NixOS. I came a long way and it combines the best of modular, customizable and immutable.

Imagine running thunderbird and firefox on an info board

Yeah right?? This might just be a small correction

Where does this work? I even tried the lemmy WebUI and didnt find such a feature

Well, PopOS is a distribution, based on Ubuntu, shipping a desktop. That desktop was formerly a customized GNOME, now they have their completely own desktop environment.

The tiling might be similar between both but their GNOME extension is probably deprecated now.

Cosmic has dynamic tiling, while KDE has many manual tiling features which may be less efficient but require nearly no setup.

This is not about GNOME…

Oversimplification. COSMIC lacks like 95% of what GNOME has that is important for regular users, like the vast extension ecosystem, GSConnect or remote RDP login as simple examples.

Dash really sucks. Use it as an interpreter for /bin/sh and thats it

Fork GNOME

No joking, have a look at GNOME circle apps in languages you like

The only address book I know is thunderbird any maybe the GNOME or KDE suite (their Personal Information Management (PIM) Suite).

Maybe the small desktops have alternatives.

Thunderbird supports CardDAV for syncronizing contacts too. But it is unencrypted so I wouldnt use it.

Etesync is encrypted.

Careful with this!

You need to change the repo priorieties to REALLY low, otherwise your system may downgrade packages and stupid shit like that.

Trust me, I extracted PopOS repos from ubuntu noble based PopOS and installed cosmic apps on debian. It worked, until it started messing up my system.

Use nix, it is way cleaner. On Debian I basically use nix for everything because many packages are missing or outdated.

Well it is some electron version, does that support it?

These are some crazy big things!!

Plasma-login is nice, has some very needed things

Plasma-keyboard is essential for anyone on a convertible or even tablet, as the old maliit keyboard is abandonware

The usb portal will be really useful

Ocr support in spectacle! This exists on proprietary android but not AOSP, and on windows too. Really neat. I hope the integration is nice, this is a really big UI task.

Bro fears normal distros

Is there a list of good GIMP 3 compatible plugins?

You are talking about global themes which is a bundle of plasmoids (which are executable code), SDDM themes (executable code, they are working on their own login manager to change that) as well as simple files like color schemes, cursor themes, icon themes, splash screens.

Well that is probably dash to panel. Or does it autohide somehow?

Themes are not a security risk XD executable code, widgets and a lack of standardization resulting in shady install scripts, that is a security risk

Themes are just colors

Edit: after reading the post, the below is not really relevant to the blog post

Interesting one

I guess it is fair that nobody wants to deal with GNOME and their reluctance of theming. I like theming and despise “light” (white) themes or not well readable dark themes (that dont save any energy on non-OLED displays).

I am on KDE, using GNOME at work (it is okay but worse in like 20 aspects I regularly use). Tried COSMIC on lower end hardware and it was not great.

I like that they support theming but agree, their desktop is pretty ugly.

Tho I use GNOME with dash-to-panel and blur-my-shell as well as the breeze cursor. The default theme is kinda weird (not blurring wastes potential) and the macOS like top bar is worse to use and wastes screen space (most importantly on Laptops).

GNOME is way worse than KDE, COSMIC has a couple of nice things but is worse than GNOME still for my use cases. No surprises.

I have to stress though that statically linked binaries are not good. Many distros shipping COSMIC use those, wasting RAM, optimisations and potentially vendoring outdated dependencies.

I also believe people when they dislike C++ and say KDE has a messy codebase. So I very much hope that COSMIC (with a substantial theme) can replace KDE for me. But I highly doubt that.

More importantly is, how old DEs make the transition from C and C++ to Rust, Zig, Go or whatever else you prefer.

With Windows going all in on Javascript you can see how not to do it XD

Yes of course, it inputs text.

But gboard is surveillance software, your voice is literally analyzed on their servers.

I did some network logs of gboard, you might be interested XD it basically sends data all the time