I love PopOS- it’s my daily driver of choice for laptops, and just a good experience overall. I’m certainly hyped and hoping for the best with Cosmic DE, once it’s ready for the general user audience.

One thing I would love to see would be if Cosmic supported the ability to choose the default file manager (think Nemo or Dolphin) when it releases. While you can switch file manager defaults via terminal, it’s a little tricky and doesn’t always work smoothly across applications (see weirdness with Firefox and PopOS when doing so).

Anyone else here have very opinionated views on file managers? Any other default app stuff they’d like to see with Cosmic’s general release?

  • Michael Murphy (S76)MEnglish
    10•1 year ago

    The file manager isn’t hardcoded to anything right now, and I don’t see much point in doing so. We will have our own file manager that fits in with the COSMIC aesthetics and technologies though. We should be able to create something that will make Nemo and Dolphin users want to switch to COSMIC’s file manager.

    • @M4775English
      4•1 year ago

      This is great news. A file manager and hybrid editor written in Rust by System76 sounds too good to be true. Add a Rust based simple music player and I’m in heaven.

    • @DestinyGreyOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Super happy to hear! I look forward to trying it out on my laptop. Thanks for chiming in with that bit of information.

  • @M4775English
    5•1 year ago

    Pop!_OS being an OEM for System76 probably means they will definitely release with a file manager GUI, but I wouldn’t care if it had none at all. You should be fine to swap out the default if what you want is a Flatpak though. Alternatives include any terminal TUI like Felix and any Rust apps developed with Iced or Slint, which I would be in favor of.
    Both Nautilus and Felix currently work well in the pre-alpha COSMIC, but navigating in and working with the filesystem in terminal is a breeze when set up nicely. Bash is great, but I prefer Z shell (Zsh) with auto-suggestions, auto-completions, autojump and a stack of aliases and scripts.