Cosmic Desktop Alpha Release

[Grogan]

Well, today is the day. I got it all built with (24 packages, minus cosmic-store... I don't do that shit) and nothing is out of place. It still hasn't broken my configuration.

There's one new package, cosmic-idle, an idle daemon, that is a dependency for cosmic-session.

[Grogan]

Nah, this is fucking bollocks. If I do anything with Firefox, minimize it, click the taskbar entry... Cosmic freezes up. You can't get out of it, there's no ctrl-alt-backspace, input is dead, can't switch TTY's, ACPI shut down doesn't work (the power button is an input device) and while I can ssh in from another box, shutdown doesn't work. There's nothing to kill, it has all crashed out and left display and input subsystems defunct. This leaves hard shutdown with filesystem errors. It's not just a one-off, it happens every time I try to minimize or manipulate the firefox window.

That's the problem with Wayland shit, if something happens the whole system is fucked because it's direct hardware acceleration. That's progress for you.

I had that happen once before with the last build, when I clicked the taskbar entry for a game that wouldn't draw its window, but only once and not with Firefox, which is my most important application. I think I'm just going to nuke this from orbit, at least for now. I can't have this kind of instability and unreliability. I can put up with bugs, even crashes (don't use it for anything serious) but not hard boots. Fucking WINDOWS wouldn't do this when a component simply crashes out from underfoot.

P.S. It's not just Firefox, it seems to be everything, it happened with just my XFE file manager. Click the taskbar entry and it's hard boot and fsck time. Even my efi partition needs dosfsck (I really should stop mounting that... it can just be manually mounted at kernel install time)

That means I can remove some unwanted dependencies like that xdg-desktop-portal and greetd/accountsservice shit too.

[Zema Bus]

I'll see how it does on mine.

[Zema Bus]

It's still working OK for me so far, no crashes yet. One anomaly I noticed is when I move a window from one screen to another, if I should happen to stop part way across, the part of the window that made it to the destination screen disappears (normally it would remain on both screens). I don't know if that's new or not though since I usually move windows across without stopping. Looks like they fixed the lack of window grouping in the panel. Before when I'd have multiple Firefox windows open each instance would show up individually in the panel.

[Zema Bus]

Power management to turn off the screens is now finally working.

[Grogan]

If I were to so much as click on a running application's notification area on the taskbar (which should minimize it), the whole thing freezes (probably crashes and leaves the display defunct since none of it was running when I ssh'd in). I wonder if I'd have waited a few minutes if it would have shut down... it could have been sitting there at "a stop job is running for..." and I wouldn't see that on a ssh terminal.

I probably won't try this again until the next bits are released.

It could even be my config... it may look right but something could be b0rked.

Whatever the case, not good if a crash takes out those subsystems. If it would just crash to console I wouldn't mind.

[Zema Bus]

I think I may have spoke too soon, I clicked on Thunderbird in the panel and instantly it was frozen solid and I couldn't get to a TTY. Ok, now it's official Since we've both run into that there's going to be a lot of other users affected too.

[Grogan]

Yeah, in that case, I'd say it's a feature

[Grogan]

So Cosmic Desktop Alpha 4 has been "released". Arch should pick it up soon.

I'm probably going to wait until a later date to try that again. (I really don't want its dependencies, like the xdg-desktop-portal shit and those greeter/session related daemons that affect things whether you use Cosmic or not. I'll wait until it's at least worth it)

Also, those lockups probably aren't fixed. (I haven't seen the wide spread complaints if it was a common problem)

[Zema Bus]

I'll try it this weekend if Arch has it then. I'll let you know how it works out this time.

[Zema Bus]

It hasn't crashed on me yet, but it still needs some work. It's still not grouping icons for multiple instances of the same application, so if I have multiple Firefox windows open the icons will be spread across the panel.

Here's the first thing I noticed after I launched Cosmic:

screenshot-2024-12-08-08-06-16.png

So far I'm only seeing this with Firefox and Thunderbird. Minimize and maximize is still accessible in the right click menu on the title bar though, but since I have the title bar and menu bar enabled I'm not sure why that's happening in Cosmic.

[Grogan]

I have had that all along too in Cosmic, with Firefox. It doesn't override the GTK window decorations properly in that application.

[Grogan]

Arch has Cosmic Alpha 5 packages now. I'm not going to try it, because I have to install some yucky dependencies (daemons, xdg-desktop-portal shit etc.) and don't want to, for something I'd only use occasionally. This, and Wayland need more work before I could trust it not to b0rk my session or make me hard boot.

[Zema Bus]

I'll try it and report back Wayland has been pretty good in Plasma for a while now. When Plasma 6 first came out about a year ago it was pretty crashy when under Wayland so I switched to Xorg. I revisited it after new Plasma builds came out and eventually it stabilized enough that I left it in Wayland.

[Zema Bus]

It's better, but it's not there yet. There is still no panel window grouping, so if you have multiple windows open from the same application each one will appear individually until it fills up the panel with the excess going into an overflow menu. Then if you launch a different application you won't see it in the panel because it will end up in the overflow menu. So if you leave it and want to get back to it, first you have to open up the overflow menu. Window decoration control buttons are all showing now so there is that. Copy & pasting from a browser address bar doesn't work, it can't be pasted back into the browser (into a forum, FB etc), into an email message, or into a text editor. I'm pretty sure that worked before. Dragging a window from one screen to another works fine as long as you don't stop and release the mouse, otherwise the part of the window moved onto the 2nd screen will disappear. Not a big issue in most cases but little things like that show that it's not close to a release yet (they previously mentioned aiming for a release in the spring of 2025).

[Grogan]

They'll want to fix those GUI annoyances, but what concerns me is that it's too close to the metal to fool around with. (Vulkan accelerated compositor using wayland protocols instead of the X server... what could go wrong there? I know the consequences)

My XFCE 4.18 is rock solid and I like the way it works. My IceWM for gaming is also simple and very reliable.

It's good to see them working hard on it though. Someday I'll want to use that.

[Zema Bus]

I see they put out a point release, Alpha 5.1 this past Thursday.

[Grogan]

Point releases of Alphas now

They know a lot of people are using it I guess. It's pretty novel for distros to carry alpha status software.

[Zema Bus]

I was playing around in Cosmic in CachyOS, I hadn't looked at it in months, probably not since January. It seems much less of an alpha now. They finally fixed application grouping in the panel. Previously if multiple instances of an application were open it would spread them all across the panel instead of grouping them under a single icon. But that's working well know. When holding the mouse over a group it'll show a thumbnail of each similar to the way Plasma and Windows do it, and if you right click on it you'll get a list of each running instance. I read that the next one will be a beta.

[Grogan]

I may try it again when it's "beta". With that kind of lockups it was causing for me, once is too often. I otherwise like it though.

[Zema Bus]

The beta is out now, I took a quick look at it. It seems pretty good, except window grouping in the panel is back to not working. It worked the last time I tried it. I'll have to explore it further to see if there's a setting somewhere. The Variety clock doesn't currently work in it, but it doesn't work in Plasma either.

[Grogan]

Cool, maybe I'll try and get a build set up tomorrow. It's been so long now that I'll probably just ditch my (backed up) old configs for it. Shame, because I did manual hunting and poking and sed'ing to get the colour scheme I wanted etc.

[Zema Bus]

The official release date has been set for Dec 11th. I've noticed when updating Arch that there have been multiple Cosmic betas since I last looked at it.

[Grogan]

I still haven't gotten around to that. I'm kind of leery of it (and wayland in general) because of how it was able to cause a hard lockup. An X11 client would have crashed me to my console shell at worst. When it's a final, and they've got their build system all sorted out and stuff, it will be time to try it again. I may give them time for a .1 or .2 sort of thing.

[Zema Bus]

I have Steam going in CachyOS on the new machine, they have a gaming meta package that installs a bunch of related packages. I have a few different DE's installed, MATE, Plasma, and Cosmic. I played BL4 for a little while under Cosmic tonight, it ran very well for the time I played it.

[Grogan]

I had games that wouldn't even draw their windows on Cosmic, but hopefully things like that are sorted. I had one game that actually worked better, Mass Effect Andromeda didn't have an annoying mouse cursor issue.

[Zema Bus]

I was playing around with it today, it's scheduled to release on Thursday. One annoying thing that's in there now is there doesn't seem to be any way of disabling the lock screen. I looked everywhere in the settings, did web searches, and I searched on their github page, not one mention of it. But I have this same issue on two machines now. Aside from that it's working well. I found the setting to set panel transparency, so I have the panel looking a lot better, it goes well with the default wallpaper.

[Grogan]

I despise lock screens... there better be a way to disable that behaviour. I don't care about that kind of security, nobody is going to touch my computer here. 100% nuisance, to me. I have it disabled on my phone too (If anybody can take my phone from me, it means I'm dead and I don't care).

Have you had any panel crashes or any other components? The first iteration of it that I had, early alpha, was actually good. After a few builds it got bad, simply clicking a panel icon could make me hard boot.

[Zema Bus]

Not so far, it's been pretty stable.

Yeah I've never seen any other UI's without a means of disabling the lock screen.

[Zema Bus]

I finally found one person asking about this issue. No solution though. I looked though the config files, nothing pertaining to this that I could find. I guess most people just like lock screens on everything or don't care