PopOS New COSMIC Desktop Has Me Excited Again!

Key Takeaways

it has been a good couple of months since we last talked about the cosmic desktop environment the new desktop environment being developed by System 76 to eventually replace the hyper custom gnome being used on pop OS and since that last November update there have been a couple of blog posts with the recent spring update just coming out so it seems like as good a time as any to see the state that it's currently in the first change isn't that crazy and you might even consider it boring that being support for tabbed interfaces in their applications this is being done with the segmented button widget and it comes with a complete style sheet implementation as well keep in mind that any styling that is currently available is completely subject to change and as things evolve it is almost certainly going to change but as it stands it does the job that it needs to do there was also a big change to the way that search works in the settings menu now it is going to be a continuous list that is updated as you search for something so in this case it's searching for the letters H and a and it's showing you all of the sections of your settings that have things that might be relevant to what you are searching for and rather than making you jump directly to that page it's going to list out those individual settings this is very similar to the way it works on Android and I love it every time I see it but there's also been a lot of changes to the individual settings pages one of those being the power settings which didn't really exist at one point but now it includes you know the general things you expect to see like the power mode of your system whether you want to limit the amount of battery charging things like that but also shows you the power level of your devices now we'll get to this graph Graphics mode thing in just a bit but originally this was located on this menu so for users who might be familiar with it being in this place they provided a link to where it now lives where it now lives is over in the display settings and the display settings include pretty much everything you could possibly want you have your monitor configuration with the tablet interface here where you can go and you know set your resolution your refresh rate the scale and the orientation setting your color profile which is you know nice to have not something you'd really configure that often but just having this here can be really useful when you have an odd monitor layout like I have I have a horizontal Monitor and two vertical monitors setting that up from the command line can be a little bit finicky but when you can just drag them to exactly where they need to be that's pretty straightforward also it includes it's a lot of shortcuts for doing mirroring so you want to go and Mirror to a specific display or if you're using a laptop there is a shortcut to mirror just your internal display to something external which is nice to see so it leads to a bit less messing around when you're using a system like that but I mentioned the graphics mode before the graphics mode is What GPU you're going to be using whether that's your integrated Graphics your discrete graphics things like that previously that was included in the power settings but upon doing testing they found that many users found it more sensible for it to be located in the display settings but as some users may still be comfortable the other way there is that link that will bring you over here instead and as every modern desktop needs it does have a night mode so if you want to go and you know make the screen warmer less warm you want to have it set up to automatically change it depending on the time of the day you can set the time or you can rely on your time zone and it does everything magically for you all of that here which is you know nice to see some people might say a nightlight mode is kind of dumb and doesn't really make any sense it can be disabled if you don't want to see it but for those users who do like to use it it's always nice for it to be there now the about page hasn't really changed that much in a while but now it does say which version of cosmic you are using which you know a nice little thing to be there not really that big of a deal you don't really look at the screen that often unless you're trying to take like you know a screen shot and posted on various subreddits but there is the ability to change your device name in this menu for things like network sharing Bluetooth things like that but moving on region and language this has some interesting ideas that I haven't seen in that many other places it sort of wants to expand upon what it means to change the Locale of your system what the Locale controls is the language being used but there are other things you might want to localize like the calendar like your temperature like your measurement system and things like that and this gives you the ability to mix and match things as you might want to see them maybe for whatever reason you don't want to use the Gregorian calendar but you like imperial measurement and you like Fahrenheit or maybe you want to go and you know change your date and time setting into you know the US version as in wrong Maybe you like 24 hour time and all of this stuff is going to live in the region and language section and in those cases like changing your Locale where you need to do a system reboot it is going to remind you that that needs to be done now the next one we have is the sound settings and most of the stuff in here is pretty normal sound stuff you know you can go and control the volume of your output and your input you can also go and change the volume of the individual applications like this isn't that crazy when you look at just any regular sort of mixer this is a terminal based one Benny GUI mixer is going to do the same stuff as well here it's just being done in a very clean fashion and I do really like the look of it but the special thing that's being done here is the audio testing there are plenty of audio testing applications out there but in this case it's going to let you test your speakers directly there in your volume settings so in this case there is a two speaker setup but in this one there is a five speaker setup and you can just go and test and make sure your speakers are working it's not something you're going to use you know every single day but on those occasions where maybe one of your speakers is playing up maybe you think something's wrong but you're not entirely sure it's gonna make it very easy to go and debug those problems and the last of the settings changes is the wallpaper settings and most of this is fairly normal as well you have a bunch of default wallpapers here you can go and make it fill tiling things like that you can go and set your own wallpapers by loading in a folder you can go and have colored wallpapers where it was showing them one of them here there you go you can go and just set a static color if you want to or you can go and have a slideshow where over time it is going to swap between various pictures you set and you can go and customize that interval in this case it is set to 30 minutes but you could have it be 5 minutes 15 minutes one hour once a day whatever you want to use and very importantly possibly as a way to spike genome uh you can have a separate wallpaper on different monitors and there's no extra tooling you need it just works now everything we've discussed so far has been in the start of year blog post the following blog post primarily focuses on the cosmic de text editor and before I show it to you keep in mind that everything I'm showing to you is very much an alpha and is very much a work in progress this is going to be heavily inspired from existing sting toes like vs code and things like that right now it looks like this and as you could probably tell it's very very vs code inspired with a bit of a cosmic theme applied to it you have your project Tree on the left hand side you have a split document view we can have separate tabs open all of this stuff is what you would commonly see using any sort of code editor out there personally I don't really see the need to be going as hard with it as they are going the desktop environment text editor is a very important thing to have when you're modifying things like config files text files like markdown and other things like that but the interface is very heavily inspired by vs code but no one would ever seriously use it for that kind of workload all of those projects have too much of an established plug-in system that it doesn't really make any sense to try to pursue that sort of use case I would suggest keeping it a bit simpler rather than adding in all of these extraditions which nobody is realistically going to be using your text editor for it probably makes a bit more sense to go more down the notepad route but maybe that's just me maybe there is a reason internally they want to go with this and with that we move up to the latest blog post the spring update and the first thing we see is the new look of the launcher which honestly I think it looks pretty clean as you probably know from my system uh okay it's not going to load here I use D menu as my launcher D menu is very simple but I'm not the kind of audience who'd be running Cosmic on a day-to-day basis from what I can see here it seems like it does what it needs to do you have a search bar that will Auto filter things as you're typing there are hotkeys here to go and quickly open things up when you open something it's probably going to go and automatically close the launcher it seems like it does what it needs to be doing and I think it looks pretty clean you might not like the look it has it might be a bit too bubbly for you but it seems like it's going to fit within the environment being developed for Cosmic the second thing we have is maximize and full screen currently on pop OS maximize and full screen are treated separately where full screen is when your app will cover the entire full screen whereas maximize will cover everything but leave the bar shown but with Cosmic there will be no differentiation between full screen and maximize what's going to happen is when you full screen an application when you maximize the application the app is going to abide by your desktop preferences so if you want your bar to be automatically hidden it'll be automatically hidden if you want the bar to be always visible or always hidden it's going to do what you expect it to do with the exception of you know full screening a video in YouTube or full screening other things where it's expected that it's going to cover the entire desktop also there has been improvements to tailing as in tiling is almost at feature parity with where it's at on the existing version of Pop OS with the notable exception of stacking mode additional features and hints to make Auto tiling easier for more users are also in the works this has always been one of the more compelling reasons to go and use pop West go and use the pop shell so it's very good to see that it is going to be working as expected using Cosmic as well and a lot of these other changes are more back-end things or things you're not really going to see on a day-to-day basis like Cosmic time their animation library for ice the performance improvements being made to their Text Editor to make it so it uses about half the ram which is probably good you know you have the ram you might as well use it but if you can cut it down that's probably for the best as well some improvements to the cosmic GUI widgets drag and drop support in their desktop which you know probably pretty useful and also there's an application out there already using ice animations this is a project completely unaffiliated with popwest it is just some random developer out there who wanted to go and make their own former software Center and you know it does the job it's not gonna probably be integrated into pop OS but it is nice to see that the improvements they are making to iced are being used by other developers as well now if I'm being completely honest a lot of what Cosmic is doing is not new and is not unique and has been done on plenty of other desktops in the past and I'm not saying this as an insult this is a good thing there is no reason to go and reinvent the wheel when something already works you could say oh they shouldn't try to reinvent genome they shouldn't try to reinvent and KDE but that's not a bad thing to do that take what works on those desktops and then bring it all together and make it really really polished if they can achieve that they are going to have a really good desktop environment I early on obviously was as skeptical as everybody else but I'm still really excited to see what they can do at this stage it looks like it's coming together pretty well and if they can actually make a good desktop environment that people actually want to be using that is going to be awesome and if pop West is shipping it it might actually become one of the three major desktop environments but let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below do you run pop West are you excited for what Cosmic is doing are you gonna set up an Ubuntu flavor that is shipping Cosmic instead are you gonna try to run it on another distro like Arch Linux and just see what happens I would love to know so that's gonna be it for me if you like this video go and like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the patreon scrub silly therapy Linked In the description down below that's gonna be it for me and I don't know when the Alpha's coming out but I'll probably make a video on it [Applause] [Music]