used electric cars too.