System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by fnl on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @05:01PM (#26799247)

I've recently switched from my usual MBP upgrade to System 76 (Oryx Pro). While yes, Apple's walled garden does feel like a Rolls Royce compared to anything, the price tag difference this time was just way too step for me to keep buying a new Mac: It was basically 2x or more for roughly similar hardware, if not slightly worse on the MBP side. Overall, using Pop_OS! with its specialized GNOME3 setup has been a bliss, and I must say I had expected a far more difficult migration. In a few days I was happily up and running with my new machine. And then, there is the support - Apple's support outside of visiting a Genius Bar is basically non-existent. System76 has diligently helped me even set up external hardware that wasn't theirs! Long story short, very much looking forward to COSMIC and continuing this experience. The only thing I do miss a lot is my iTerm2... :)

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by skrtskrt on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @06:11PM (#26800014)

iTerm2 is a beauty, is there a closest equivalent on Linux?

There seem to be 25 popular choices especially now with the GPU-accelerated ones. Tried a few of the classics like Termite and they all seemed painfully outdated and crappy compared to iTerm.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by favadi on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @09:09PM (#26801816)

I don’t get the love for iTerm2. I tried it before and see nothing appealing for me over the built in Terminap.app. And it seems to be slower too.

On Linux, I just use whatever ship with the distro Gnome Terminal, Konsole... and they work fine.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by khazhoux on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:23AM (#26804397)

On iTerm2 my windows are full-screen, black background, zero border or window decorations. I cycle between windows with cmd-` it switches instantly from one full-screen terminal to the next. It's what to me a console should be.

Every terminal app I've tried on Windows or Linux insists on having a goddamn window border. I don't want even a single pixel of border.

And yes, this is enough to make me a die-hard iTerm2 user.

(users care about little things more than developers sometimes realize)

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by aembleton on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @06:39AM (#26805232)

If you want to make it Full Screen with no menu or window decorations, then in Gnome you can press F11 in, then go to View > Untick Show Menubar

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by ajosh on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @12:09PM (#26809063)

In KDE, in addition to being able to do this full screen, you can have regular windows without any chrome if you want. You just right click on the window title bar and change settings. You can easily set a rule to do this as well if you'd like.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by red_trumpet on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @05:19AM (#26804721)

Xubuntu user here: If I open my xfce4-terminal in fullscreen (F11), there is no border and I can cycle between all open terminal windows with Super+Tab. I can also disable the border in windowed mode, though that also removes the title bar.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by leephillips on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @08:14AM (#26806020)

I use dwm and of the handful of terminal emulator's I've used, none have a border or window decorations. So I don't think they "insist" on having borders.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by Shorel on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @02:45PM (#26811293)

I use Kitty and it offers that feature, while at the same time feels extremely fast.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by swinglock on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:23PM (#26812540)

That's Windows Terminal.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by Corrado on Thursday April 15, 2021 @05:09AM (#26818007)

I really love the fact that I can change profiles depending on CLI prompts. So, when I SSH into a server the background color of my terminal changes to blue. When I change to root but background changes to white. This, along with banner support, helps me keep track of where I am and what user I'm currently using.

This functionality may be available in other terms, but iTerm just seems to nail pretty much everything in one package. I just wish it was available for Linux.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by ndesaulniers on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:31AM (#26804434)

Most terminal emulators are missing support for splits; moving from iTerm2 was painful for me. Been using terminator and kitty, but I still miss iTerm2 5 years later.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by RMPR on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @07:41AM (#26805690)

Been using a WM and Alacritty for quite some time now, but iirc Tilix supports splits.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by inDigiNeous on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @02:22AM (#26803610)

I had the same experience, Apples Terminal.app is a really beautifully built terminal. But newer versions of iTerm2 proved me over, it finally felt as fast or faster than Terminal.app.

What initially invited me to test iTerm2 was the one button quake style scroll-down terminal, but I stayed for the better tab management and much more customizable options.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by t00ny on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @10:05PM (#26802160)

Same here all my colleagues use it, but I don't see any advantages except maybe for the built-in split view.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by skrtskrt on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @11:34PM (#26802658)

The search for text -> tab to highlight more of a search result -> the highlighted text is already copied to the clipboard automatically

workflow was such a game changer for me, it’s so snappy.

Could probably be configured on other terminals?

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by techn00 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @02:02AM (#26803465)

Konsole has all of that

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by jwatt on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @07:33AM (#26805623)

One thing that irks me about Konsole is that it doesn't rewrap the scrollback when the window is resized. Apparently that will be fixed in Konsole 21.04 though:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196998

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by girvo on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @02:38AM (#26803719)

There are some useful features (tmux integration), but honestly I agree. I've moved back to Terminal.app entirely myself; though honestly I mostly live in the Terminal panel in VSCode these days anyway

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by dsego on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @06:32PM (#26800274)

There is tilix, not sure how close it comes though. https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by joelthelion on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @06:21PM (#26800132)

Gnome terminal is really good.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by skrtskrt on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @06:34PM (#26800307)

On Pop OS I just stuck with gnome-terminal, it was plenty good if not quite as slick as iterm2.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by instb3at on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @07:21PM (#26800827)

Try installing tilix and 'Oh-my-zsh'. I did that to my desktop and couldn't be any happier.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by monopoledance on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:12AM (#26804350)

Or if you are up for something new, try fish, which has a nice out of the box experience and so many nice features. Like 'alt + h' for manpage of the command you are working on, or 'alt + s' to toggle sudo. Multi-line editing is a bliss too. The only thing I dearly miss is cmd <<< "string".

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by buu700 on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @10:10PM (#26802195)

I originally discovered and started using iTerm2 because I was looking for an OS X equivalent to Yakuake, which is pretty much the same thing as Konsole but with a dropdown/Quake-like UI.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by theta_d on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @09:09AM (#26806548)

Try Terminator. If you just want the ability to do window splits easily it works pretty well. Though I do miss the tmux integration from iTerm2.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by k_bx on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @09:20AM (#26806668)

My solution is tmux. I’m using white status line with C-z prefix on localhost, and green status line with prefix M-z on servers. This way I can reuse my finger memory, be equally productive on macOS, local Linux, remote Linux.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by mxschumacher on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @06:18PM (#26800088)

I use iterm at work and a combination of alacritty, fish and i3-wm (so I don't open multiple tabs but just several terminal windows) on my personal machine, I'm really happy with that setup.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by cultofmetatron on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @03:37PM (#26811991)

I'm on osx but I switched to kitty a year ago.

Its GPU accelerated and super fast. hard to go back to term after feeling how snappy it is. Plus its available on linux as well!

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by brianzelip on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @05:19AM (#26804724)

I switched from iTerm2 to Hyper, which has been great and is cross platform.

https://hyper.is/

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by notamy on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @07:02AM (#26805398)

How is it with lots of text being displayed? VSC's terminal is unbearably laggy for me when there's more than like 10% of the terminal covered in text, is this similar?

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by brianzelip on Thursday April 15, 2021 @09:50AM (#26820481)

I think I know what you mean wrt Code's terminal. I haven't experienced buggyness in Hyper. Give it a try!

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by iimblack on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @12:03AM (#26802817)

I like kitty

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by human301 on Friday April 16, 2021 @09:53AM (#26833873)

That's exactly what I did a week ago (with a Fusion 15, but System76 was a serious competitor). It took a day to customize the thing to my heavily-apple-influenced habits and it was a joy to find out I could actually feel _pleasure_ using the machine, something I had forgotten 3 or 4 macOS updates ago.

Now, do we need another DE? Dunno, wouldn't make the top of my wishlist. I realize the good I'm getting comes much more from intelligent choices of sensible defaults rather than specific features. It's removing - or, if you prefer amend - the noise (apps/utils/extensions/clutterware) the key here, even more so for the open-source software ocean of half-baked solutions. Yes, that's what distributions are for but unfortunately even the biggest struggle to keep a steady route (think Ubuntu and Unity, for instance) and often fall for the latest shining tech everybody wants (hint: no, there's a whole lot of people who'd better like a stable, predictable, coherent environment to a new set of flashy icons and widget palettes).

And if you wonder what would make the top of my whishlist, it's solid a development environment (again, a-la macOS but it's actually a-la OpenStep and NextStep, where it all started) enforcing good defaults at the OS level, letting people/companies build quality apps easily and preventing them to disrupt/reinvent existing OS patterns/paradigms (without a reason). Or we could keep on downloading browsers-disguised-as-applications and call it a day.

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Re:System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment by gowld on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @01:20AM (#26803214)

There is no configuration where MBP and Oryx Pro have "roughly similar hardware". They are completely different designs.

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