How so? 22.04 is actively maintained and updated by Ubuntu, and is still the latest LTS release. On top of that, the most important packages in Pop!_OS are updated frequently, so we are on Mesa 24.0.3 and Linux 6.8.0. As for when COSMIC releases, you should read last month’s blog post.

Did you not read the blog update? That is exactly what the blog update covered… The user’s theme colors are applied to the Adwaita theme used by GTK4/libadwaita, and GTK3 theme support is provided by adw-gtk3.

Are you interested in contributing? You can find the source code for theme generation here and here.

All desktops use the Super key nowadays. Sway, i3, GNOME, Plasma, etc. are all using the Super key. Have been for years. The standard convention is that the Super key is reserved for system-level shortcuts handled by the window manager; and Alt key shortcuts are reserved for application-level shortcuts. Your desktop might have bound both Alt and Super because of legacy reasons.

You might be surprised how much disk space those GNOME Circle applications actually require, despite being dynamically linked to a lot of GTK/GNOME libraries. Unless they’re written in a scripting language, they’re much closer to a COSMIC application than you think.

• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.TwentyFortyEight 12 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Reversi 12 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.NetworkDisplays 13 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.eog 12 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Photos 29 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.Notes 12 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gedit 20 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/app.drey.Warp 22 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.flxzt.rnote 41 MB
• https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.news_flash.NewsFlash 42 MB

I don’t see the issue with an application having a static binary within the realm of 15-25 MB. Even if you had 100 applications installed, that’s only 2 GB of disk usage.

That is to show the icon theme feature.

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a cosmic-applets-community package which bundles third party applets, or the gradual inclusion of popular applets into cosmic-applets. Given that an applet would only become popular if there’s a lot of need for those use cases, then it would make sense to open a path to getting them mainlined.

Static linking is not an issue. Binaries may require more space on disk, but the benefit is that they are self-contained, portable, with excellent performance, and low memory usage. Binaries are compiled with LTO, so unused functions are stripped from the binary. What remains is highly optimized to that application’s use cases.

They commented on their video that it was their fault. There was never a packaging issue. The issue was that we pushed a systemd source package update to Launchpad, which silently didn’t build or publish the 32-bit systemd library packages, because Ubuntu had systemd on a blacklist for 32-bit package builds. We noticed this minutes after packages were published, and had it fixed within an hour later.

This didn’t actually affect any systems in the wild because apt held back the update until we had worked around the restriction on Launchpad (there was an invisible ceiling to the package version number). They were only affected during that time period because they manually entered that sentence from the prompt in a terminal. We stopped using Launchpad with 21.10, so all packages released since then are the same packages that are built and tested by our packaging server, and used by our QA team internally.

The drama and reputational damage that LTT caused was unnecessary. Especially given that they uploaded this video a week later, and never attempted to reach out. They still have yet to properly edit the video.

You are misunderstanding the data. It is not the number of users, but a percent of posts to ProtonDB, which only applies to PC gamers. There can be a disproportionately larger number of reports from those who need to spend time tweaking their system as opposed to using it, or that are particularly vocal about sharing their tweaks.

The total number of users playing games on Linux is rising each year. Pop!_OS was the first OS that a lot of people tried a few years ago, and so you’ll see a lot more diversity in choice now. People who are new to Linux, yet particularly heavily invested in it, tend to like to try out a lot of different distributions in the following years.

I’m defining it the same way that Mint and Ubuntu is here. Which is when they release a new version of their ISO. We are currently on 22.04.37. Release date January of 2024. There are substantial changes since the first ISO build of 22.04

It’s not stable in the Debian sense. We’ve always had rolling release updates for the system base; and people often complain about regressions in Linux, Pipewire, Mesa, and NVIDIA updates. I get them packaged shortly after they’re released. As long as they pass QA tests in the System76 hardware lab, they get released within a week.

I am still actively maintaining Pop!_OS. COSMIC has not changed that aspect of my job. Just within the last week I packaged Linux 6.6.8, Mesa 23.3.2, Just 1.22, Rust 1.75.0, and updated Popsicle’s dependencies to fix a bindgen build error with recent versions of Clang. We have a systemd update that was packaged today, and I’ll be doing another linux-firmware backport soon. So I don’t understand why you’d think it is stagnant. We’re even shipping Pipewire 1.0.0 by default, which Ubuntu hasn’t yet done in the latest version. People usually complain that we update too often.

Pop!_OS has released 37 versions based on Ubuntu Jammy, though. Soon to be 38.

There are new versions released every two or three weeks. I’m about to release Linux 6.6.8 with Mesa 23.3.2. We have Pipewire 1.0.0 and NVIDIA 545. ISOs are regularly rebuilt with our latest updates.

2022 was only a year and a half ago, and we ship the latest Linux kernel, firmware, Mesa libraries, NVIDIA drivers and libraries, Pipewire/Wireplumber, ZFS, Firefox, Alacritty, Lutris, Steam, and Rust. Since when did we start considering that to be “incredibly ancient”? The next LTS release is not yet available to base Pop!_OS upon, but we ship newer kernels and drivers than the latest version of Ubuntu.

This is already in progress. COSMIC applications are compatible with Redox OS.

You can start with the libcosmic repository, and the examples contained within. We’re going to work on revamping our design demo application soon, which will be a learning resource for COSMIC application development

In my experience, that has never been an issue with any Rust-based projects. It’s quite the opposite. 80% of time is spent completing the first 20% of the project, and then the remaining 80% is quickly finished as everything fits into place. Most of our time is spent in foundational work getting widgets created that we can use with our theme system, and then the actual implementation of the interface in the application is stupid easy.

What you describe is what I felt developing the GNOME extensions. There’s very little you can do to resolve issues that you encounter there.

COSMIC Edit is being developed by our manager through personal motivation; who also developed cosmic-text, so this is the perfect playground for simultaneously advanced cosmic-text, and developing useful real world software with it. The git diff view was not yet part of planned designs, but it took only a portion of a day to implement. It adds a useful test case for the cosmic-text library, and improved cosmic-text as a result.

We’re all paid a full time salary to work on COSMIC and Pop!_OS. Each person on the team is going to spend a full day writing software, regardless of what they’re working on, so concerns about burnout are somewhat silly. Burnout is typically caused by working overtime for extended periods of time. System76 has never required developers to work overtime to meet a deadline, and variety of workload can alleviate mental fatigue, so burnout is not a thing here.