I tried one of the earlier alphas a year ago and it was too rough to daily drive, but I’ve been looking forward to beta. It’s not often we get a completely new DE so it’s very exciting.
I installed it yesterday and have been using it for a few hours. I love how smooth and responsive it feels. You can feel the benefits of being built from scratch in Rust. I wish the UI was more customizable, since I come from KDE and have very strong preferences on desktop layout, but it’s otherwise an improvement on GNOME’s ideas, as far as I’m concerned. It will be very appealing to Mac expats, which is S76’s key audience, I think. It’s a hard sell for Windows or KDE users.
One thing I do love versus KDE is the common sense naming conventions. The files tool is called “Files” and the terminal is called “Terminal” and the text editor is called “Text Editor.” There are no ridiculous, ambiguous names for the default apps.
The built-in tiling features are also absolutely wonderful. They work so well, so fluidly, and so intuitively. I am going to have a hard time giving that up when I switch back to KDE.
However, it still has a lot of rough edges and is not ready for less-technical users right now. Networking is squirrelly, the UI briefly freezes sometimes in very isolated and frustrating ways.
I’m going to continue using it over the weekend, but I am likely going back to Fedora + KDE next week. I like the direction that COSMIC is going, but I need more customization and stability before it can be a daily driver for me.
I tried one of the earlier alphas a year ago and it was too rough to daily drive, but I’ve been looking forward to beta. It’s not often we get a completely new DE so it’s very exciting.
I installed it yesterday and have been using it for a few hours. I love how smooth and responsive it feels. You can feel the benefits of being built from scratch in Rust. I wish the UI was more customizable, since I come from KDE and have very strong preferences on desktop layout, but it’s otherwise an improvement on GNOME’s ideas, as far as I’m concerned. It will be very appealing to Mac expats, which is S76’s key audience, I think. It’s a hard sell for Windows or KDE users.
One thing I do love versus KDE is the common sense naming conventions. The files tool is called “Files” and the terminal is called “Terminal” and the text editor is called “Text Editor.” There are no ridiculous, ambiguous names for the default apps.
The built-in tiling features are also absolutely wonderful. They work so well, so fluidly, and so intuitively. I am going to have a hard time giving that up when I switch back to KDE.
However, it still has a lot of rough edges and is not ready for less-technical users right now. Networking is squirrelly, the UI briefly freezes sometimes in very isolated and frustrating ways.
I’m going to continue using it over the weekend, but I am likely going back to Fedora + KDE next week. I like the direction that COSMIC is going, but I need more customization and stability before it can be a daily driver for me.