I left 10 years ago and decided to come back to see if things have improved.
It’s 90% there, but there are still too many bugs and quirks that think I I’m going to go back to Windows.
I started my reintroduction to Linux using Mint. Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible and the “start menu” would lose its relative aspect ratio and my 4k monitor would display a 400x200 pixel start menu. Also, when trying to install apps using flatpak, the results was convoluted. I am trying to install tailscale. Why are there so many results? Which one do I need? Maybe this one?.. Nope, not that. How do I uninstall it? Installing apps was a chore and I couldn’t get anything to run correctly.
Switched over to Pop OS which is what I’m using to post this. Oh man, its so much better than Mint. Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way. Just 2 options for Tailscale with descriptions on which one fits me better.
But there are so many quirks. The multitouch trackpad is great. The 4 finger workspace swap is amazing. 2 finger “back” button works great too. Except it doesn’t translate to anything else. Firefox/Chome/Edge doesn’t recognize the back gestures. So, I spent 30 minutes looking for a solution which led me to touchegg, which is available in the Pop Store. But after trying to install it, it freezes my computer. No worries, try again. Freeze again. Arg… that’s annoying. Whatever, my mouse back button works. I’ll live without the touchpad feature.
Install all my productivity programs (zoom, slack, office, etc) for some reason it takes forever to install these and there is a constant lag between installs that persists across all apps. Where is the progress on all the apps I selected to install? Why must I research the app to see if its done or frozen. Whatever, I only need to do this once.
I start working on my new system and I don’t really notice much of a difference between working on my Win11 machine vs Pop OS since most of my work is on a browser. After a few hours of working, I walk away for a few hours. I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either. I hard reset the system and lose some work that wasn’t on the browser. I’m super annoyed now. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fix my sleep issue and have yet to figure it out.
I’m running these OSs on a Dell Precision i7 with an NVIDIA dedicated card and 32gb of ram. Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?
While this is true, several core elements of pop os 22.04 continue to receive updates. The kernel, pipewire, Firefox, etc. all continue to receive updates to modernish versions. It is not an ignored distro by any means
The Pop_OS! Devs do not develop the Kernel, pipewire, Firefox, etc. so no shit they’d still receive updates.
No they but they still need to test the kernel and pipewire with the packages they ship to ensure that there are no bugs or dependency issues.
No/few distro maintainers develop packages. By your logic, maintaining a distro should be trivial.
Actually, I’ve made my own distro before. It’s not hard, just extremely time consuming especially when you’re just one person and have no infostructure to automate the process.
It is, actually. You use a CI/CD system to do the vast majority of the work then do the most basic form of testing. It’s nothing like developing and maintaining actual source code.
The Gnome-based Cosmic DE was something they actually developed and wrote lines of code for, they do no such thing for the Kernel. They just compile it and package it into a deb using a CI/CD system, test it and vender it out to the user. They already have all the infrastructure required up and running.
Cosmic is not gnome based
WRONG.
Wiki Source
I think that’s out of date, or refers to the old customized gnome extension, of the same name, that pop currently uses called Cosmic Shell.
Cosmic desktop is in rust, uses iced, and doesn’t even use mutter as it’s compositor.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/COSMIC
If you look at the source for the new cosmos components they don’t have any gtk.
https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-session/blob/master/Cargo.toml
https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-files/blob/master/Cargo.toml
Edit:
Yep, seeing the Tumblr post we’re talking about different things. You mentioned above the Rust based DE so it’s easy to conflate the two given your previous responses
Gnome-based Cosmic DE = Old/Current
Rust-Based Cosmic DE = New/Incoming
They’re specified for a reason.
Yes however you’re conflating the names of both which is where the confusion lies.
Cosmic is a portion of Pop Shell, which is what you’re calling “Gnome-based Cosmic DE”. This collection of gnome extensions forms what is called Pop Shell. The cosmic here only refers to the extension that modifies the dock, workspace and configuration changes and is not a desktop environment.
Cosmic DE refers to the “rust based” full desktop environment called Cosmic DE which has nothing gnome within it.