Really feels like a great year for the Linux desktop. Also with cosmic desktop having an alpha ready in a few months.
I can't wait for COSMIC, not so much because I'd use it, I quite like Budgie and so will need to do extensive test-driving to switch, but to just see System76 back onto the stage.
Pop! OS hasn't been updated in a couple years now, making it an absolute relic. As far as I know none of the Pop! OS apps have been either. I get why they're doing what they're doing but it's gotten to the point now where I, and many others I'd assume, are forgetting about them. Pop! OS was huge, now I hardly see it anywhere.
I don't use Pop! OS nor any other System76 products, but the nature of our community means any developments anywhere grow it. I would recommend Pop! OS to my friends as a first-distro, but I can't throw them two years into the past, no small amount of time for Linux, to give them a feel for how it is today. I currently refer them to Fedora, but Fedora is far from perfect for a total newcomer.
I think they will come back very quickly in 2024 and there will a big surge in popularity thanks to cosmic, specially if it's better than Gnome in ways people care about. Will be so much fun to see.
I don't think a newly released DE can get better than gnome or Kde. They're very stable and they both have amazing support as well as innumerable add-ons and tweaks.
Yeah they are awesome.
I tried cosmic in VM and they have a long way to go. Whatever they release in 2024 will be just barely usable, nothing more. Think of stability of KDE 4.0 with 1% of its features. I'm not saying that they are doing a bad job, quite the opposite. But what they have right now is only nearing the bare minimum, and the road ahead is long.
Ok yeah. Will try to not have high hopes.
It can't be better than Gnome or KDE but it will be very different for sure.
Pop! OS hasn't been updated in a couple years now, making it an absolute relic. As far as I know none of the Pop! OS apps have been either.
I think you are a bit misinformed on the situation. The core gnome-apps are struck on version 42.5 (which is ancient) but apps like Firefox, libre office, steam, etc. have been getting updates to keep them up to date. They might miss a sub version here or there but these are more or less upto date. The kernel and mesa graphic stack are also relatively up to date (not as modern as arch, fedora or opensuse tw but close enough) while the nvidia drivers are just as modern as on other distros(its their USP after all). Native packages of other 3rd party apps might old but you always have flatpak for those.
What I am trying to say is that pop os is still recommendable. I was using it until a few months ago when I changed devices leading to some distro hopping after which I have settled on universal blue's rebase of fedora silverblue. It is completely possible that if I had not switched from nvidia to amd, I would still be on pop os.
Their battery management daemon is nice, also the thing for switching between iGPU and dGPU.
Wow another budgie fan?! Hey there!!
Hi 🙌
Please test and report bugs! I still found some, and the relese is too close!
YAY!!! FINALLY! From the site:
"KWin’s “Active screen follows mouse” setting is now gone; now the active screen is always the one with the cursor on it, or the last one that was tapped with a touchscreen. This turns out to be much simpler and it’s what we think most people wanted anyway, hopefully alleviating complaints about OSDs and new windows opening on unexpected screens"
That was one of my most annoying issues, but learned to work around it. But on the rare occasion where I end up clicking and I don't realize that my mouse was on the the other screen, this will be a huge improvement. (especially when I have my Always on top windows for my job)
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