Fedora members plan on creating a Cosmic Desktop Spin

Pantherina@feddit.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 256 points –
news.itsfoss.com

There already is an experimental image based on Silverblue with the alpha stage Cosmic Epoch Desktop.

Mainly finetuning and SELinux profiles are needed!

Join the Matrix Group! (yes, no Discord 😉)

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This would be awesome. Fedora has really been one of the best distros lately, hopefully they don't get fucked by Red Hat in the future.

Didnt it get fucked once? Also what did fedora do lately? Seriously asking.

No, they only fucked CentOS, and they made RHEL proprietary last year. Since Ubuntu's decline, Fedora basically took it's place. It's very stable but not extremely outdated, has great security, always supports the newest technologies like Flatpak, Wayland, Pipewire, etc., has good Desktop spins and constantly innovates. The next Fedora KDE release will even completely drop support for X11, which is a good step because it forces developers to adopt Wayland. They also have pretty good immutable spins like Silverblue, Kinoite and others. Other cool distros like Nobara and uBlue are also built on top of Fedora.

Its not really proprietary. Developers get the code, and everyone that gets the binaries also gets the code. Thats GPL compliant.

To quote Software Freedom Conservancy:

For approximately twenty years, Red Hat (now a fully owned subsidiary of IBM) has experimented with building a business model for operating system deployment and distribution that looks, feels, and acts like a proprietary one, but nonetheless complies with the GPL and other standard copyleft terms.

To quote both of you “nevertheless complies with the GPL and other standard copyleft terms”.

Were you trying to prove his point?

As shocking as this might be, I think he's agreeing, and offering supplimentary proof

Obviously they comply with the GPL, otherwise they would get sued. But Red Hat acts exactly like a proprietary software company. That's what the quote is trying to say.

@Dehydrated but something something proprietary! waa!
/s

I know that it's a joke, but find me a distro that doesn't include any proprietary blobs.

@Dehydrated this is my pet peeve everytime i try to discuss anything about linux someone interrupts me about how SOME COMPONENT is proprietary
like yeah, the keyboard on the laptop is proprietary, so are all the ICs, come on...

All the hardware is proprietary. The CPU, the ME in the CPU, the chipset on the mainboard, the BIOS, the RAM and SSD controllers, the TPM and everything else. Even the damn battery controller hardware and software are proprietary. It really doesn't matter though.

@Dehydrated the car i drive to work is entirely proprietary!
but yeah, open source is awesome but not using something useful/good because of its license is just kinda shooting yourself in the foot IMO

It sucks a lot.

It's not that big of a deal

I mean we have a monolithic kernel, with every single line of code running as root, that contains proprietary garbage. Thats even worse than Windows if you ask me, where you can see the drivers processes, which means they are seperate processes.

I will soon compile my own kernel, because I dont really feel good with running such a bloated piece of bad code on my standard intel laptop.

You mean besides Fedora?

No, because Fedora DOES include proprietary blobs (for a good reason)

Really? Which ones?

Intel/AMD CPU microcode

Wait, you object to their feely-distributable firmware updates? Seriously? Without those, your CPU is vulnerable to exploits and known hacks.

Did you read my previous comment? I spscifically said:

No, because Fedora DOES include proprietary blobs (for a good reason)

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There used to be a Linux just called Red Hat Linux. It was run by Red Hat obviously but a community built up around it.

Fedora was literally created by RedHat and staffed to be the “community” distro. They did this so that they could be “corporate” with Red Hat Linux ( now called Red Hat Enterprise Linux ).

I find it funny when people say that Red Hat is going to try to take away the community in Fedora and use their corporate behaviour in RHEL as an example. They literally created them both. The whole point of Fedora is to be community driven.

Fedora is a lot like RHEL in most ways but absolutely not a competitor to it. More of a testing ground. This is all by design.

Where things went wrong for them is that somebody created a bug for bug clone of RHEL. The story was that the clone would be a “community” but that is bonkers because ( by definition ) the clone cannot deviate from RHEL. It cannot innovate. It cannot modify or contribute code ( not even fix bugs ). So, it was just a zero cost version of RHEL. The whole reason for creating Fedora was to prevent that.

Anyway, Red Hat likes Fedora and WANTS it to be “free” and anybody that understands the history knows why.

In fact, the problem is somewhat that Fedora is not allowed to get too corporate. You will notice that Fedora is one of the staunchest distros with regards to including potentially patented codecs and such for example.

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I'd hop to this in a heartbeat. I do enjoy pop os and I've been looking for a reason to go back to Fedora since I've been on openSUSE for a while.

That does look slick!

TIL cosmic is the name of the pop! DE

It’s not the name of it currently. It’s currently an alpha, and will be released with the next major release of popos, which is due in April. 

I use PopOS as my daily driver on my desktop. The tiling window management is simply the chef’s kiss.

I’m stoked for Cosmic DE, it’s awesome to see further community adoption of System76’s contribution to Linux.

Fucking awesome. I love pop os but I’d probably switch to this in a heartbeat. Ubuntu has such a huge community so you basically have access to every package out there, but I’d rather deal with fedora’s package manager and flat packs then ever think about dealing with snaps

No way pop os will ship with snaps. System76 devs have already said they prefer flatpak

Yeah Snaps (and performance too) are not really Ubuntus stopper problems (you can easily remove them). I mainly want Plasma 6 fast (as I am sure an en par Cosmic will need at least 2 years) so Kubuntu is not an option really. Also snappifying core packages like Firefox, where I am not sure how that affects the tab isolation capabilities, is a bit annoying.

But Ubuntu is pretty quick!

I still don’t understand the need of putting so much time and energy into DE #284838284. I have been using KDE for ages and if I don‘t like the looks of it, I change them. Other than that, 99% of my daily use of a linux is independent of any DE. I actually don’t even care what DE it is. Just give me a Terminal Emulator and a graphical desktop to run software.

Other than that, 99% of my daily use of a linux is independent of any DE. I actually don’t even care what DE it is. Just give me a Terminal Emulator and a graphical desktop to run software.

Do you realize how far you are from the average computer user? DEs and GUIs are very important for most people, and are one of the biggest "selling factors" for attracting new users.

You are right, but in the end there are so many good choices already. Reminds me of this: xkcd #927

I see your point, but things get more complicated than that, because there are different design choices in many DEs, and you can't simply change the design choices of an existing project. Some, like gnome, are particularly inflexible in that aspect, and won't add some features, even if there's a high user demand.

They like GNOME, obviously, but they also diverge quite a lot from its workflow (not to say to the better, I have only minimal GNOME experience and no Cosmic Epoch experience).

They want something with their native tiling out of the box, written entirely in Rust. And they are doing something really beneficial here, tbh unlike all the other projects that want to implement their own stuff.

I agree that we dont need more fragmentation, but Kwin and Mutter are both written in memory unsafe languages, and I have many memory safety errors in KDE.

For sure a polished KDE plasma 6 is more usable than their alpha, but

  • Rust attracts a ton of young developers
  • it saves a ton of mistakes leading to future bugs

So while I think I dont really like their type of Desktop (I like KDE but tbh I think I could also change to the GNOME style), I sure hope that KDE will switch to Rust more.

Problematic is that KDE is completely and entirely tied to Qt, which is C++ and C only pretty much. This makes KDE waaay to stubborn and I honestly dont think they will every change to Rust at all.

Budgie already thought of using Smithay / Cosmics compositor, but it wasnt ready (I think thats the reason). I think that was a mistake, but its a hard choice.

I think that's one thing about open source project : a lot of people work for free so they invest time on what they want and like. I don't know if it's what happens here, but I think in general it is not fair to ask for an optimal time management in open source communities.

I would be just like you if it weren't that with KDE dragging windows show visible lag and moving them from screen A to screen B causes a micro stutter, the PC lagging into a stop if I drag the window in between screens nonstop.

This doesn't happen in gnome. It really sucks, because like you, I prefer having the freedom of customising everything to my liking in KDE, but the window behaviour with an nvidia card is simply not acceptable. Until that changes, I'll stay in the dog house.

Oh, usually I‘m very sensitive with things like that, but have not noticed any lags/stutters and I‘m someone who immediately sees when the screen is below 120Hz. I use Garuda on my gaming pc and Debian Sid on my old Acer notebook, both with Nvidia GPU‘s. Hopefully they will release a fix soon. Did you already try nouveau? Or KDE 6?

Not yet, my system is kinda scuffed because I didn't want to lose the windows disk when I swapped, so I bought a nvme to usb adapter and installed Linux there. It's a prior m2 nvme so data corruption is not an issue, but on launch sometimes it fails, and kde sadly locks itself quite a lot, so I will stay on gnome (which I need to start with gdm from a separate tty, it fails, and restart the service. I know, really scuffed but it doesn't lock all the ttys at least) until I get a new mobo, which will come with a full system upgrade (and pass down my current system to my so, which uses windows, so yay) and will get an amd card, so I hope both problems fix themselves.

About this scuffed issue, I have checked journalctl and there's nothing apperent. It's just that sometimes it fails to launch everything at the speed the DE wants at startup, and restarting after a fail lets the system load everything. After the login it works flawlessly so w/e, laugh at my stupidity I guess.

About noveau, that's not really viable since its performance with games is pretty subpar and I like to play pretty demanding games.

Having Cosmic on Tumbleweed would be super awesome too

Is that matrix group for just fedora cosmic or fedora in general

Look at the group? Its "Fedora Cosmic" so yep, but for some reasons Fedora has two servers fedoraproject.org and fedora.im

This is pretty much my setup anyway. I run Pop Shell on top of Fedora and add dash to dock.

I'm just absolutely hooked on the autotiling built into pop shell.

If its an official spin all the better.

System76 developed its own Desktop, not a modified GNOME anymore. It looks similar, but it is a completely different and novel piece of software.

I can't wait. As long as they keep the autotiling feature working as well as it does now I'm down.