• hornedfiend@piefed.social
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    9 hours ago

    How does this compre to plasma or gnome 3 now? Given I’m a plasma user and I don’t really like gnome 3, would this be a fresh take on IDEs, worth trying a new arch install on?

    • jcarax@beehaw.org
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      2 hours ago

      I came up using primarily Fluxbox and XFCE, and could tolerate Gnome 2. Had a love/hate relationship with Gnome 3 for awhile. Never really liked any version of KDE, but…

      I used Cosmic for about a year, just switched to KDE last weekend. For me, Cosmic is the first Wayland DE to hit that sweet spot of lightweight window manager feel, with a few conveniences like integrated panels, notification bus (which is bidirectional, unlike KDE’s), small application suite, and some useful applets. I’m always tempted to go back and roll my own with LabWC and god knows what at this point, because it’s not quite what I want ideally, but it’s quite good.

      It’s still a bit buggy, recently I started having an issue where windows would lose their position and size after minimizing and restoring. I’ve long had that issue after unlock. Others feel differently, but tiling has never been great for me, I hope they rework it, or introduce more customizable snapping without the rigidity of full tiling.

      But it’s lightweight and clean, fairly customizable (compared to Gnome, not KDE), and generally sane. We’ll see how Budgie and XFCE come along on Wayland, they both have a far more mature DE as a whole, but Cosmic does have a head start on Wayland, and has the benefit of being a fresh code base.

      I’m hoping Cosmic, along with the lightweight DE ports (?) to Wayland, kick start development of more lighter weight, non-DE-centric applications with native Wayland support.

      • hornedfiend@piefed.social
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        29 minutes ago

        Thank you for the info, appreciate it. Yeah, I guess I’m expecting bugs on Cosmic.

        My hardware is decent, definitely more than enough for Plasma, but I sometimes get bored and distrohopping isn’t doing much for me, at least not as much as a DE would, which is why I’m curious.

        I will give it a try in a VM, but doubt I’d be able to reproduce the same workflow on a VM as on host.

    • GottaHaveFaith@fedia.io
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      4 hours ago

      You don’t need a new install, I actually found it useful having cosmic installed when KDE wasn’t working, I could just start it from the alt f2 cli

    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
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      9 hours ago

      You probably meant “DE” instead “IDE” (i was confused first, but think its a typo). You should look in YouTube videos to get an idea of what it is and how it works. I would say, its something GNOME 3 inspired by its look and design, but with functionality and customization inspired by KDE. Some parts might be still under cooked, as it is still early. The question is, why do you want change from KDE? This information would be crucial to give a recommendation. And only you can answer it. Maybe try it out in a virtual machine before committing installation on your main system.

      • hornedfiend@piefed.social
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        8 hours ago

        Yes, I meant “DE” indeed. Habit I guess…

        Sure, a VM would be the easiest indeed. I’ve watched some older Cosmic videos and it was far from being ready, so I couldn’t even be bothered with it, but seeing it grow and actively being worked on, has picked my interest again.

        • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
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          8 hours ago

          The older videos explicitly tested early alpha and beta versions. Meanwhile it is already released as official version with their distribution. Off course there might be quirks (like KDE has in example), but its ready for productive use.

    • jimmy90@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      the only thing i was missing was input-remapper functionality and it still felt a bit clunky and not the super slick-fast-efficient experience i was hoping for