tl;dr (understandable, to be honest): on a technical level, modern GNOME prioritizes polish at the expense of flexibility, and COSMIC is focused on customizability. Bad communication aside, they have fundamentally different goals and audiences.

Acknowledging that this is a 4-year-old article, I think it’s important to read this as a very one-sided perspective. However, I am certainly not defending System76, as it does seem like some pretty poor behavior if the article is to be believed.

I’m going to look past the issues over communication and behavior, as others have already addressed that in this thread. Other than that, it seems that the main issue is arguing over the role of GNOME in the software ecosystem. How I see this is that:

• System76 is arguing for backwards compatibility and and more customizability.
• GNOME is arguing for “bulletproof” theming of apps by restricting user choice and modularity.

Honestly, I think this is pretty reflective of how the current state of the respective DEs.

GNOME is the cleanest, most polished Linux desktop environment, if you use it exactly as the designers of GNOME envision. If you want any options outside the extremely limited set GNOME provides by default, you need to rely on extensions, which are less stable and less polished, and may or may not be updated to new DE versions.

COSMIC is a clean-sheet implementation designed around modularity. It’s really the main thing they talk about. It has the advantage of being Wayland-only, and (supposedly) pretty much every element of the DE is modular, and there is a pretty substantial amount of customization available even in the fairly barebones 1.0 implementation.

In terms of COSMIC “just being GNOME with extra color options”, I disagree. I really like the UI design concept of GNOME, and ten versions ago I used it all the time. However, over the last few versions it’s become very locked-down into only supporting one narrow way of using the desktop, and I need features outside that (e.g. system tray, options for window tiling, etc.). Even with ten extensions modifying the behavior – which causes stability issues when I get a new GNOME version – I still find things which bother me and are only fixable with manual dconf editing, which means I just can’t daily-drive GNOME.

I think that’s who COSMIC is really for: someone who wants less windows-y, more intentional UI design than KDE, but with good customizability. It sucks if the creators of a pretty neat new DE were not effective participants in their previous DE, so I really hope they don’t make the same mistake with COSMIC, and manage it properly as an open source project.

FYI, OpenSuse maintains .rpm builds of the signal app in their repos, specifically targeted at OpenSuse Leap and Fedora. They work great for me.

Krohnkite is incredibly janky, I tried it recently and it made all the window animations lag. Also every third boot or so it would fully stop kwin from starting, and lead to a black screen on login.

Theres no equivalent to Windows Defender on Linux, because it’s like 14 tools in one, and Linux by nature is a lot more modular. If you want something whcch scans files for malware, the tool of choice would be ClamAV. By default it only scans files which you manually tell it to, but you can set it up to automatically scan any file when it’s downloaded. It’s a lot less sophisticated than Defender, but there’s also just not as much malware for Linux (yet), and if you stick to installing software through the package manager and never giving other files execution permission, you should be fine.

I would also add that the more you modify the system (PPAs, packages not installed via the package manager, nonstandard partition layouts) decreases the stability of your system and makes it harder to get back to your current system state if something goes wrong. I like to think about it like balancing a tower of blocks as a kid. Mint is the first block, and is very stable, but each additional block makes the system less and less stable. Mint itself is really stable, but if you do weird stuff the Mint devs can’t do anything about it, which puts you in a bad position until you really know what you’re doing.

The Snap store is intentionally left out by Mint, because they don’t like how Ubuntu manages it. This means that even though the Ubuntu version Mint is based on supports Snap, there’s no guarantee that snaps will work with the same stability which .deb/apt and flatpak packages will, because it hasn’t been tested in Mint. I would advise against using it.

If it’s WebKit-based, it is still using one of those four engines owned by large companies…the engine isn’t the selling point. As I read it, Orion is to Safari as Brave is to Chrome.

+1 ro this. The obfuscation tunnels traffic through the QUIC protocol used by https/3. Basically, it’s almost impossible to block QUIC without sabotaging the web. This is opposed to traditional VPN connections, which send encrypted (usually AES) packets over UDP, which is much easier to tell is a VPN.

I know what you asked about is the Machine and Frame, but I’m super excited about the controller. I love my old steam controller I got on fire sale, but its an extremely flawed device. If they can polish that to the standard of the Deck, I’m so in, especially since you know it’ll work well on Linux with no firmware BS.

Honestly? I have more or less the same use case, and I use Gnome or KDE and just use super+left/right to do the half-screen windows, and super+page up/page dn to switch between workspaces for fullscreen windows.

Is is the most optimal TWM experience? No. But is is fast to set up, easily usable, and requires no keyboard shortcut configuration? Yes.

I had no idea! It seems like it was a really unruly project to manage, but it’s a shame to lose the centralization of having one app that can configure anything. I don’t see any problem in having package management split off into Myrlyn, but it sounds like Cockpit is much more limited in scope, which is a shame, since handling the edge cases gracefully was what made YaST so useful.

Here’s a source for others who didn’t realize.

Agreed. Fortunately, I don’t see anything about that being planned, they are just separating system installation from system management. I’m fine with that, as long as the new installer keeps the good control over partition management.

My reading is that the installer is no longer based on YaST, not that YaST has been retired overall.

I mean isn’t this just Xen revisited? I don’t understand why this is necessary.

Should be in testing within a day or two, might take a week or more to make it to stable.

edit: this is wrong (sorry!), see replies

Some motherboards explicitly enable wake on LAN as a BIOS option. If not in the BIOS it’s going to be a bit harder, but the software option recommended, (the Archlinux forum link) looks interesting.

Yes, on fedora you just click the check box for the Nvidia driver repo in KDE Discover or Gnome Software, and you’re good.

Zettlr! Its designed around writing manuscripts in markdown+latex, then exporting to pure LaTeX, PDF, or any other Pandoc-supported format via a builtin Pandoc GUI. The only thing that doesn’t work particularly well is the table editor, but they’re working on it.

It is electron based, but almost all graphical editors for markdown + inline latex are (obsidian, etc.) because MathJax & KaTeX are the most mature method to render LaTeX inside other document formats.

Obsidian is also good, but it’s not FOSS and their built-in export isn’t great.

Nah, I’ve had no issues pasting from the clipboard into signal, from either the Mint screenshot tool or Flameshot. Not sure what issue the top commenter is having…

Yeah, mint uses synaptic. Works well in my experience.

No no of course not, but it’s a compatibility layer for windows inside linux.