Cosmic DE

Sadly Nvidia have no interest in supporting Wayland on card before the 1650ti, an Ubuntu dev has submitted a patch to try and push it back to the maxwell series which would include the 750ti.
 
It's clearly still and Alpha but it does look quite nice. It's very "Gnomey" out of the box and I'm not a really a fan of Gnome but I'm sure it will be more customisable when it's ready.
 
Apparently they have been working on Xwayland support, so things might not be as bad as i first thought, being wayland only.
 
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Just installed alpha 6 on fedora and got it how I want it. I'm easily pleased so the customisation seems good enough, mostly trying to minimise things to look clean and maximise screen real estate used by actual programs. The dock can be disabled, windows can be snapped easily to half or a quarter of the screen (for gnome you need to mess about with extensions to do that). The only thing I haven't been able to do that I would like to is put the battery % number in the top bar instead of just a vague status icon. And the tiling mode seems a little jank, but that may be because I switched to it with a load of floating windows open so it crossed the streams so to speak. It's a 4 finger swipe to switch workspaces (compared to 3 on gnome).

The way it handles quarter window snapping alone makes it better for me than gnome. I'm now playing with some of the cosmic utilities and they seem fine, the terminal emulator is the most important one and that works well, the text editor has line numbering and syntax highlighting so that's also great.

Didn't think it would be there yet being alpha, but it's so impressive I'm actually switching to it immediately on my daily driver.
 
This looks pretty cool, been a longtime Gnome user on arch and haven’t tried any other DE’s so might be time for a change :)
 
santa said:
Just installed alpha 6 on fedora and got it how I want it. I'm easily pleased so the customisation seems good enough, mostly trying to minimise things to look clean and maximise screen real estate used by actual programs. The dock can be disabled, windows can be snapped easily to half or a quarter of the screen (for gnome you need to mess about with extensions to do that). The only thing I haven't been able to do that I would like to is put the battery % number in the top bar instead of just a vague status icon. And the tiling mode seems a little jank, but that may be because I switched to it with a load of floating windows open so it crossed the streams so to speak. It's a 4 finger swipe to switch workspaces (compared to 3 on gnome).

The way it handles quarter window snapping alone makes it better for me than gnome. I'm now playing with some of the cosmic utilities and they seem fine, the terminal emulator is the most important one and that works well, the text editor has line numbering and syntax highlighting so that's also great.

Didn't think it would be there yet being alpha, but it's so impressive I'm actually switching to it immediately on my daily driver.
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@santa How are you getting on with this as your daily driver? Have you encountered any of the reported 'memory leak' issues yet?
 
Once a notification popped up and would not go away, it became uninteractable for some reason but other notifications have worked fine. Another issue is the bluetooth widget would not enable bluetooth once, but it did work after logging back into gnome and enabling it from there. Did the usual systemctl before doing that without success, haven't investigated further. It's only been 3 days of use so far so it's too early to tell but there have been no other issues so far. I've now gone fully minimal with the top bar hiding itself when a window would cover it, which slides back into view when mousing to the top. I want to disable the mouse behaviour and have a keyboard shortcut to toggle displaying the top bar, that may not be possible right now.

A rudimentary look at residential memory consumption from htop after login:
cosmic-comp 144MB
cosmic-panel 100MB
Everything else sub 100KB (like a dozen things, one for each widget and a few more)

Looks like gnome-shell is gnomes main process, gnome-software at 375MB consumption appears to be the gui updater which doesn't count.
gnome-shell 282MB

With desktop icons enabled there was a process called cosmic-files-applet consuming 99MB. With icons disabled it's <100KB. I have desktop icons disabled anyway, gnome appears to require an extension for desktop icons and there's loads to choose from so I don't know what to compare to so I won't.

Residential memory usage of default file programs after searching for .jpg from root:
141MB cosmic-files
164MB nautilus

It appears that cosmic is lighter on memory in general, not that this is an exhaustive or possibly even reasonable test.

Haven't noticed a memory leak issue but haven't been looking. I'll keep stuff open and keep an eye out with htop but if you have a particular issue/program in mind I can investigate further. Right now I'm just using what fedora installs by default which are the basics, the DE itself plus terminal, text editor, file manager, screenshot program.
 
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