A lot of shallow "but the buttons!" comments here... no need to be so negative.
This is the first alpha release of a full new desktop environment, built on a new GUI toolkit (based on Iced) and a new Wayland compositor, together with a suite of applications, all built from scratch in Rust .... give it some time.
Most interesting to me is the integrated tiling support.
I've been on i3/sway for many years, but a lean, lightweight and fast DE with tiling as a core feature and full proper keyboard navigation support everywhere might get me to switch. There are times where you really miss a proper DE over the hacky patchwork that a custom setup with a niche Wayland compositor entails.
It is sort of dumb but at this point I’ve bounced back and forth between i3 and sway long enough that I’m vaguely tired of them but also totally reliant on the key binds.
But if I’m going to switch to a DE… I mean, I already have a fine customized window manager setup. The point of a DE is that it doesn’t need to be customized much and comes with all the bells, most of the whistle pre-installed.
All that is to say, if new really interested in this as long as they ship it with a built in “i3-like key binds” option.
I will say, the integrated tiling and being able to also break out is nice imo. I actually like the gnome based cosmic enhancements that Pop has done in the past and have been following the COSMIC development with a lot of interest. I wouldn't mind seeing a relatively simple app... maybe Calculator, with libCOSMIC so I can have an idea of a getting started level of such an app with Rust. It's harder to start with more complex apps as an example to look at or work from.
I agree that it could use some more polish. I'd also like to see the bulk of the icons (re)generated from a primary and secondary accent color as well. They look out of place as you may tweak the colors. A unimenu and kde theme generation are also things I'd like to see sooner than later.
The integrated tiling is THE killer feature for me using Pop OS.
I used i3 plenty back in the day, but these days I just don't have the time to fiddle with the config. Pop OS tiling works perfectly out of the box if you don't need anything fancy.
Yes, I'm using Hyprland at the moment but it's got a chaotic community and it's still pretty buggy (though heading in the right direction), but I'd love an advanced tiling Wayland WM that is less "hobbyish" as my daily driver.
I knew someone would recommend sway which is why I added the word "advanced". I used sway for a couple years before moving to Hyprland because Sway hasn't moved much. There are things that I need that Sway doesn't do, like disabling Xwayland scaling, and proper screen and window sharing.
Gnome with animations completely turned off + the pop shell extension is a great experience. And for when you have to, you can still log into sway from GDM.
did they need to build all that?
I'm all for them doing something new, especially integrated tiling support. But it seems they have taken on way too much for a small company.
As an owner of a System76 laptop I'm really conflicted on this stuff.
On the one hand, I'm glad to see developer attention given to the Linux desktop. I use and like GNOME well enough, but it's great to see competition and innovation.
On the other... I guess when I buy System76, I'm effectively paying a markup to subsidize development of these side projects (I'll never use pop_OS for example).
As somebody who's looking to just buy a computer, it makes justifying the expense of System76 a little more difficult. There are other Clevo rebadgers, after all.
There isn't a fixed number of Linux users. Your economic model for this is misguided.
System76 seems to want to sell to engineers, researchers and data scientists. The competition here is a MacBook with the typical Unix ecosystem or a Windows laptop with WSL.
So this allows them to take control of the total user experience and increase their customer base.
Their target audience is people who want and need a Unix based environment, are power users, but don't want to play around too much.
So this investment is intended to sell more laptops. I think they have a fair shot at making this pay for itself and they have a small but reasonable opportunity to grow exponentially and become a player of a seriously different size.
I would assume people on HN could appreciate the ambition.
Alpha release is how people remember you. Virtually no one interested in a clear ui will check it again just in case it got buttons. People are tired of this ui fad and speak out cause it’s probably important for them.
That's ridiculous. I wouldn't consider running this in alpha regardless of what it looks like, so you can get I'll be checking back in when it hits its first stable release to actually give it a try.
This is the first alpha release of a full new desktop environment, built on a new GUI toolkit (based on Iced) and a new Wayland compositor, together with a suite of applications, all built from scratch in Rust .... give it some time.
Most interesting to me is the integrated tiling support.
I've been on i3/sway for many years, but a lean, lightweight and fast DE with tiling as a core feature and full proper keyboard navigation support everywhere might get me to switch. There are times where you really miss a proper DE over the hacky patchwork that a custom setup with a niche Wayland compositor entails.