A desktop environment is more than a window manager. Can't remember installing a DE and not having a platform default text editor included as a core application.

So a DE is a OS? Or why would a desktop environment be responsible for platform defaults? Wouldn't that further fragment the whole Linux ecosystem, which is, imo, ultimately why it's not a great user experience?

The desktop environment plays a major role in application defaults. Can you imagine installing GNOME and getting Kate as the text editor, bundled with all of its KF5 libraries? Or installing KDE and getting GNOME Text Editor bundled with libadwaita and GNOME libraries? That's what you're asking us to do with COSMIC. Which is insane because it's not that difficult to make a text editor when you have a mature platform toolkit.

I mean I would expect an ecosystem not be so fragmented to be honest. Looking at DistroWatch it seems that for every Linux user there is a Linux distro, and seems to be going that way with DE's and text editors as well. You might think this is great - but it seems, to me at least, to have the opposite effect of no option having good quality, because nobody puts any effort together, but instead in siloes.

That's just not how software development works. The quality of the software depends on the people who own the development of that software, and the technologies they used to build that software. You're advocating that COSMIC should be a hodgepodge of random projects built with completely different frameworks with conflicting design philosophies. The end result of this is the exact opposite of good quality.

Seems they want a complete ecosystem they even have a screenshot utility. [0]

[0]https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-screenshot

Exactly. With VS Code in existence, I'm not sure why they're wasting their time. This isn't a huge need for folks right now.

And VSCode is just one of many that run on Linux. This feels like some sort of a unwritten rule that if you are making a new DE you also have to make a new text editor (ElementaryOS makes Code, KDE makes Kate, Gnome makes Gnome Text Editor) which honestly is a bit ridiculous to me.

it's not as ridiculous when you install your DE as a bundle of packages

Because: https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/18ike40/december_up...

VS Code is in an entirely separate category. This is a text editor, not an extensible code editor.