It will be possible to configure COSMIC to look like Unity out of the box. There’s only a few panel applets that need to be implemented to make the experience 1:1.

  • Michael Murphy (S76)OPEnglish
    11•9 months ago

    It should be noted that COSMIC itself hasn’t been delayed. Development on the core applications progressed much faster than expected, so we decided to skip the Alpha 1 release and release Alpha 2 instead.

    Why wouldn’t you like using it right now? I wouldn’t call it “very alpha”.

    • @[email protected]
      6•9 months ago

      Thanks for the reply!

      I find some things confusing to use. Like maximizing/tiling windows my dragging them to screen edges doesnt work. I think documentation about the tiling would be awesome, as meta+arrows also didnt do anything.

      It seems the tiling is only active when using tiling mode? That mode is slick as fuck, but having super+arrow always available or at least the tiling applet always shown would be great.

      I am also not a fan of the color scheme, which is too black and I would prefer a less aggressive “active window” border.

      The screenshot tool is very minimal but works well, its hard to reach a (bugfree ;D) KDE spectacle.

      Same with the Filemanager and Editor, Dolphin is the best piece of software in existence, I love it. Kate is also great. (Main dolphin features: filter, search, preview size, column selector, custom right-click actions, custom buttons, custom places bar with custom names and icons,

      And there is this issue with 3rd row symbols and keyboard layout not working at all. I have an en-GB keyboard, en-US either has no 3rd row or this is actually not working, and I also needs to disable capslock and use it to switch between 2 layouts.

      The app menu has no “show all apps” view which makes searching a pain for me. I also prefer the layout of either GNOME (showing all apps with folders and rearranging) or KDE Kicker (WinXP like with search and favorites).

      I will try and see what my problem with the search was, because that would probably be my preferred way.

      The ability to remove the top panel, and to resize the applets independently of the app icons is crucial for creating a laptop-friendly one-button-panel layout. The GNOME-style only makes sense in GNOME I think.

      Style-wise I think it already looks great, and its snappy and modern and has better dual-monitor support than Plasma 5, which is kinda crazy.

      • Michael Murphy (S76)OPEnglish
        4•9 months ago
        1. That’s not implemented, but you can click the maximize button, or press Super+M to toggle maximization.
        2. You can open the Appearance settings page and change that to your preferred color scheme. We’ve already selected our default colors and they’re not going to change from here on out.
        3. What do you mean by minimal? The PrintScrn key opens the screenshot utility, which lets you choose between capturing a selected region, a specific window, or the whole display
        4. What’s wrong with the file manager and editor? You can use whatever editor and file manager you want, so that shouldn’t be a blocker for daily use.
        5. This can be configured in the cosmic comp config, but will be implemented in the settings app soon.
        6. Super+W opens the workspaces view
        7. Your distribution should make sure pop-launcher is installed, and each of its plugins symlinked.
        8. That is already possible in the Desktop and Panel settings page. As you can see, I’m not using a GNOME style panel or dock here.
        • @[email protected]
          3•9 months ago
          1. I found that it only works in tiling mode, which may be better but normal snapping in windowed mode is pretty normal I think.
          2. Okay thats fair
          3. Clicking on the notification doesnt open the image, there is no recording and it has no editing :D but it works well and way quicker than Spectacle
          4. Added features I like about dolphin. For sure I could install dolphin instead. I would also prefer a places bar where you can click on the parent directories, clicking on the empty space after them activates manual path selection mode. But the filemanager is already pretty nice. In the editor I would miss things like LSP and text snippets, but it seems very nice for its purpose.
          5. That view is nice, but the drag-drop animation is similar to KDE (apps need to already be opened) and they are not minimized during the action, so it looks a bit clunky. Also removing workspaces is kinda buggy.

          Disclaimer: using the latest ublue cosmic 40 image, no idea if the RPMs are up to date.

            • @Delta_44
              3•9 months ago

              It’s funny how I find cosmic-editor to be perfect for code too

            • @[email protected]
              2•9 months ago

              Nice, I already tried that editor. Thanks!

              The best source seems to be COPR titaniumtown/lapce