Yeah, the author normally rarely misses an opportunity to complain about KDE being too complex in his articles - and COSMIC aims to fall in that sweet spot between the extremes that are GNOME and KDE, while adding features like optional but native tiling.

The applet concept where applets live in their own process and communicate via Wayland protocols (behind a COSMIC API) is also less likely to break than GNOME plugins that are horribly injected into its bowels.

Given the toolkit, organized development and UX decisions being up-front designed with figma sketches, etc. that are reviewed before implemented, and having both paid developers and community contributors it has a lot of potential.

Yeah, I am comfortable with most DE's, I'm flexible but I prefer KDE+Wayland.

Dolphin is poorly threaded though. For example: If I drag a large file from a network share to the desktop I can not drag another one to the desktop until the first copy have completed. If I connect my VPN or just an away-from-home wifi, Dolphin freezes, probably because it can't find the local SMB connections in the "Remotes" group.

I'm also watching COSMIC, it has a very well thought out architecture though I suspect the first version will be too simplistic in terms of features - for example vs Dolphin.

It's very exciting. It fixes a number of bugs that exist on Intel and AMD as well and has a lot of polishing and features. It'll be the defining Wayland experience for DEs and gaming.

Many of us have. I enjoy KDE but COSMIC looks very slick and when listening to the developers it sounds like it's really thought through. They have considered so many details. For selfish reasons I'm glad to see it's already being worked on for openSuse.

I'm a bit confused, OS upgrades are free... I've been back and forth between iOS and Android a few times, I avoid lock-in to either ecosystem by using 3rd party cloud services like Bitwarden, Signal, Dropbox free (10GB), etc. I can switch over in half an hour. Most recently they started supporting the open standard Matter so they can use same smart home things as Google or Home Assistant.

As for "bloat", well there's a few apps I don't use, most can be uninstalled, if not it only takes up a bit of disk space, not RAM/CPU so they don't impact performance and I keep my phones for many years. Right now I got an iPhone 13, it runs like new, it'll last for a long time.

Are we upset about what they call support staff? All companies do weird marketing stuff, it matters not.

I don't use a Mac, I run Linux on my gaming PC. If I didn't game I'd be equally happy with a Mac, the new hardware is great and the OS doesnt get in my way. In contrast with Windows where one feels like a hand-puppet.

Yeah, I also had apps like Steam native break once or twice due to library updates (such as Mesa) - the downside to rolling distros. However, the Flatpak version continued to work so now I only use that. I don't use mods though.

I'm now gravitating towards treating my rolling distro a bit like an immutable; more Flatpaks, avoid user repositories.

Wait I though it was Windows that had a KDEy feel? Anyway it shouldn't matter whether UI's have some common features if they're good, only whether we like one regardless. You enjoy GNOME, great, that's a very slick desktop too.

Plasma has a lot of things that puts it above Windows in my book.

It was not a joke, I've worked on Windows and Linux for decades and I've worked on Symbian OS and Android as an OS engineer. With the right hardware and stable drivers neither crash. Anecdotally (which admittedly proves nothing) my gaming PC's only ever crashed because I had bad RAM, which i diagnosed with memtest86.

It's not the operating system. This is the weakness of Windows/Linux - the many many vendors of PC components and badly written drivers. It's not the operating system's fault as such, unless you count the OS' fault for not running a microkernel with drivers in a less privileged ring like Symbian OS did.

Now, the UI freezing and having weird random slowdown that's another thing and one of the reasons I prefer Linux. I'm very grateful for Valve/Proton that I have been able to ditch Windows completely now.

And much time is saved from debugging. It makes a lot of sense that we let the computer/compiler keep an eye on lifetimes, allocations and access so the code is much more correct once it compiles.

I feel like my old colleagues and I have spent a far too large part of the last 20 years chasing memory issues in C++. We are all fallible, let the compiler do more.

Yeah, I’ve used Linux in some capacity since the late nineties and know my way around. I can’t be bothered to fiddle with an Arch install, I’ve moved on, I got better things to do. So I decided to try out EOS on my new laptop. A few clicks and it was running with proprietary NV drivers by default, which are updated as needed by yay. I was playing games within 20 min from my Steam Library preserved on another ssd.

Only thing I had to do was install btrfs-assistant, plasma-Wayland and whatever apps I need.

The most laborious bit was configuring various apps to use Wayland but that didn’t have to happen immediately.

First start the process of getting a new wheelchair, my current one is 13 years old and leaves a trail of nuts and bolts.

EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop. I do productivity, Rust programming and gaming, mostly GuildWars2 and various RPGs. Waiting for Baldur Gate 3 !