I was playing with COSMIC on Fedora since mid-May, or around 3 months before the first alpha. It’s been pretty solid for me though there are still bugs and missing features. I see why they’d want it for F42, but I’m just not sure if System76 can have Epoch 1 released in time for that. They still have Alpha 5 by the end of December, Alpha 6 planned for the end of January, and maybe 2 or 3 betas before release. So We could only have Epoch 1 (first full release) End of March (or even later), which I’d say would leave too little time for extensive testing to meet Fedora’s standards. Just because I’ve barely had issues on my fairly standard setup doesn’t mean that others haven’t been plagued by issues. So my take on it is I want it to happen, but I’m not sure if it can happen for F42, so maybe the contingency plan to delay to F43 might be a better idea, but ultimately only time will tell.
There would be no reason to delay anything regardless of it being beta or not. Fedora is always doing rolling release updates of software that lends well to that paradigm, and COSMIC is one of those. It’s not like GNOME or KDE where you have to carefully and meticulously manage 100 system libraries used by the whole ecosystem. System dependencies in the COSMIC ecosystem are virtually non-existent. If they really wanted to, they could just wait a few weeks to release the spin. But I don’t think there’s any reason to.
That would be completely wrong. See the Fedora Miracle Spin, for example. The project (miracle-wm) is still a work in progress, and yet Fedora already officially offers a Spin for it. What you’re describing would only be true if Fedora was switching to COSMIC as the official desktop for Fedora.
Regardless, the maintainers doing the Spin proposal have said they will only release the spin when COSMIC gets a full release. And COSMIC is very much Alpha quality software still.
Alpha 5 is actually releasing next week. I’d also disagree with “very alpha” as most of the beta milestone is finished now. Regardless, I don’t understand where the disconnect is. A spin can release at any time. Doesn’t matter when COSMIC Epoch 1 releases.
Really? I must not have heard about that, I’m sorry.
When I said “very alpha”, I meant that it still very much contained bugs and lacked features, as in it is still in Alpha.
When I’m talking about bugs, the main ones I’ve encountered are the ones I’ve seen on Brodie Robertson’s COSMIC streams.
The only unfixed bug I’ve encountered is terminal font rendering on COSMIC Terminal being very weird and different compared to all other terminals I’ve tried, specifically Alacritty, Kitty and Foot. I’ve seen a bug report about “Black bars about content” but nothing mentioned about how, for example, Hack size 14 on all those 3 terminals looks bigger than Hack size 18 on COSMIC Terminal.
I was wondering if that would be fixed with Alpha 5?
But other than that, I only had 1 bug until recently, that seemed to have been fixed with Alpha 4 (keybindings fell back to default ones for a few minutes of logins on cold boot; idk what caused it but it’s been gone since I went to Alpha 4.
So… is there a timeline for releases I could follow? I’ve been looking at the issue tracker for Epoch 1, and I’m even asking questions about and tracking individual features like Startup Applications and especially Pinned Workspaces.
Apologies but do you happen to know where I could find more info on Pinned Workspaces and maybe how to automatically implement them as replacement for Static Workspaces until that feature arrives in the Epoch 2 cycle?
Many thanks for reading and I would greatly appreciate a response.
And of course thanks for making what is now my daily driver Desktop.
I was playing with COSMIC on Fedora since mid-May, or around 3 months before the first alpha. It’s been pretty solid for me though there are still bugs and missing features. I see why they’d want it for F42, but I’m just not sure if System76 can have Epoch 1 released in time for that. They still have Alpha 5 by the end of December, Alpha 6 planned for the end of January, and maybe 2 or 3 betas before release. So We could only have Epoch 1 (first full release) End of March (or even later), which I’d say would leave too little time for extensive testing to meet Fedora’s standards. Just because I’ve barely had issues on my fairly standard setup doesn’t mean that others haven’t been plagued by issues. So my take on it is I want it to happen, but I’m not sure if it can happen for F42, so maybe the contingency plan to delay to F43 might be a better idea, but ultimately only time will tell.
There would be no reason to delay anything regardless of it being beta or not. Fedora is always doing rolling release updates of software that lends well to that paradigm, and COSMIC is one of those. It’s not like GNOME or KDE where you have to carefully and meticulously manage 100 system libraries used by the whole ecosystem. System dependencies in the COSMIC ecosystem are virtually non-existent. If they really wanted to, they could just wait a few weeks to release the spin. But I don’t think there’s any reason to.
The main reason is Fedora has standards for some stability that COSMIC simply can’t meet on time.
That would be completely wrong. See the Fedora Miracle Spin, for example. The project (
miracle-wm) is still a work in progress, and yet Fedora already officially offers a Spin for it. What you’re describing would only be true if Fedora was switching to COSMIC as the official desktop for Fedora.Regardless, the maintainers doing the Spin proposal have said they will only release the spin when COSMIC gets a full release. And COSMIC is very much Alpha quality software still.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FedoraCOSMIC
They expect it to “reach maturity” so likely when Beta 1 is released at the earliest.
Edit: I would expect the timeline to look as follows:
End of Jan: Alpha 5
End of Feb: Alpha 6
End of Mar: Alpha 7 or Beta 1
End of Apr: Beta 1 or Beta 2
End of May: Beta 2 or Beta 3 or Release
End of Jun: Beta 3 or Release
End of Jul: Release Epoch 1 or Alpha 1 for Epoch 2 (seeing as they said they want to release Epoch 2 in the same year i.e this year)
Alpha 5 is actually releasing next week. I’d also disagree with “very alpha” as most of the beta milestone is finished now. Regardless, I don’t understand where the disconnect is. A spin can release at any time. Doesn’t matter when COSMIC Epoch 1 releases.
Really? I must not have heard about that, I’m sorry.
When I said “very alpha”, I meant that it still very much contained bugs and lacked features, as in it is still in Alpha.
When I’m talking about bugs, the main ones I’ve encountered are the ones I’ve seen on Brodie Robertson’s COSMIC streams.
The only unfixed bug I’ve encountered is terminal font rendering on COSMIC Terminal being very weird and different compared to all other terminals I’ve tried, specifically Alacritty, Kitty and Foot. I’ve seen a bug report about “Black bars about content” but nothing mentioned about how, for example, Hack size 14 on all those 3 terminals looks bigger than Hack size 18 on COSMIC Terminal.
I was wondering if that would be fixed with Alpha 5?
But other than that, I only had 1 bug until recently, that seemed to have been fixed with Alpha 4 (keybindings fell back to default ones for a few minutes of logins on cold boot; idk what caused it but it’s been gone since I went to Alpha 4.
So… is there a timeline for releases I could follow? I’ve been looking at the issue tracker for Epoch 1, and I’m even asking questions about and tracking individual features like Startup Applications and especially Pinned Workspaces.
Apologies but do you happen to know where I could find more info on Pinned Workspaces and maybe how to automatically implement them as replacement for Static Workspaces until that feature arrives in the Epoch 2 cycle?
Many thanks for reading and I would greatly appreciate a response.
And of course thanks for making what is now my daily driver Desktop.
And Happy New Year!