Spyke

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linux

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Reminder: System76 is not to be trusted

Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.

Shocking, a 3 year old project is not as well established as a 20+ year old desktops. Its feature set is enough to me, but they did release it too early as it is still quite buggy.

COSMIC is very poorly designed, it might be written in the “memory-safe programming language” but it’s clear that they don’t have a design backbone

It looks "fine". I agree that modern Adwaita looks better, but it's not terrible. The default theme is meh, but themes like Catppuccin makes it look nice. There's also missing things like drop shadows and animations, which I believe are toolkit limitations.

They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME

Gnome and System76 had different goals and UX ideas that were incompatible. Rather than continually patching Gnome and updating their patches to keep working, they decided to build their own thing, that's fine.

I don't quite get why Gnome people see this as a negative. If System76 is a poor downstream, then System76 no longer being a downstream is beneficial for them.

rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time

I think that's a good thing in the long run. Gnome and KDE both have a significant amount of technical debt.

One of the things I love about COSMIC is how sanely it's built, following modern programming principles.

  • Rust helps avoid memory issues, helping with security and bugs
  • A lot of things run as their own processes, which would typically all be running under a single process in Gnome/KDE. So even if something does crash, say the power applet or notifications applet, it won't bring down other components like the shell.
  • Clean layout of configuration, data, and state files. KDE is an absolute mess in this department. Gnome is better than KDE, but COSMIC does even better.

So while COSMIC is worse now due to its bugs and lack of features, I think it's built on better foundations. That is, if System76 continues to invest in it. I'm not sure how profitable/unprofitable it is for them. My guess would be unprofitable.

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GNOME & Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default: "An X11'ism...Dumpster Fire"

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It can conflict with some programs. A lot of modern design programs make use of middle click drags to move around a canvas.

That caused problems for me and it took me days to realize it was middle click paste causing the issue of all these random segments of text appearing all over the canvas.

It was also annoying to disable. I was using Chromium at the time and you simply cannot disable it, even by disabling it in Gnome. I had to use Firefox exclusively when using that design program since at least Firefox has a hidden option to disable it.

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What do you see as the arguments for and against adding Server Side Decorations in GNOME?

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The for argument is basically the following

  • Wayland as a protocol was designed around CSDs, protocols for SSDs came years later
  • Having the client control the CSDs simplifiies things for the compositor and apps
    • The compositor has less things to implement and test
    • Modern apps tend to prefer CSDs anyway since it provides more flexibility, very common on MacOS and Windows
    • It's difficult to coordinate things between the client and compositor.
      • Something that annoys me about KDE is that they do this headerbar look where the top part of the application will match the color of the the titlebar. However, the top part of the application is drawn by the application and the titlebar is drawn by the compositor. But when the color changes (such as going from unfocused to focused), they do not update at the same time, so for a frame or few the top part of the application is a different color than the titlebar. That wouldn't happen under CSDs.
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Ubuntu 26.04 LTS - The Roadmap

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Snap is interesting for me it can do more things than flatpak and has some really interesting sandboxing features coming up such as permission prompts for filesystem access.

But Canonical management is a significant hindrance. The Snap Store simply cannot be trusted after so much malware got in and they still have not improved their processes. So many snaps including Canonical's own, are still using core22 for some reason. And there's the broken snaps Canonical pushed on users.

I would love to see a snap repo that takes the best parts of Flathub and Fedora Flatpaks. Because as a technology, I think snap beats flatpak (if you're using AppArmor). But it's Canonical's poor management that really drags it down.

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my reason why you should use KDE+Krohnkite instead of WMs

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The main reason I hear is that it maximizes screen usage and helps avoid/limit the tediousness of having to manage windows.

Not what you're asking for, but I'll give you my perspective as someone who's tried tiling on and off and overall don't like it.

  1. Applications work best at certain aspect ratios, having them automatically tiled to different aspect ratios can be annoying
  2. Some windows windows/pop-ups have no business being tiled. Like some Yes/No dialogs (not all windows specify a max size which would avoid triggering the tiling) or a simple calculator. And you can specify which ones to have floating, but it requires setup.
  3. Sometimes it ends of causing more work than floating environements. Most of the time I only have a max of 2 windows open, but occasionally I'll quickly try to do something then end up with 4-5 windows, at which point that's too many windows and I need to reorganize stuff to continue working. But that usually wouldn't be an issue in a floating environment.
  4. Worst of all, just setting up a tiling environment is a nightmare. You have to configure the actual compositor/WM, which tools you want to use with it (bar, launcher, screenshot tool, notifications, screenlocker, etc) and configure all those too, ideally with some basic theming to make them look coherent. But inevitably you end up with missing functionality especially in the modern area where an app might be sandboxed or expecting all xdg-portals to be implemented, which most compositors don't do.

Cosmic is exciting in this regard since it aims to be a fully-featured floating and tiling environment. You could just toggle between them as necessary (or have them on separate workplaces). You also get much better portal support.

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Phoronix compares the performance of the open-source Nouveau + NVK driver stack against NVIDIA’s proprietary 580 Linux driver across RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell GPUs (Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compu

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I disagree with that. The main problem is that Nouveau was stagnant for years because it just wasn't feasible to use since NVIDIA blocked reclocking support, so it would only ever run at its base clock, resulting in terrible performance. So nobody wanted to use the drivers, all that mattered is that they worked well enough to let users install the proprietary drivers.

But now that NVIDIA allows reclocking again, there's actual reason to improve the performance and fix bugs in it.

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Minecraft’s new version numbering system

It's so terrible...

I like the fact it includes the year information, but it does not solve the problem of Bedrock and Java being misaligned.

I don't see why they didn't just do year.dropNumber.patch version. So, the third drop of 2026 would be called 26.3.x for Bedrock and Java. But that last number will differ for Java and Bedrock to represent fixes made.