COSMIC ALPHA 1 Released (Desktop Environment Written In Rust From System76)

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11 comments

Looks nice. Well as far as I can tell anyway. Maybe next time you're showing off a GUI don't make the screenshots 320x240?

Anyone know what toolkit they are using? As far as I know none of the Rust GUI toolkits are close to mature.

Edit: it's iced.
- Screenshots are scaled based on your device, try 'Desktop Site' if you are using a phone.
  
  Ah yeah that works. Very silly. Phones can zoom!
- It's a bit more than iced as they've created a library on top of it, esp for the theming they desire
I've tested it for a whole of 10 minutes so far, but for an alpha, it's excellent. In my subjective "feel" it sits somewhere between Gnome and KDE.

Note: on my setup Steam didn't like being scaled at non-integer scaling level. It would occasionally hang the whole DE for several seconds (on Gnome it only hangs its own window).
- do you have any hint on why i would prefer it over kde? i'm not a linux user right now but kde looks already the most polished experience, i don't know where it lacks :O
Do they have some preference what GUI toolkit apps should use? GTK or Qt?
- See: https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-team-interview-byoux
  
  We considered toolkits like GTK, Flutter, and QT, and though the team was already experienced working with GTK for Pop!_OS, eventually landed on the Rust-based toolkit, Iced.
  
  https://iced.rs/
It looks well designed. I wonder if it will find purchase among users.
Looks nice and all, but I doubt I'll use it. Feels alot like GNOME

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