There were quite a few claiming we don’t have to resources to do this. There was some “concern” warning people that COSMIC will release without accessibility support because we’re not using GTK. There were also claims that we’d need years to have proper text shaping, layout, and rendering that supports every language script. Along with the usual concern posts about a new platform increasing fragmentation of the Linux desktop and therefore causing the death of the Linux desktop.

Yet text-related functionality was implemented within a few months in cosmic-text, which just recently merged into iced. AccessKit already existed at the time and we’ve had successful integration with it in our fork of iced. But apparently we’re suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect because we think we can implement COSMIC in Rust without relying on GTK.

We have the resources and talent. It’s just a matter of time to get from design to implementation. Every milestone we reach allows development to progress quicker than before. Some still don’t realize how effective Rust is in this domain, or how large its open source ecosystem is that we can utilize. There’s a lot of open source Rust libraries we can rely on that didn’t exist 20 years ago for C. Development experience between C and Rust is totally different so you can’t really compare development times. Wayland protocols, drivers, and application support has also improved a lot in recent years, so timing makes a difference as well.