corviraptor

i had to switch back to plasma because i need some functionality but i miss cosmic so much already mannnn its so nice!! i knew i would have to switch back at some point because its like. cosmic's first alpha release but man

tangentially related: the fact that on NixOS i can switch my whole desktop environment just by changing two lines of code without hunting down a bunch of leftover packages is insane, i don't know if i could ever daily drive anything else at this point, now that i'm familiar with Nix as a language it's saved me so many headaches

i had to switch back to plasma because i need some functionality but i miss cosmic so much already mannnn its so nice!! i knew i would have to switch back at some point because its like. cosmic's first alpha release but man

its insane that it feels more stable than plasma already

• i love how it looks. i'm not usually a rounded corners person, but COSMIC's apps are so easy on the eyes.
• this has to be the best tiling in any DE so far, right? the auto-tiling feels intuitive and has mostly sensible keybinds (i am not using shift + super + 1 to move a window to workspace 1, that's an almost entirely vertical key combination idk how they expect human hands to be able to accomplish such acts)
• games are actually running just as well on COSMIC or even better than Plasma, although Steam will spit and scream at you if you force it to tile (this is a problem with many tiling WMs tho iirc)
• this alpha release is already usable as a daily driver. i added nixos-cosmic to my flake inputs and replaced plasma with COSMIC just for fun expecting to switch back to plasma later but i'm considering keeping COSMIC even in this first alpha release state. i know if i switch back to plasma i'll really miss COSMIC's tiling.
• stacked windows in a tiling workspace make floating windows feel totally irrelevant besides modal windows. in Plasma i keep most main windows maximized because dealing with floating windows is a pain in the ass sometimes, but with stacked windows i have the advantage of being able to see all of the windows in the tabs, vs Plasma where i need to use the Overview for that.
• X11 is holding Plasma, GNOME, and the Linux desktop as a whole back. COSMIC is one of the first DEs that won't be burdened with supporting X's legacy code, and it's already exceeding the two big players in several ways. it really makes me think that once the Wayland protocol supports all of the accessibility features that X11 has and app developers don't have to target a protocol that's been unmaintained since the 80s, the "Year of the Linux Desktop" might actually happen. I think KDE especially will benefit from not having to support the X server, and I'm sure GNOME will improve a little faster probably.

there is a lot of stuff that i'm missing, though (which is to be expected for an alpha release)

• the screenshot utility just dumps the images directly into your Images or Documents folder, not into a Screenshots folder in there (i don't think this is configurable in the UI but i'll check later to see if there's a config file i can mess with). still better than Windows' screenshotting, though! i also thought it didnt support cropping but it does, the button icons on the bottom panel of the screenshot UI are just blank for me LOL

• while gaps between windows when tiling looks nice, i wish if there were only one active window or window stack in the workspace it'd just automatically maximize and fill the screen. especially with brighter desktop backgrounds the gaps at the screen edges just bother me.

• rebinding COSMIC's hotkeys through the settings GUI appears to be unfinished (which is fine, it's in alpha) because it's just a text field and my preferences for Compose and Alternate Characters keys don't carry over between desktop sessions.

• i miss the GNOME-style overview quite a bit. the "just hit the super key to see and do Everything" thing is pretty cool, and I'm missing it here. COSMIC Launcher is pretty good even if its not as powerful as KRunner yet, but for workspaces where i have to use floating windows like Steam it would be nice to be able to see all of the windows in that workspace at once with a single key combination.

its insane that it feels more stable than plasma already