Tech Over Tea - Bringing A COSMIC Spin To Fedora Linux | Ryan Brue

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

You're probably by now aware of the COSMIC desktop, you may also know about the Fedora COSMIC spin being worked on, well Ryan Brue here is the maintainer of that to be Fedora COSMIC spin, on the show to talk about why the project is happening. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== Fedora Website: https://fedoraproject.org/ Github: https://github.com/ryanabx Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@ryanabx ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson. And today we are talking to Ryan Brew, the maintainer of the soon to exist Fedora Cosmic Spin. If, just correct me if I'm wrong, it's supposed to be a thing if all things go well with Fedora 42.

Yes, that's the plan, assuming everything falls into place and things are currently going pretty well. I assume it'll also depend on whether Cosmic actually releases on schedule. But yeah, that's the plan. OK, so I guess just do a bit of a brief background on who you are and, I guess guess why you wanted to do this. All right.

So I started my Linux journey at the end of 2023, so I'm actually pretty new to Linux overall. Okay, sure. Yeah, it's coming from not using it to doing the spin thing. Making a spin. Yeah. Yeah. I recall in your video about

the spin, you talked about like how I talked about it was my first time doing a mailing list and all that. That was just like a couple months into using Linux overall. So I just kind of jumped in. But I

was in college at the time and I I'd use Linux sometimes for like classes, but never really daily drove it or put it on bare metal. So it was kind of just a impulsive decision. I was like, well, I'm going to take my entire laptop and switch it over to Linux. I wasn't even going to dual boot. I just wanted to switch to Linux entirely. I was actually kind of convinced to do that by some contributors to the Godot engine, because back then I was doing contributions to their project.

And I saw a bunch of people talking about Linux. I was like, hey, what distro would you guys recommend? What spin or what desktop environment? And most of them there were like, definitely choose Fedora. When I told them the laptop I had, I had a newer gaming laptop at the time. And they're like, yeah, for the newest packages and everything, you want to go Fedora.

And they said, no Mercadie either is fine and I started out on Gnome actually okay for the longest time I was on Gnome and I think I've just kind of switched around desktop environments ever since I don't really stick on one for a whole long time, but later on, I kind of got interested in the Rust programming language, and that became my language for basically everything I developed. And then I found out later that somebody was developing a Rust-based desktop environment. So I was like, all right, I'm going to jump in on that. And that was back when it cost me.

Yeah, you would have just been getting into Linux. I probably ran about when they first started talking about it, I think. Yeah, I think it was in development for a long time. But nobody really talked about it until the beginning of 2024, I'd say. So around that time, I installed it on my machine, and everything kind of sucked with it,

going to be honest. Back then, it was very bare bones, and I instantly found a lot of bugs. I wasn't able to connect to my school's network. That was one of my first bug reports. I was like, yeah, I can't connect to enterprise networks for whatever reason. The panels were weird. I really hated the fact that whenever you set the panel

to really small, the app icons were just really miniscule and the dots were almost the same size. So eventually, those issues kind of irked me enough to where I started contributing. And so one of the first things I tried to tackle was the enterprise Wi-Fi thing. And that was the only thing I tackled that I never really finished.

So the app tray problem, though, I've kind of focused on the app tray for a long time. And so I also implemented the touch pad gestures for like switching workspaces. That was one of my favorite contributions because that made me have to learn Rust in a way I'd never learned support, that was the last thing I contributed that's actually been merged significantly. I have some outgoing PRs that I haven't really had time to revisit for a while. But yeah, so I started contributing there.

And since I was on Fedora and they didn't have any cosmic support at all, I was using an unofficial like silver blue based image by Draculax. Yep. Yeah. And that was the yeah that was the first image I used and I was already kind of a fan of the image based operating system so I just rebased to it and I was like wow this is easy. But I found out that it was out of date whenever I tried rebased to it and I was like, wow, this is easy. But I found out that it was out of date whenever I tried switching over to it when boot at first. So I was like, OK, time to time to try and update this.

It was only a couple of months old, but they've been working on cosmic nonstop. But yeah, I think you actually found the forum post where I talked about that for the first time. Somebody was like... Yeah, I probably did. I probably mentioned it up a lot. I don't have the link at hand right now, but usually when I talk about something like

this, I'll try to dig back as far as I can get. If someone mentions a thing, I'm like, okay, where can I find that link? And usually that gets me back as early as I need to be. Or, you know, if it's a forum, sometimes you can see post history, things like that, and you can go back through earlier things people have said. So at the time, right now, you are the maintainer of the Fedora Copper Cosmic Package. Was there any package for cosmic at the time or was it just that? No. Okay.

Yeah, there was not. And honestly making the packages was maybe one of the most frustrating experiences in Linux I've ever had but it was very rewarding once I had that because when we had the original like silver blue images we were just compiling cosmic from source every time we would do the image build. And so I had it running daily on a GitHub action,

but it was taking like four hours or so just to build everything in GitHub. And so about the time that I proposed making the SIG, which was another thing I did around that time because people were showing interest and I was like I kind of want to be the change that I want to see in the world and actually get involved with that. So I made the proposal, got approval, made my matrix room and a couple people joined including Neil at the time. But he was just kind of generally interested in bringing up

new spins. I think he was working on the Fedora Miracle spin like a little bit later on as well. And he gave a lot of great advice for bringing up a spin. So he's been kind of my consultant throughout the whole thing. But the first step, of course, was to build packages. So, yeah, that was...

And I was still in school at that time. So whenever I was not working on school stuff, I was just working on RPM packages. It took about... Oh, sorry, go on. No, go on, go on. Okay, so, sorry, if I'm rambling, just stop. No, no, go, it's fine, it's fine. I was just gonna ask you about the process

of making packages, but you might have gotten to that anyway. Yeah, so it depends on your distribution, but RPM packages- Right, specifically for Fedora, yeah. Yeah, so my first set of packages did not conform to the Fedora guidelines at all. It was very far from it. But in a basic sense, all you need to set up

is some metadata, like version, source URL for repository, and some build instructions and installation instructions. And then one thing that RPM has different from some other package managers is you have to actually specify which files are owned by the package. So you have to go in and find every artifact from your build where it's installed

and list that in like a file section. So that's something that's kind of unique to that that the Debian packages didn't have. So oftentimes I was referencing the Debian packages that PopOS was trying to put out. But that was one of the things I couldn't just bring over. But overall it was fine. It wasn't too hard. The hard part was testing them after the fact. It wasn't too hard. The hard part was testing them after the fact. Right. So I've talked a bit about the Fedora Copper before and it's kind of... It's not exactly the same. It's kind of like Fedora's AUR, but it's not exactly the same

because my understanding is also build infrastructure as well as a way to access these packages. a way to access these packages? Yes, it is. It provides building, posting, and even in my, like... It even facilitated Fedora review. Like, I was able to just take the artifacts from there and put them into my review request. So it was nice to have that off my computer on a centralized resource.

I don't think I would have gotten this far if I had run it on my own computer. And especially... You were saying four hours on GitHub. So, you know, yeah, building that would be a little rough. It would be a chore. And also it was nice to have that set up to where I can just click Rebuild All Packages. And for a while I just did that every day. Nowadays I have a script that actually checks

whether the version has changed between the upstream. So I'm not building as many packages at once. But that's more of a recent thing. For almost a year, I was just going in every day and clicking Rebuild All Packages Manually. That is something that I've really enjoyed doing is building all this automation around the entire process. I have the packages automated.

Whenever there's a update in the Fedora repos, most of it is automated whenever there's a update in the Fedora repos. Most of it is automated. I just build in a separate copper for tag packages and then reference the latest build, download it, and then push it to the official Fedora repos and have it build there. And that's all like a one page Rust program. So it's nice.

It's fun to have it all automated, but it means that over time I can kind of forget what I had automated in the first place. If you ask me to go back and reference how I did everything, I'd have to look through the code and be like, oh yeah, that's what I did there. That's what I did there. But yeah, it's a. Yeah, I have a number of a number of things in my life that are very much the same as that where it's like, oh, I wrote this.

I wrote this like, you know, 500 line Python thing a couple of years ago. And it's like, how does this work again? What did like, I want to go and add some like new thing to like, okay, now, after that point, it's kind of like looking at someone else's code, especially if you are improving. It's like, why did you write it like this? What? What is? What is this? Yeah. Yeah. And after a while, you've learned so much about refining processes that you come back and you're like, man, I was terrible at this. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I look at some of that Rust code from when I tried to first automate my package building. And I was like, no. Short of rewriting it, I'm just going to leave it as it is. If it's doing its thing and it's not broken, I don't want to touch it again. Mm-hmm. So what is it that we got?

Sorry, the next question. Can we can we cut for a second? My monitor is my second monitor is frozen and I'm just going to unplug it. I've been trying to to open Firefox and I was I was like, why is it not working? And then I move my mouse over to my other Firefox and I was like, why is it not working? And then I moved my mouse over to my other monitor and I'm like, wait, it's not showing up there. Oh, great. Now this monitor is frozen.

Are we gonna have to like pause? I'm just gonna pause for just a second. Let me unplug all this stuff. It's Nvidia. I swear to god okay man why did I do that okay and here I am thinking that Katie is stable so this So this cable connects to that monitor. So it should be working, but now it's just frozen. Oh. Okay, you mind if I reboot my computer real quick?

Go right ahead. I'll be right back. Okay, I'm back. Sorry about that. No, no, it's all good. Okay, so we're talking about, what was it, like packaging? Yeah, the process of getting the packages built and I went on a tangent about my automations. That's more of the modern day stuff. But yeah, so making the packages, it took me about a week of just solid.

Every time I got home from school, I was just working on the packages. And I would document my progress in the SIG chat, but there wasn't very many people there at the start. So it was mainly just for my own reference and for anybody who was kind of interested in that. But yeah, once I got the copper packages up, I started building them daily.

And I set up a, I switched over my atomic image to using those copper packages. And actually, around that time, Jorge Castro from Universal Blue was like, hey, I've seen what you've done with the cosmic atomic image. Would you like to move that over to Universal Blue? And I was like, sure. I thought that was really cool, and it'd

be nice to collaborate in that way. So now my original atomic image is now part of Universal Blue. That's been maintained over there for a while. But I think later on in the future, once the actual atomic image comes out, we're going to just deprecate that image. But yeah. It's been talked about that maybe we

might want to make like a, what's it called, a bluefin like Bluefin-like experience for uh, for Cosmic. So uh, that may happen in the future, but I don't know. Depends on if there's interest. So what is it about, obviously you were saying that like you liked the the fact that it was a Rust desktop, the Rust desktop coming up, but like what is it about Cosmic that drew you to it besides that? Because you know, you could make a Rust desktop, it could be garbage and no one ever wants to touch it. Is there anything about what the desktop was doing at the time, their vision for the desktop, or anything like that that made you want to stick around with it?

I think kind of the silliest thing that I was really interested in was the panel customization. I liked that no matter who I saw using Cosmic, they all had different panel configurations and that seemed to be something that was heavily prioritized was customization. And I know that like KDE Plasma has customization, but it's kind of hard to access. I mean, there's a lot of settings. And being able to customize your setup quickly is kind of a thing I like to do. I mean, I switch desktop environments all the time.

I switch configurations all the time. So I like that Cosmic was aiming to be able to provide all those customization things quickly and easily. So that was, I guess, one of the other things other than it being Rust. But I'm going to be honest, I'm very much a Rust shill. So that was kind of my primary thing was like,

I like that they're building up the desktop Linux stack in Rust. Because we have the desktop Linux stack in Rust, because we have the Rust kernel stuff going on. We have more of that in the lower level, but there wasn't a lot in the graphical range of things. Like they're building Cosmic Comp, which is set to be one of my favorite compositors once they iron out some more issues.

And just Iced in general is a really good graphics stack. And for a while, I was using that for some of my personal projects that never really saw the light of day. But I don't know. I just like Rust. And it was fun to contribute to and felt nice to be a part of that.

I haven't really been able to contribute that much recently just because after college, I got a day job. And every time I come home, I'm just kind of tired. And I'm like, OK, what can I maintain that I've built and haven't really thought about doing any new things? Yeah, I know you say that a lot in your videos that open source contributors Oftentimes if they're not they're not working on it full-time then You're losing out on a lot of people who could contribute. Yeah, there's a lot of people who

you know would really like to work in open source, but just That like it's just not the work there. You just don't have that many open positions and the ones that are open, there are people that are very experienced to fill them. It's not like you're getting, it's a bit different from trying to get a job at some big tech company like Google

where there's thousands of employees. It's a different problem where there's not many people people but everyone who's trying to get it is very skilled and Yeah, because it's like you're getting it less pay working it, you know You know getting contract work at KDEV or doing work at system 76 It's not gonna be like that top-end developer pay the people who want it are very dedicated to wanting to work in this space. Yeah, it's a high skill ceiling just because everybody's everybody who does open source, I imagine would love to do that. I mean, I'd love to do it. I know that in in like the

late spring when I was graduating from college, actually did reach out to System 76. And I was like, hey, you guys have any job openings ever? Just let me know. I don't think since then they've had a software engineer opening, which it just kind of shows that they have to kind of remain small because they're working on something that's free with the Cosmic Desktop. And it always amazed me in general,

just how they end up turning a profit. I know it's all in their hardware, but it's very awesome that they actually dedicate time to something that's completely free with the Cosmic Desktop. I know they're alive. I see people talk about, sorry about that. I see people talking about Cosmic being, you know, developed by

System 76, it's developed by a company, but they don't realistically have that many paid engineers working on it. I think it's like, I think it's like four or five, like, it's really not that many people. Yeah, it's Michael, Ashley, Jeremy, Victoria, honestly, that might just be it. It might just be those four. But yeah, that very small amount of people and they're able to build an entire desktop in just a couple of years. Granted, they've had external contributors, but it's one of those things where it's 90%

them. Yeah, yeah, cool. Like every project is going to have external contributors, but you've seen, if you go to like any big GitHub project, you're going to see the person who started the project, and it's like 10,000 commits, second place, 500. It's like there's all you know, with this massive drop off and pretty much everything. There are very few projects that have active contribution from more than, you know, even more than one person, but sometimes you'll see a project be handed off like W.O. Roots, which got handed off from Drew Devolt to Simon Sir. Simon, yeah. Like, Gnome, for example, or KD is a massive exception,

where you have lots and lots of active contributors yeah, yeah, and I mean I could nerd out about KD as well because I think it's my Second favorite desktop behind cosmic. It's definitely my favorite stable desktop and it's actually the one I daily drive most the time because as a working man, I can't really tinker with a semi working desktop most of the time. But, you know, once Cosmic is fully stable, I'm going over there just to like dog food because I need to be sure that any bugs I see there, I can resolve on the fedora end. Do you have a secondary machine that you run Cosmic on or?

I do. Yeah, I have a like an old two and one that you run Cosmic on? I do, yeah. I have an old 2-in-1 that I run Cosmic on. I sometimes will run Cosmic on my NVIDIA machines to varying degrees of success. I think over even the past year, year and a couple months that I've been on Linux, I've seen the NVIDIA support just go from like almost nothing on Wayland to basically fully supported. And it's really cool to see. I know that- You joined at a really good time because you joined at like the tail end of things being bad. Like just as a video started actually caring about doing things on Linux. Absolutely. How long have you been using Linux for?

I want to say about four or five years. Absolutely. How long have you been using Linux for? I want to say about four or five years. And are you still in college or you graduated now? I graduated. Yeah, I'm not doing YouTube full-time, but like pretty much full-time. I still have a second job, but how long that sticks around, we'll see. We'll see what I feel like getting rid of it. For right now, it's not that big of a deal it's a bit of extra money yeah yeah it's exciting to uh think about going to youtube full time though uh I bet um it's definitely weird yeah um my my my parents are always like hey when are you gonna get a job like let's let's not talk about that. Yeah, you're like, this is my job. I mean, yeah.

I remember there was a time when I did YouTube back in high school, but I could never have called that a job. I got very into a mobile game called Geometry Dash. I don't know if you've heard of it. Yes, I've heard of Geometry Dash. Yeah, I was big in their community. I was actually the the owner of their forums. I was I was what they called a moderator, which is somebody who can like send levels directly to the game's creator. Yeah, after a while, I just got kind of bored of it. And I kind of

ghosted that entire community. I feel feel kind of bad about that. But like, of ghosted that entire community. I feel kind of bad about that, but like... Okay, sure. It's always fun when I bring people on and it's just, I get some random lore that wouldn't be obvious from what they do now. Yeah. It's like, it's very different. Like, and the only difference between my username now and in Geometry Dash

is I added an X to the end. I was Ryan AB. So if somebody who plays geometry dash happened to see this, then they'll be like, oh, that's the guy whose levels I've been playing. I used to be in the top 100 creators in the game, but yeah, that ship has sailed. Just as like a random side example,

last week I had the developer of... I don't know if you know about this project, it's a very fun project, Buttplug.io. It is an open source library for controlling buttplugs and other sex toys. The guy who makes it is an ex Mozilla developer. And was there at Mozilla when they were doing servo. Doing servo, doing a Firefox OS, worked on Second Life at one point. Like, it was fun to just get these like, random bits of lore from people.

Yeah, there's one thing I know about like open source. It's,, you get all kinds of people it's it's really cool to see though it's like a It's it's nice that we all treat each other with respect, you know you know regardless of Any sort of sorry now my camera fix your camera. It's fine Yes Any sort of sorry. No my camera fix your camera. It's fine Cameras weird well, uh, that's good that that happened then because I actually didn't know where I was going with that So what are your thoughts on? Cosmic in the state it's currently in because I you know

I've been going back to my streams every You know a couple of weeks every month when the new alphas come out and things have been getting better. There have been new weird esoteric bugs, but what I've noticed is going from the early alphas to where we are now, it's getting harder and harder to find the bugs because early on you could find some real simple ones that just, you know, you would run into if you were just casually using Cosmic.

Now it's becoming a lot of things where you have to intentionally do something stupid for something to appear, which makes sense, right? Because the developer who's working on it, they're going to test it in a way that they assume someone is going to use it. it in a way that they assume someone is going to use it. And if you do something the developer doesn't even think that you can do, it's very possible there's a bug there. Um, like, uh, one of the things that I reported the other week is, I think someone else had already reported it, but doesn't matter. Um, if you opened up that side menu that had the, um, like the icon settings, if you didn't click in the, in the settings menu, if you didn't, in the settings menu,

if you didn't close that and then clicked on an option in the sidebar to go to another part of the settings, that window would stay open and would just sit over something else. They expect you to close it first and then go to it. But there's just things like that. I think it's when you press super X, if you drag a window, the desktop just crashes, which is fun. Yeah, I mean, I definitely fall into that trap of

when I have my workflow on a certain desktop environment, I don't switch from it. And I think as Cosmic was being brought up since I was using in its earliest phase, I have a very specific workflow when it comes to Cosmic that is basically bug free. There was that AMD freezing bug, though, that caught me. If you maximize the window, the whole thing will just freeze and that's unfortunately still a problem I've had people coming to me like oh how do I fix that there's a environment variable to disable direct

scan out which is yeah what I've pointed people to cosmic underscore disable underscore direct underscore scan out equals one. Yeah. You want to set. Mm-hmm. Yep. I think it's on the ArchWiki, if I recall correctly. Maybe. The ArchWiki is a great resource, I swear. Even as a Fedora user, I use ArchWiki all the time.

Yeah, that's one of the things I heavily respect about Arch is that everybody's put together this huge knowledge base of like, oh, you have this problem, do this. Most of the time it'll work across distros with some modifications. If it requires you to install a AUR package, you might have to look for a copper, if it's an official Fedora repoos. But yeah. But what you're saying about workflow, like that's the reason why I do the streams. It's so I can have, you know, a bunch of people telling me like, hey, try this out, see what happens and just a bunch of different workflows all coming together or just people who, you know, enjoy breaking things.

They want to, they came across a bug themselves or they limit tested something and, you know, want to show that it's actually a bug themselves or they limit tested something and you know want to show that it's actually a bug. Just getting all those voices together to try to work out what the problems are like that's how you can actually make things improve because you can write tests and you can test things yourself but unless you know what bugs you're looking for it's going to be hard to find the bugs. Right yeah and so bringing those to the developers who, you know, they have their workflows, they don't know what's going on, that's definitely caused a rapid shift in the quality of Cosmic, especially like once the alpha

started coming out. I do appreciate a lot of other people have like, sorry, I do appreciate a lot of other people who also started like reporting bugs as well. Cause I remember like early on with the alphas You would see like 10 bug reports in a broke from me There'd be nothing else there from a lot of other people but it seems like as the alphas have been progressing There's been a lot more people involved in like not even just like trying to break it, but just trying out cosmic

yeah, yeah, it showed people that it's in a state where they're ready to at least present it to power users and I I don't know when the beta is gonna be but I imagine that'll also bring up a lot more bugs there'll be people who expect full release quality at that point and they'll go in and find some bugs and Honestly, I think that's a great way Forget about it. I lost my train of thought. My understanding is, Carl seems to think... I think he was saying like March full release, which is so insanely aggressive.

I don't buy it. No. Sorry, Carl. And I know that they've pushed deadlines back before. So I imagine they'll probably do something like that again. I know that there have been people asking in the in the Pop OS chat, like, when is the first beta coming out? They're like, well, there will at least be an Alpha 6.

But at this point, once we have Alpha 6, it's already February. So that March timeline is looking not existent. least be in Alpha 6, but at this point, once we have Alpha 6, it's already February, so that March timeline is looking non-existent at this point. And there's no way they're doing just a single Beta. There will be at least a Beta 2. Oh yeah, and that does make me kind of worry a little bit for the Fedora spin, but I noted in the change proposal that I'd still like to consider moving forward, even with it being in beta, potentially.

But we'll have to see how that goes. I don't think anybody would mind if we updated to stable as soon as that came out in Fedora 42. So we could release initially with beta and then maybe provide an upgrade there. Assuming beta is stable enough for the install and the initial setup and all that. Right. Because you made another good point there about beta where people are going to assume it's stable, so there's going to be a lot more people that try it.

And with more people trying it, that's going to be more weird setups to people using weird use cases people have. And yeah, like, um, one of the things I ran across was really dumb is you can in the, in the panel settings, you can drag the, I don't, I don't, maybe they're fixed now. You could drag the panel icons out of the window and they just were, they're just gone. They were still in the panel, but, uh, they wouldn't come back until you reloaded it or because um also the the panel um the panel applet is a file manager i reported this bug this is a fun one yeah so if you drag it if you drag an applet into your, it tries to download the desktop file connected to the applet. Yeah, that is something I've... I remember for a long time they were working on drag and drop.

That's like a huge feature that took them months. I imagine there's a whole slew of bugs with it. Yeah, the desktop is a drop target. Yeah, desktop's a drop target. App tray is a drop target. Yeah, desktop's a drop target, app tray is a drop target. Obviously the applet settings are as well. I'm trying to think if there are any other drop targets in Cosmic that I know of. Well, you know what's another drop target? I mean Cosmic files, but what? The media player.

You can't drop things in the media player. Interesting. Yeah. That was another thing. Whenever Alpha 5 came out and Jeremy was like, cosmic player is ready to be packaged, I was like, I don't know. It doesn't look like it's ready yet. It builds.

It works. You can play video. Yeah, it builds. You can play videos. Is the experience really quality? I don't think so. I need to double check this, but I think the media controls weren't even finished at that time. I think it just had play, but I may be wrong about that.

It had them when I tested it, so they might have added it in later commits. Yeah, they did do a 5.1 release because they found a bunch of memory leak problems that they were able to fix. Also, Cosmic was just using way too much memory. From my understanding, there was some issue with Iced where I don't know the specifics, but it was using a double the amount of memory

it should have been using, which was very nice. I know that some of that was in Cosmic Text, which I think it's interesting. It's like one of their biggest projects on their entire organization. And it's used by more than just Iced. It's used by like, I think Zedd used it for a time. I don't know if they've switched recently, but I think Bevy used it for a bit for their text rendering. But it was always interesting to me that out of all the things system76 has made, that that ended up being the most popular

like product that they make, at least on that, on their organization but yeah, they fixed a memory a memory issue with that and Ended up just updating every cosmic app and then they're like, alright, we're putting out a new release. This was a You know a really good thing to add worthy of a release well, I think that that tag release also fixed the Well, I think that tag release also fixed the iced window resizing, where if you resize the window, it would resize at like 3 FPS. Oh, yeah. They had to like throttle resizing,

and then they implemented some other tricks that came from Neri, I believe. So we actually take quite a bit of inspiration from Neri. I remember whenever I was working on the touchpad gestures, Draculax just said, ask Yalter, who's the developer of Neary, ask them, I guess, ask them if we can use their animation for workspace switching. And it's kind of funny. It was a chain of inspiration. We got inspired by Niri, which actually got those animations

from Gnome, which I believe got inspiration from some other project that I can't remember for the life of me. But I just thought it was funny at the time that we had four simultaneous implementations of the same workspace switching animation. So if Cosmic's workspace switching ever seems like GNOME, that's because it is. Yeah, for better or worse, there's a few issues that I've noticed that are kind of GNOME-y.

Oh yeah. Like the... There are a few issues with the way dynamic workspaces spawn, which are a problem. Like, I've reported all of these problems. Sometimes they just don't delete themselves or you can get them to spawn in ways that shouldn't happen. Yeah. Yeah, I think I reported one a while back. If you just start the session, it

has really weird behavior with the dynamic workspace. Normally, you're supposed to have two workspaces at the time, your main one and then the extra one. But because there's no windows in the first workspace, it doesn't initialize the second one properly. And in order to get to that workspace, you actually have to swipe the opposite direction for some reason.

I don't know why. But that was how it was at the time. And I think it's still the case. But I'd have to go back and test. There was also an issue that I actually knew about when I was making the initial PR for the workspace gestures, where if you kind of spam the gesture over and over, the workspace will jump back and forth instead of actually moving.

But I don't think that was deemed a blocker for the initial PR because it was already significantly better than not having those. And that was back in like April of last year. So it was before they even had the alpha. And I think, you know, there are priorities and they didn't really make that a priority to fix it. But yeah, you can still do that. So if you just spam the gesture. I don't know if this is still a problem, but last time I checked, if you open the window overview and then click on the empty workspace, and then open the window of view again, you have an extra workspace and you can just keep clicking on the final one and just making new ones. But because they're not, yeah, they don't have windows on them.

So what I think is happening is it's treating the window overview as a window so it spawns an additional workspace after it because I know it treats the launcher as a window. There's a few things that shouldn't be treated like windows that do that cause an extra workspace to be spawned. So I think that's what's happening but But because there's no window on there, after you go back to it, if you swap to that workspace, it realizes the workspace there. So it deletes the workspace. Yeah, I think I wonder if the solution would be to because you can set like some kind of property

on your desktop file that makes it not show up in app launchers and stuff. And that's what I believe they use. So maybe for Windows that are attached to that kind of app ID, maybe they just need to not create a new workspace for those. But I wonder if that'll cause any other weird issues with Windows that are, I don't know.

But that's just my musing about a potential fix for that issue. But WorkSpaces has been a weird, weird part of Cosmic for a while. It didn't get a lot of love until very recently. Oh, that's the fifth person I was thinking of. Ian, Ian Douglas Scott, he's the fifth one working on Cosmic. But he's been working on Cosmic workspaces more recently. And he updated Iced, which added a lot of improvements. He fixed a lot of drag and drop things.

Now whenever I use it, I don't see a weird issue where if the window title is too long, it kind of just makes it into a column where each letter is on its own row. I had that issue for a long time, but I don't see it anymore. So I assume that was fixed. But I'm very glad that WorkSpaces is getting a lot of love because a lot of my workflow back when I used Gnome was opening the workspace, switching around,

and I kind of want to recreate that workflow in Cosmic. But also having like a bottom bar. Yeah. Sorry, go on. I was gonna say, honestly, most of the problems with workspaces come from the fact that they're doing dynamic workspaces. Yeah. I mean, if it was just static, half the problems of them just sporting weirdly and all this stuff, they wouldn't exist anymore.

I know, I'm not a fan of this, but there's a shift in the direction of what they're going to do with that. At least at this stage, are not doing static. At least, it's going to be like a modified dynamic where you can like pin them mm-hmm yeah that's a that's a weird thing to me I kind of wish they would just do static it almost feels like just being different for the sake of being different well I like the idea as like an extension to dynamic like if if you want to have it there you can pin them I think that's cool but yeah that's not like yeah yeah it sounds like in the settings you should be able to have you can pin them. I think that's cool. But it's not a plated functionality. Yeah. Yeah.

It sounds like in the settings, you should be able to have static and dynamic. And then in the workspace overview, you should be able to pin spaces. Yeah. Yeah, I think that would be cool. I think that that would be a good. Yeah.

I agree. I forgot what else I was going to say. But it was something about workspaces. And oh, yeah, I have another PR open that hasn't got a lot of attention yet. But over time, if it doesn't get figured out before release, I'm going to ping them. It's a gesture configuration PR.

Do you remember what number it is, or where I can find it? So there's one in Cosmic Comp and one in Cosmic Settings, Damon, because it's a two-part PR. The first PR was actually made back in March, and I updated it only recently. So here's, I'll just post in the chat. This is the Cosmic Comp one. Basically, you know how, actually, I

don't know if any other desktop environment has configurable gestures. But I want to. How configurable are we talking? I think, Katie, you can choose between a couple of options. And Gnome, you can never choose a couple. I remember Neil talking about wishing that you would be able to change the workspace switching over

to three fingers in KD. Apparently, there's some kind of legacy code that keeps that from being worked out. Yeah, and it would just take a lot to actually fix that. But that's something I've wondered for Cosmic, because I don't really like their default of four fingers to switch workspaces. I'm always used to three.

So I made this PR back then and Draculax was like, any reason we don't put this in like the existing like actions for like keyboard actions. And I was like, that'd be a great idea, but it will require some structural changes to happen before I continue with the PR. And that was actually some changes that Michael was already going to work on.

So he finished that, but I never got around to finishing the PR. And then I think maybe a month ago, I was like, all ago, I was like, all right, I'm going to come back to this. So I finished up the PR and haven't heard anything since. But also, it is an old PR, and I'll probably have to just ping them eventually about it.

But yeah, priorities as always. They have a lot more egregious things to fix before getting gesture configuration. Yeah, the desktop crashes are a lot more important than making sure gestures work exactly the way you want them to. Yeah, there was somebody in the PopOS chat who asked about like, oh, when are you going to add the frosted glass effect? And it's like, this is important for first release. And I was like, I don't think that's important for first release.

I'd rather them fix the other issues they have first. And I think they're even going to have to wait on a new Wayland protocol, the blur protocol. I don't know if you've covered that before. But it's been in limbo for about a year and actually I noticed somebody bumped the thread recently and was like, hey, is there anything going on with this PR? Yeah.

I don't have it on my list. Zeyzver mentioned it in a PR recently. Yeah, uh... This is an aside, but I actually have like a giant software wishlist of like a bunch of issues and PRs and stuff that I'd like to be completed. Ah, yeah, here we go, here's a bump from Xaver. Okay, can you send the link so that I can look at it too? Ah, yes, here. I want to see what the status is of that. Got some comments on here from Xaver and

Drakulix and that's as of two days ago Yeah, yeah Drakulix responded, cool Yeah She you know, she'll implement that as soon as the protocol gets supported and actually merged. But in the meantime, there's actually a blur support in WinIt and Iced. Well, maybe not Iced.

In libcosmic it is. But I think that's patches on top of Iced. So they, well, I lost my train of thought again. Okay, it was Ed. Ed Flores. Have you heard of him? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's probably the one I see the most when it comes to external contributions to Cosmic. Maybe after that a guy just named GitFox. Yeah, yeah, I was talking to GitFox.

Yeah, he's been there since the start as well. I remember talking to him when I first got into Cosmic. So he's been there for a while. And actually, it's really interesting because at first he would talk about issues, and I'd be like, maybe you should try fixing it. Like this might be an opportunity to like learn some Rust. And he's like, Oh, I don't know if I can learn Rust and all that.

And nowadays, he's just submitting PR after PR. Like he's really, he's gotten good at it. So I feel like he's, he doubted himself for a while. But you know, that's, I guess, an inspirational story. If anybody wants to contribute, you can, you can do it. Even if you don't think you can learn Rust, it's a, it's not so bad after you get through the learning curve. Well, also with the project being an alpha, a lot of the, it's not like the lowest of low hanging fruit that has been like, this is still there. Right.

A lot of those very simple problems have been dealt with but it's not a it's not a project that's like you know we're not talking to gnome where it's been around since 1999 or kde since like 98 where you have this like almost 30 year legacy code base where stuff was written where some parts of the code haven't changed in, you know, maybe 15 years and Trying to Wrap your head around Making a change to that is going to be a lot harder than something that is still, you know There's still these relatively easy problems to address

Yeah, absolutely. And I actually originally tried to contribute to KDE. There was a bounty on an issue. I didn't do it because of the bounty, but I wanted the issue as well. And it was dynamic workspaces. I don't know if you like or dislike them, but I wanted to bring that workflow to KDE. I like them as an option.

I don't use them. Yeah, it wouldn't be something, obviously with KDE, it'd be an option disabled by default. So I started looking around and it didn't take long for me to just get into a maze of different projects and I'm like, well, where is the original place where workspaces are defined? And yeah, I probably should have asked for more help because I just kind of got lost. And I was like, OK, I'm not doing this. I'm bored.

But I like that with Cosmic, it feels more accessible at the moment because there isn't all that legacy stuff. And everything is clearly defined where it is. Maybe that's just because I've been around the project a lot. But I kind of know where everything is. At least if you are looking at workspaces, that's in Cosmic Workspaces. In KDE, if you're looking for workspaces, I don't know.

There's a KDE workspaces repo. But that's kind of the overarching repo for the core desktop components. It's kind of like the superset of KDE Desktop and KDE Mobile. So, I don't know. It's confusing. Confusing naming. I like that everything is kind of laid out easily in Cosmic. This is one of the things I've talked about that Cosmic can do really well, that isn't really possible with a legacy

project. Cosmic can look at what KDE, what Marte, what Gnome, what Budgie, what XSE, and all of these other projects have done, and instead of replicating the same mistakes they made, you know, 10, 15 years ago, start from the fact that this is a solved problem. Basically build, you know, build off of the, what is it, the backs of giants, the, you know, the, the, the. Yeah, sand on the shoulders of giants. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sand on the shoulders of giants. I saw that all the time at Google Scholar. That was like the thing that showed up whenever you're searching for research papers. But yeah, I can start going. But importantly, you can also structure a project in a more sensible way. Because again, Gnome and KDE both started in the late 90s.

And this, okay. People did, look, people did not know how to structure software projects in the late 90s, right? Let's be honest about it. And by the time people realized, hey, maybe things should be structured in a better way, changing the structure of something like KDE or GNOME in 2010, by that point, it was way too far gone. You were not going to be able to change anything with a complete refactor of the project.

And it's only going to get worse and worse and worse. So if you can start with, hey, workspaces are done here. Compositing is done here. You can make it so it's maintainable a lot longer into the future. Yeah, having everything in components is nice. That's kind of in contrast to a GNOME shell, you know, which really for the entire desktop environment, the two main components are just Mutter and GNOME shell. Everything's in there. And I mean, I can't appreciate that it kind of makes everything trim.

I think GNOME is very, like, their philosophy is kind of keeping everything trim and clean, and they don't want to add on what they deem as unnecessary things. I think that can go to a too far extent most of the time, but, you know, I like that philosophy. I think that Cosmic does take some inspiration from GNOME in that aspect, but they, I think they realized that, especially with stuff like Wayland Protocols, that you need to play ball with everybody and implement what everybody else is implementing. Yeah, so I think that was actually one of my biggest initial draws to Cosmic was the fact that it was kind of like Gnome, but it had panels by default.

A lot of people in Gnome like to add the like dash to dock and dash to panel. And I did that for a while. But then if something would break, people would just blame me for using a dash to dock. It's like, have you tried using no extensions whatsoever? Like, I get it. I, I get that they like having this core model with extensions, but I've never really, uh, liked that as far as like organizing projects goes.

Yeah. I've, I've talked about this a couple of times before, but if you have an extension that has 10 million downloads, that shouldn't be an extension. Oh yeah. Agreed. Dash to Doc, I think, is the biggest defender. I would say that Blur My Shell is also a pretty common one, but there are even accessibility issues with that. Sorry. Blur my shell is also a pretty common one, but there are even like accessibility issues with that. But, you know, some people just want. Uh, is that 8.7? Oh, it's only 8.7 million downloads. Oh, sorry. Oh, only. Okay. Wow. How many Linux users are there again?

Yeah. I don't know how they're, um, how they can accept accounts, downloads, if accounts update as a separate download or what it actually does. Either way, it's a lot of downloads. And people destroy and recreate their systems all the time. I know that for the longest time I couldn't go a month without re-wiping my entire drive and trying out a new distro or a new configuration. I've really stabilized on a Fedora Kinoite and whenever Cosmic becomes stable, I'm going to go to Fedora Cosmic, obviously. But it's nice.

It's always nice to try new things. And I tried OpenSUSA. I'll say that I tried Arch, but I found that the setup was pretty complicated. And I was like, I'm not gonna deal with this. Like maybe I'm not like a power user for saying that. But I don't know. I did try KD Linux though, the new image-based distribution that Katie is trying to push.

Or not trying to push, but trying to develop. I don't know if you've heard much about that. Not since the early talks of it? Yeah. I'm in their matrix group. They're still developing it. And I did some small contributions there, just small issues that I found.

One of my PRs was just to change their boot logo. The Plymouth boot logo was this really old, KD. I guess back in the day, they had this wizard mascot. So they had this reference image of a KD wizard. Let me see if I can find it. KD wizard. Oh, kendall. Yeah, it's kendall. I need to... What is this thing?

Yeah, so that was the boot logo for a while. And I was like, let's change it to the official KD logo. Yeah, so that was the boot logo for a while. And I was like, let's change it to the official KD logo. Yeah. I thought that was like an ImageMagic logo for a second. What is the ImageMagic logo? It's very similar to that. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's probably a little more charming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From this. Yeah, yeah. Image magic is definitely a cuter wizard. But yeah, I don't know. I think Harold, the guy who was working on it, was just like, for development purposes, I'm just going to put an image here.

And might as well call back to Kandalf. I'm going to look into that one. I had no idea that was ever a mascot they used. Because obviously the main one they put forward is Konki. Yeah, Konki is a pretty good mascot, I feel like. I think in terms of like, I mean, Gnome has the foot. Like, I feel like Konki is way better than that. There's a lot of there's a lot of jokes that people have made about Gnome and feet because of that one. Yeah, it's just low hanging fruit. Like, you got to go for it.

I do remember a while back a video you made about the the Gnome Circle logo and it being like associated with something that... That was so stupid! I had a I never heard of that before and I was like okay am I ready to be traumatized? I'm 23 so but I I did not I didn't do any of the like live leak or going out and looking at YouTube videos that are like I do remember somebody referencing like a a jar video was that was that actually the that wasn't the genome circle thing. No, that's that's that's a different one.

The jar videos. They there's a number of it. There is a number of videos. There is a number of videos. But, um... Man. So, yeah, I have some friends. Sorry, go on. No, go on, I was gonna talk about something else.

I have some friends who have just who are just fully in on the internet rabbit holes. Actually, my girlfriend is a pretty bad offender for that. she watched an entire documentary on Chris Chan Do you remember who made the documentary because I feel like I know that let me see Chris yeah I mean there was like 50 episodes or something oh yeah I think I went to the modern day like she actually said

that she didn't think she could continue to the modern day just because it was too recent. Like you know it's easy to it's easy to think of these things as in the past but he's yeah or they I don't know they're still struggling but yeah I don't know how we got on this. I'm not really sure, but you were talking about KDE there. So what are your thoughts on KDE becoming an official Fidora edition, moving up from being a just a spin? Yeah, I mean, I'm super excited. As my daily driver, I definitely think that it's something that is stable and everyone should be using if they like more Windows-style desktops, which I think I tend to.

And I think that Neil especially has put in a lot of work into the KDE spin, and there's a lot of other people in FedoraKD that are working hard, but I think it's getting what it deserves. It should have been a desktop option, like a main option for the longest time. I will say, actually, the reason why I started with Gnome originally was because I thought that FedoraKD was less supported because it was a spin. I was like, I'm going to go with the official. What's the default? All that stuff. And I think that a lot of people may not like that, that workflow and, but they may still want something that's default. So I think that this is a good niche for them.

Yeah. I do think there is probably a little bit of people that have bounced off of Linux after trying one of the, whatever, whatever distro it is, whether it's a Buntu, whether it's Fedora, trying the main thing, it's Gnome, it's this weird, like it's, it's not like impossible to use, but it's weird, it's different, it's not like Windows, it's not like Mac, it's like its own different thing

and for the people that like it, like that's great. More power to you, But I do think having a flagship, more traditional desktop option is just a good idea. And my understanding is Fedora KDE has been basically run like an edition anyway. Like this is pretty much just a marketing change. Yeah. Yeah. It was always a release blocker for the longest time, at least I think for as long as run like an edition anyway. Like this is pretty much just a marketing change. Yeah. It was, it was always a release blocker for the longest time, at least I think for as long as I've been using Linux, it's been a release blocker. So like if something's wrong with QA with Fedora KDE, then they'll actually

delay the release and it, I think it was mainly just procedural issues that kept it from being a full edition for the longest time. The workstation moniker being one of those, they didn't want to give that up. They want Fedora workstation to mean Fedora Gnome. They didn't want to change it to Fedora Gnome and Fedora KD. Yeah, I don't know what they're doing about the name. I don't know if they're gonna... Are they just gonna keep calling it Fedora KD? I've not heard about anything about that. I don't know. I know that Neil is gonna have to start updating like the website, doing all the marketing stuff for that. That's actually stuff that I have to do for Cosmic as well.

I need to get with the the website people to make the website for the Cosmic Spin. And I don't know yet what I'm gonna put on it, but I'm sure the website people the Cosmic Spin. And I don't know yet what I'm going to put on it, but I'm sure the website people have some ideas. I mean, they've been around, they know how to make spin pages. So, but it's exciting. And I think that KDE being an official edition is long overdue. Yeah. One of the issues KDE has traditionally had is the way they handle their releases, because different KDE components are released at different timing windows. And the nice thing about Gnome is it's six months, new release.

This is why you have Ubuntu and Fedora releasing in that same window, because it's just convenient. And I know KDE is working on cleaning up their release windows. I don't know if they've actually done it yet, but I know they wanted to move to a more like stable, this is the cycle that we're doing. It's always going to release at this window. We're going to have our components all releasing at the same window as well. And that will make things a lot easier because I believe that's one of the reasons why rel dropped it actually because rel up until 7? 6 or 7. I think it was 7. Yeah. Yeah had KD. I heard something about rel 7 having KD.

Mm-hmm had KD as an option and I don't know when I Think they had it pretty much since the start. I don't know if there was a point they didn't have it. Um, but anyways, it's just been like a problem for these distros that the, it's fine for like an arch, right? Or a Gentoo where you have it's rolling release model. But yeah, yeah. But if you have a, I want to release in April and October because of the other district or the other of the other district

or the other desktop we're doing, having one that's doing something different, you know, it makes things annoying. I know that both Neil Gampa and Nate Graham, who's actually, I think you did a podcast just the other week. It probably needs no introduction, but yeah, I think they both would like to change the release schedule and So to understand it, I think that some some are on a four month release schedule and some are on a six month, right? Yeah, so I did see a recent change

With spectacle like their screenshot tool that's being changed to go on the release schedule of Plasma. And that's the same issue. They were having problems with the release cycles not being aligned, and Spectacle was either getting too ahead or too behind. So it makes sense to slowly align everything to one release schedule. And since I'm not deep in the weeds in Fedora infrastructure and everything, I do actually like more often releases, but I know that that just doesn't make sense for a six month release cycle of a distro. So I'd be cool with a six month release. I know that Cosmic, they plan on doing yearly releases, which I'm not sure how that's gonna work. But that's what I believe that's what Carl said. And I was like, I don't know.

A lot can change in a year. And so I'm thinking... Wait, like not doing point releases in it? Or how does... I don't know. I don't know what they mean by that. But it was at a certain talk that I watched. I wish I had the reference, but I think major releases.

So maybe they'll do minor releases, but yeah. So what I have to be thinking about is, you know, in between these releases, I need to be making sure that everything is up to date, and I'd rather keep a pace that's closer to upstream. I've never been a fan of LTS distros and LTS everything. So I actually like how Neil manages KDE in that way. They update KDE like very often. But yeah, I'll have to be thinking about that

whenever Cosmic starts doing official releases. Right now, whenever there's a new alpha, I just tag it and we go. And most of the time Those updates just go through without any any issues We are right now like, you know, it you can't really expect anything to be stable because it's the alpha Yeah, thank you. You know exactly it's a it's a tagged release, but it's not a

Like they've explicitly said they're not doing it like testing for these releases They're gonna test it to make sure things build but they're not doing like full QA they would do for a full release Yeah, and I don't know back in the day I wouldn't have even recommended using the tag releases because everything was changing so often and things still are. But I think we're finally getting the point where I can recommend staying on a tagged release and using the official Fedora repos. For the longest time, I was like, if you want the latest experience, go to my copper.

Everything is updated daily. But nowadays, you may not really need to. We're getting to the point where everything is finally stabilizing. And they're getting to the point where everything is finally stabilizing and they're, you know, they're getting really close and I'm excited for them. Yeah, I want to swap to Cosmic. There's a few issues that I still have. Some of them are obviously, you know, bug related, sure, that's one thing. Some of them are kind of like,

Some of them are kind of like, butting heads design issues that I'm just, I just don't really get. I'm doing a video a couple of days talking about some of these things, but I just don't really get why you would not do this. Like the way they're handling decorations, for example. So fire, I reported this as a bug and it got closed as like, oh, this is the way we're doing it. It's not re- it's closed as not planned. I'm not happy about it. I think I might know what this is.

Yeah. Go on. So for anyone who doesn't, if you run Firefox on KDE, it's going to have the KDE decorations. If you run OBS, it's going to have the KDE decorations. If you run a terminal, it's going to have the KDE decorations. If you run a terminal, it's gonna have the KDE decorations. But on Cosmic... I feel like they're handling decorations backwards. So, if a toolkit supplies decorations,

which all of them do because there is a major desktop that doesn't do server-side decorations, Gnome... You might not want to say it, I'm gonna say it though. There's enough people at Gnome that don't do server-side decorations, Gnome. You might not want to say it though. There's enough people at Gnome that don't like me already. So basically all the major toolkits have fallback decorations because they need to. Otherwise they're going to be like DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci doesn't have any decorations. They rely on server side decorations. So it's actually impossible to use DaVinci Resolve on Ganome right now. You have to control it with bindings.

Like you can't move the window. You can't even like, I don't think you can move like super meta, the super drag. I think you actually cannot move the window. It's like really broken. I'm gonna home. Yeah Good This is like it's extra bad because of DaVinci right like it's right to itself for the do their thing But the point of getting out is it doesn't have decorations

So GTK QT probably most of the toolkits, supply decorations as a fullback. Now, what's supposed to happen is, if a desktop provides service and decorations like Cosmic does, it's supposed to replace those decorations that are a fullback with the decorations of the desktop. But Cosmic has taken the different approach of, it's only gonna supply the decorations in cases where there are no decorations. So usually that's going to be for an electron application or a terminal like Lackrity.

So what you end up having happen is, applications like Firefox and OBS, even though they do support service or decorations, don't use them on Cosmic. Yeah, can I um actually there for a second? You can, yeah, go ahead. Okay, so maybe this is a little in the nitty gritty of how XGG decoration works, but the way Cosmic implements it is actually within spec. But it's weird because the spec doesn't give you,

it doesn't tell you how you should do this certain thing. So basically clients will, ideally they'll send their preference of whether they prefer client or server-side decorations. The compositor will either honor that preference or not, which is why I also think that Gannon could totally implement XDG decoration and just refuse everything. But that wouldn't really be helpful anyways.

But it's technically within spec. So if a client refuses or doesn't refuse, if a client doesn't have a preference on whether it prefers client or server-side decorations, it's up to the compositor to choose one. And most every other desktop environment chooses server side decorations, which I also agree is, I think, the best way to do it. Cosmic chooses client side decorations. If it doesn't have a preference, it chooses client-side. So Electron does have client-side decorations, but it prefers server-side decorations explicitly.

And that's why it shows up as server. But stuff like Firefox and Alacrity, they don't set a preference, presumably. And so it shows up as server-side. Well, Alacrity doesn't have decorations to begin with. OBS. Oh, oh. Oh, yeah. OBS. Oh, oh. Oh, yeah, OBS.

Yeah, cute applications are like that. And I actually wanted to talk to, I think, David Redondo is the one who does cute Wayland stuff. But I wanted to talk to him about potentially changing it for them to prefer server-side decorations. But I ended up, I have a lot of of ideas and a lot of them don't really get acted on, so I didn't end up talking to him. But I think that that is a big problem in Cosmic, is cute applications look terrible. So you would argue it's more of a upstream issue rather than

an issue with Cosmic? I think it's an issue issue with cosmic, but I think that upstream could also, uh, fix the preference as well. Uh, they, I still think it's ultimately cosmic's fault for not preferring server side decorations, but I do think that, uh, if I had to like, if, if the ideologies of, uh, desktop environments were on like a one line spectrum, I really think the cosmic's kind of Gnome and KDE. So they prefer client-side decorations when possible. But I don't know if that's always the best option, because things can look ugly, like Qt.

But the ideal way to fix it in lieu of that is actually to make a Qt platform abstraction for Cosmic. So Qt has a Aveda abstraction. Aveda. So cute has like a Adwaita abstraction. Adwaita, I don't know how to pronounce it. I think it's Adwaita. That's the way I say it, at least. Yeah, Adwaita then.

They have an abstraction that makes it look nice on GNOME platforms. We could actually potentially tap into that, I wonder. But that may be a good thing to do in the meantime, because Qt apps, again, look terrible right now. But the idea would be to create a cosmic platform for it, because Qt basically has a bunch of platform abstractions for Windows, Mac.

And then for Linux, they have several, depending on like Gnome or anything else. The problem is no platform is being picked, or maybe like a default Linux platform is being picked for Cosmic. So I don't know how many cute apps you've tried. OBS probably looks terrible on your Cosmic stuff. OBS is I think the main one that I've used. Yeah, maybe yeah, maybe there's like one wait. What is it? Oh Pro to know that you see that's the only other one but downloading new pro versions proton up QT. Oh Is that a proton the mail app or proton the that's the wine abstract? It's it's a tool for downloading new versions of proton the same thing

It's a tool for downloading new versions of Proton, the Steam thing. Okay, I will say that someone on Mastodon said, like, RIP Proton once, and I was like, oh no, is Proton gone? And it was like some controversy related to Proton mail and all that. I was like, oh, you got to clarify these things. But yeah, so until we have a cosmic platform for that, then Qt apps just don't look good. And I actually want to, in the cosmic spin, mix Qt apps and GTK apps. Oh yeah, yeah. Not about that one.

That's your main editor? Yeah, yeah. Okay. What do you think of it? Is it good? You know of the options that are around It's it's the best of the options at least if we're talking open source There's a reason why a lot of Linux youtubers who are otherwise very very big open source people used DaVinci resolve

Yeah, it's the only other one that could be seen as supported. I remember when I did YouTube back in the day, I pirated Adobe products. So yeah, Premiere Pro was my choice of editor at the time, but that would not work at all on Linux. I know that for a fact. I know there's some people that have done some... At certain times you've been able to get Creative Cloud working. It has required a lot of messing around with Wine

and it's not been stable and different versions have broken it, but it's technically been possible sometimes. Interesting yeah I know that somebody got Photoshop like maybe CS6 or maybe the first version of Creative Cloud on there. Oh yeah people have definitely got an older version of Photoshop absolutely working yeah. Yeah that's a feat in of itself like massive props to people are able to do that. Did you hear that Wynne just tagged their for their 10.0 stable release? I did hear about that.

I haven't looked into what's in the tagged release. The thing I'm most excited about is the Wayland support. Oh, is that coming now? I forgot about that. Yeah, so Wine Wayland is enabled by default, but there's been a couple of people who are misunderstanding what that means. Oh, hello. Who is it? Did I disconnect?

Wait, Who disconnected? Uh... I can't hear you, no. Uh... is that my side? Wait, I don't even know. Is it... Tell me it's not Discord that's breaking. Uh... Hello?

Can you hear me? I can. Uh... Hello! Can you hear me? I can. Okay, uh, that was probably my router. American internet. No, my uh, my video also started dropping in quality as well. So I don't know what that was. Interesting. Well, uh, I don't know. Uh, so we were talking about Wine Wayland.

Yes. Yeah. So there's a misconception that I've seen in Reddit right now where people are like, oh, it's on by default. You'll be using it just out of the box. But if you have x Wayland, it'll default to x11 still, because that has way more support. So if you want to actually use Wine Wayland,

you have to unset the display variable whenever you call Wine. Right. And I actually tinkered with it today a little bit and already found some bugs. Most of them were reported, but I ended up reporting one that I hadn't seen to Wine. There's a big issue with Electron applications. They just show up as a black screen.

Oh. I tried. I was like, what Windows app should I try with Wine? Because most of the time, I'm running Wine through Proton. I'm like, I don't know of any Windows applications I want to try. So I downloaded Spotify and was like, all right, let's try this.

Black Box. It installed and then a Black Box. That's fun. Yeah, so apparently WineWayland doesn't have support for multi-threaded rendering yet. And I assume that's a big deal. So it's definitely not fully ready for prime time. I wish it was because it's been.

prime time. I wish it was because it's been. Ah, we lose you again. What the hell's happening? Oh, this is a great episode. I love this. Technical difficulties. Okay, uh, you're on my phone now. Okay, sure. Yeah, whatever works. Sorry about my internet. Anywho, you can hear me, right? I can hear you just fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, it's not ready for prime time at all. Well, I guess not at all. If you're just playing games, I think Vulkan and OpenGL is supported. But for actual desktop applications, it's definitely not ready. I even tried something as simple as Wine Notepad, and I found that touchpad scrolling still doesn't work. Regular mouse scrolling works, but touch pad does not. So I don't know.

But it's been a long time, like once of mine to try out a Wayland only desktop, like removing X Wayland. And in order to do that, the two things that I really need to be Wayland are Chromium and Wine. Those are the last two holdouts, I feel like, for Wayland support. Yeah, I'm thinking of what I have. I reckon it's pretty much the same for me as well, because Firefox has Wayland support, yes?

Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's had Wayland support since like maybe April of last year, I think. And it's enabled by default now, yeah. Yes. And that's pretty nice. Chromium has Wayland support, but it's really borked. You can enable it as a flag. You can do the same with Electron apps, but I wouldn't recommend it for a while. There are just various different issues.

I did notice recently something interesting that Element, do you get on Matrix at all? Not that much. I've used it a bit though. You should. I kind of just lurk in every development discussion there ever is. I'm in the Gnome chats, I'm in the KDE chats, I'm in Cosmic chats. It's kind of in the KDE chats, I'm in cosmic chats. Like it's kind of fun to just lurk and see what's going on. But the Element app is electron-based and I noticed that the Flatpak actually runs on Wayland by default. Because I was trying, I, the way I try a Wayland complete desktop is I, because I'm running on an atomic distro,

I just create an overlay that, that removes X Wayland entirely, and then I try running KDE and I try opening apps and see if they'll open and Element opened just fine. And I was like, interesting. And it worked perfectly under Wayland. So if that's some hope for Chrom Wayland support then you know, that's That would be great now that I think

One other app that I do run under X11 not because I need to but because there's not really a good way to get around the problem. Otherwise OBS I run under xwilord. Um, it's on KDE, they have the option to, um, what is it? What is the option called? A legacy X11 app support where you can pass through, uh, keybinds to a window you're not focused on. Um, so I don't want to, like, want to be like doing stuff on my browser or going through

my terminal and then press hotkeys to change, you know, when my camera is on the screen. That is not something you can do without being focused on the window in Wayland without, you know, doing it through Ex-Wayland. Right now Cosmic doesn't have a way to do this, so Cosmic's a little bit annoying for me when I'm trying to record a video. Yeah, you can't use your hot keys like you were used to. Is OBS planning on implementing global shortcuts eventually? So my understanding is the global shortcut thing is like this...

It's in this weird like purgatory state where I think the portals now have like a partial solution. I don't think they have a full like UI implementation though. And then OBS doesn't have an implementation of it either. So I'm pretty sure the like the main portal project has it, but I don't know of any of the desktop portals that have like an actual GUI for it. Yeah. Maybe it's kind of a chicken and egg problem.

We're like, you know, desktops are waiting on apps to support it. Apps are waiting on desktops and it never gets implemented. Yeah. But yeah, I'm kind of lucky that my workflow has never has never been hampered by Wayland. In fact, when I first started Linux, I tried Linux Mint like very briefly and I was like, why is multi-monitor support not good? And it's like, oh, you should use a Wayland desktop. And I was like, okay. And then I stuck with it. Like I haven't needed anything from X11 ever. And, you know, I'm able-bodied person and I don't need accessibility. It's very important. And it's something that needs to be done right,

but I'm lucky that I've never had to be affected by the shortcomings of Wayland, at least. Yeah. Yeah. The Arch Linux subreddit recently did a survey of various things about Linux, and one of the things that I think is interesting, and I've done surveys in my community as well, that had very similar results, 80% of people said they preferred a Wayland session at this point. Interesting. And being somebody who doesn't have like a history of Linux, and I'm very new to Linux, in my head I would expect that number to be higher, like most people to be running Wayland obviously, but like maybe closer to 90%. But it's interesting. I assume those 20% are probably people who have been on Linux forever and they have their

workflows and they've used all the X, XIs, Xprop, whatever other X tools, and they don't know how to do the same thing in Wayland or there isn't even an equivalent. So, I mean, I don't blame them. Well, it might also be art, right? So there's going to be a lot of people who are like DWM users or i3 users and they've got, you know, you can't replicate DWM on Wayland. Like it's a very specific experience. So enlighten me on DWM because I don't know a lot about the very, the more niche desktop experiences.

So DWM is a tiling window manager and it's part of the Sucless suite of software. And one of the things that Sucless makes a big deal out of, which is so stupid, is you don't configure the software to like, to configure things, you patch it. So there's like this giant list of patches that are available that you can apply to the code and it always ends up creating, you know, impossible to maintain personal builds and changing anything is a nightmare. But people who like it really like it. And of course there are people who are on things like XFCE,

or they're on Cinnamon, or Budgie, which is getting very close to Wayland. Um, Cinnamon, they have Wayland, but it's like very experimental. Um, yeah. So there's obviously those people. Yeah, but both Budgie and Cinnamon seem like interesting projects to me. Uh, they're, I mean, they both have their roots in GTK, but they Budgie and Cinnamon seem like interesting projects to me. I mean, they both have their roots in GTK, but they're also they also have the traditional desktop layout.

And I think my interest has always been in traditional desktop layouts, but keeping keeping a workflow similar to Gnome's. I like using workspaces and stuff like that. So stuff like Cosmic and Cinnamon and Budgie are interesting to me. I don't know if Cinnamon has workspaces. I think they do. I really used it for like- Printed everything on links with workspaces at this point.

Yeah, I used it for less than a day. I very quickly went to Fedora. Yeah, I wouldn't change that for the world. I like Fedora. I know that Arch is cool and all, but I feel like Fedora is a great starter distro. I would recommend it over stuff like Ubuntu. Just I think that the overall Linux desktops are moving towards the stuff that Fedora is moving towards, like that Fedora is moving towards like flat packs and I don't think that snaps really

have a place in the future of Linux. That's another thing that came out of that out of that survey. It was you look at the the the people like the AUR and it's like, oh who prefers the AUR? It's like, you know, most people on art prefer the AUR. There's like some people use it a little bit and the graph is mirrored for snaps. Most people don't want snaps anywhere near their system. I think the thing that's really like annoyed people about snaps in Ubuntu is when Ubuntu's like silently

replacing Debian packages with snaps, like they do this with Firefox. They did do that with Firefox, yeah, like if I say if I use apps to install it, I want the app package like like, yeah, yeah, I. It's a it's it's an anti pattern like you. If you're if you're calling from a specific program, you want to install from that program. That's confusing to the user.

They'll think that they installed the app package and then start barking at the wrong tree if there's an issue. It's just not something I really understand why Ubuntu did. I actually did try out Ubuntu server recently because I wanted to set up an xCloud instance and I ran into snaps and I realized why people don't like it. It showed up as an install option.

It's like, do you want to install the Nextcloud snap? It had a bunch of other options, but I was like, yes, and I very quickly just didn't like it. But I assume there are people who are used to that workflow, but I immediately went back to something I'm familiar with. I did Fedora server. Not a lot of people use Fedora server. It seems like people use CentOS.

There's a lot of other server-based distributions or there's a lot of other server RPM-based distributions out there. Well, when it comes to silently installing snaps, there's actually kind of a problem that exists on Fedora as well. And this is a very recent discussion with Fedora Flatpak. There's a discussion right now about how that should be handled, whether it should be enabled by default, should it be taken priority over the regular Flatpak.

My understanding is Fedora's gotten, obviously they've gotten complaints from like the Bottles developers but also like complaints from OBS as well and if the Fedora flat pack has issues that don't exist in the official flat pack from the developers, it's like The developers aren't going to deal with that problem. Yeah the developers, it's like the developers aren't going to deal with that problem. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I have, I probably have some hot takes when it comes to like, a lot of Fedora packages

wouldn't share the opinions that I do, but I actually think, I think I align more with the Bottles developers on the side of the conversation. I don't think that they should make it explicitly hard to package it, but I understand why they did it. They were dealing with problems that, and they have one distribution method that they want to support. I do think that Flatpaks are great in that way that they can encourage companies and also just open-source developers

to package their things intentionally, instead of letting somebody else package it for them. And that's something that we see on every other platform. And maybe because I've been on Windows and like iOS and stuff like that my whole life, that's just what I feel like I'm used to. I feel like it makes sense as a developer to package your stuff once and do it yourself.

And I actually developed a project where you could run flat packs transiently. You don't have to install them. And I wanted to package that for like, Fedora. And I ran into some of the same packaging issues that I see a lot of other people do. First of all, Fedora, like, package reviews are pretty strict. And their guidelines surrounding Rust specifically are kind of weird. It's not weird if you look at it in the context of like C and C++, because they're used to packaging

all their libraries separately, but they want you to package each individual library create as a separate RPM. I've never really understood that, and I don't personally agree with that decision. Obviously, I'm not the one doing the majority of the Rust work in Fedora, so I don't really care much. But when it came to Cosmic, I don't think we would have been able to package it if it wasn't for an exception to that rule where they allowed us to vendor the dependencies.

Because there's some packages like Smithy, for example, that haven't had a release in like four years. Well, it may be four years, maybe it was two years, I forget, years, it's been years. And they probably won't tag another release for a long time because it's constantly changing. So it doesn't make sense to package it separately. It makes sense to vendor it. And it was kind of a point of contention

for just a little bit until the Fedora side of things started realizing that it would literally be impossible to package Cosmic without this exception. So I'm very thankful that that exception was made. But normally you're supposed to package each individual crate separately. Right. But yeah, packaging for applications.

Like if I wanted to package my Rust application, I would have to make sure that all of the crates are in the Fedora repos and that I'm matching the versions that are in the Fedora repos so that I can avoid API problems. So it's just, it's a pain, it's a chore. And I understand why Flatpak is so enticing for application developers.

And if I made an app and somebody made like an RPM that only half worked, I'd understand why. I understand the bottles developers perspective there. So, whilst we're on the topic of back on Fedora, let's talk a bit about the actual creation of the spin itself, because we haven't really talked about that much. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess, why did you want to make a spin? Rath, you could have just released the packages, and that'd be the end of it.

Why did you want to go all the way and actually make a spin? So personally, I think when I want to make changes in projects and stuff, I want them to end up being something that everyone can really benefit from. And I think that making a spin allows all this work to reach more people. And since a lot of other people also want to have a cosmic

desktop on Fedora, it just kind of made sense to put in the extra work to make it a spin. But that involved, of course, I think where we were last at, I created the packages. From there, they had to go through package reviews. And as I mentioned, they're pretty rigorous. So that took probably like a month or two once we started doing that. And then after we got everything in there, of course, it came around time to make the change proposal in December.

There was kind of a period of time where we were just releasing alpha versions in the official Fedora repos. People could make their own custom spin, I guess, if they wanted to just install the packages themselves. But I think that it makes sense once they're officially in the Fedora repos to just make a spin at that point. I mean, there's spins for basically every desktop on Fedora. So, might as well. So, if somebody wanted to make a spin, let's say some new desktop came out, or there's some desktop right now that doesn't actually have a spin. What was the actual process needed

to go through there? What did you actually need to do in Fedora to make this happen? Okay, so the first step, you have to have packages for your spin. Everything that is needed to run your specific spin needs to be in an RPM package. I would start by using Copper. That's their custom build system slash external package repository, and it's free to make an account. It's free to start setting things up. If you don't know anything about RPM packaging,

it's also a great testing ground. Oftentimes, people will say to run things locally and you can, but I found it easier to just run in the copper and then if something fails, the build logs are great, just find out what went wrong. Learn how to make RPM packages. There's some great documentation in the Fedora docs about that. Once you have those packages,

you'll need to submit them for review. You have to create a Fedora account system account. You have to accept their FPCA, I think it is, Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. From there, you go to their Bugzilla, and there's a template for requesting a package. It gives you slots for the package name, package description, your account system username,

and then you have to put in the URL of the spec file and the RPM. At that point, someone will get back to you with like action items, and there will probably be a lot to start because there's a lot of review items. And if you want to make their lives easier, you should probably look at the package guidelines before submitting it as well, because they'll end up just being like, did you even read this? But yeah, there's a whole ton of stuff to be thinking about, stuff that I would never have thought about

and probably can't procure off the top of my head just because it's been so long. I did this back in June, but each package will be reviewed individually. And depending on how many packages you have for your desktop environment for your spin, it could take a long time. For instance, Cosmic at the start had like 21 packages. It has like 25 now. But it was easier after the fact to add packages. Like we packaged Cosmic Player recently, Cosmic Wallpapers, stuff like that.

But yeah, so once things are reviewed, you have your packages done. It comes time to where you need to actually request the spin. Change proposals are on a deadline. So you want to make sure you get that in before the version you want your spin to be in. The Fedora 42 one, for example, was in like December, I think it was December 18th. So you submit the proposal.

I think at that point, you may want to reach out to somebody in Fedora and let them know your intent, just so that they can help you out. For me, Neil Gomppo is a huge help. He kind of was my consultant through the whole thing. Like he was like, all right, here are the next steps. Here's what you need to do. And that made it really easy for me to keep track of what's going on because there's a lot of things at that point that you need to be aware of. There's like live sys scripts, which I don't actually know what those do,

but I've made a PR for that. Because, so the scripts are like per desktop environment or per spin, and then to adapt it to Cosmic, all I had to do was just change a couple of things from like the KDE one, for example. And you'll find that there's a lot of those kinds of things where you have to make PRs and different repos for like, LiveSys scripts, Kiwi descriptions.

Kiwi, I think, is like an image builder tool that they have. But yeah, then they'll use that stuff to actually start building ISOs at the spin. So that's actually where I'm at now. We recently got our first official cosmic ISOs of the spin. So that's actually where I'm at now. We recently got our first official Cosmic ISOs in Rawhide. So if you wanted to download them, you just go to Rawhide and yeah. So we have the official Fedora Cosmic spin now in Rawhide. We don't have an atomic image yet. That's another thing that needs consideration. I'm working with

image yet. That's another thing that needs consideration. I'm working with Timothy Ravier. I probably butchered that name. I'm American, sorry. But he works on all of the atomic images, but he particularly loves Kinoi, so he's big on Kinoi. But he's helping out with the cosmic atomic image, which is what I'll personally be using and I'm very excited about From there you need to talk with marketing to figure out how you're gonna market the spin need to talk to the website people So you have your website for the spin? You need to make sure that the install installation media works. So Cal they don't do these calamar as they use a Anaconda, that's right. You have to They use anaconda. That's right. You have to make sure anaconda works with your spin

because basically the live image will spawn your desktop environment of choice and it'll show anaconda in like a maximize window. There's actually an issue in Cosmic Comp right now where that window doesn't maximize for some reason, but that's like a minor detail. Apparently, the maximize request is not being honored. But yeah, pretty soon,

I'm going to have to get an ISO to actually start dogfooding that for myself, making sure that everything is stable and people can install from that media. I think Neil, just out of curiosity did an initial install and he said things were working pretty good. But yeah, from that's from there. Oh, my phone's at low battery now. Oh, well, I'll get that in just a second. So from there, I think honestly, just making sure you're responding to bug reports and stuff. And then once the official spin comes out, making sure everything's stable and continuing to maintain it, obviously. Yeah, that's kind of like from zero to hero for a spin.

So what about the the SIG then? Like where does that sit in this? Oh yeah I forgot about that part. Yeah you'll want to near the start of your intent to make packages you'll probably want to make a special interest group. Sorry I'm grabbing my charger. Yeah, so Fedora SIGs are pretty easy to create. You just explain that there's a new desktop environment or you want to package this desktop environment and you want to create a group of people similarly interested in that goal. From there, most of the time it'll just be approved. I don't actually know if there are many SIGs that aren't.

Probably the ones where it doesn't seem like people would maintain it. Sorry, trying to find the plug here. Yeah. So making a SIG is definitely important. I would put that either if you want help building the packages, you probably want to put that step before you make the packages themselves. So yeah, that's what I ended up doing, but I still ended up doing the packages all by myself. And now at this point, I have so much like automated infrastructure surrounding it that if people want to help, I'm going to have to start documenting things.

And that's another goal. You got to document your processes, especially when you get close to spin release. You also want to document like, you want desktop environment specific documentation. Because I believe there's KDE docs, there's GNOME docs and there's Gnome docs, and probably for other spins as well.

But you know, just common, common use cases, what you'd want to do and how to solve problems. So there's actually some, oh, sorry, go on. There was somebody who volunteered to do some documentation. Yeah. No, go on. I was going to say, um, what sort of support have you received for doing this? How many people are involved in the SIG and just general interest in the project?

Yeah, so the biggest involvement has been me and Neil. That's why it was just us two on the change proposal. But there have been a couple of people have done significant work on some of the build scripts. I know that Wheeze Noakes, I don't know if you've seen him around the Cosmic repos as well. He's an occasional contributor to Cosmic and I believe, I mean, he's a Fedora user, so I guess he wanted to contribute some to the automated build scripts. And so I gave him SIG access. So he's a member of the SIG. The guy who heads the Rust SIG, his name is Fabio Valentini. He's been a huge help, especially with Rust related questions.

Russ related questions. He developed a tool called Russ to RPM that helps you at least get started with the packages. But you know, I had to do some modifications because that that tool assumes that you're not vendoring your dependencies. And you know, I had that exception and all that. Where I was able to vendor. But yeah, so he's been a he's been a huge help. And then there was that guy who wants to do documentation. I actually don't know the status on that. But other than that, it's just been people generally interested in Cosmic and bringing up issues when they exist and all that. So yeah. Sweet. That's the key.

So it sounds like things are coming along pretty well then. Yeah, things are coming along well. I think that really the biggest question is when will Cosmic release stable? I think that's important for us at Fedora to know because we like to align our release schedules with releases of spins. And I would hope that their release schedule closely aligns with ours. Obviously, it's not a release blocker. This isn't a very important spin yet. But I hope that they release maybe close to April. Beta? Look, you'll have Beta by then, hopefully.

Yeah, yeah, I I Really don't know like if if they're planning on making an alpha fix which word on the street is that they are and I Don't know they're not gonna hit their March deadline. I'm sure that But I can I can say that because I don't work at system 76 They're gonna try to keep their their they're trying to be optimistic about their release schedule Well, I asked Jeremy about it on mastodon. He's like we're gonna do it. We're pretty much gonna do an alpha 6 and Yeah, that's that he wasn't anything else after that Yeah, I mean they've worked so hard like all credit to them, they're great at what they do.

It's just a lot to bring up an entire desktop environment. Yeah. So, and I, you know, I've missed the respect for them putting all that work anyways into it. They're a small company that does hardware. They, as much as they say that, you know, their customers wanted a certain experience, so they made it say that, you know, their customers wanted a certain experience so they made it, like, they didn't have to do this necessarily.

Like they could have had a similar experience somewhere else with modifications, but I don't know. It sounded like that was unenticing for them. And I think some of that's just ideological. Yeah, they did. And they ended up having a falling out with Gnome, of course. Yeah, that was before my time. But I remember, I remember hearing chatter about it in the modern day Gnome chats. Yeah. That's another fun thing about being on Matrix is you get to see like inner development chats and seeing how GNOME people and KDE people like converse and talk about issues and stuff. I've seen GNOME people like casually talk about the System 76 stuff.

I think they're a lot more mellow about it now, like they're fine. But I know that it seemed to be pretty heated back in the day. Yeah, yeah. Well, most people, it's just a thing that happened, right? I can imagine the people who are directly involved with it might still, you know, might still hold some grudges. Yeah, there's very much an ideological dispute there between Gnome and System 76. But I kind of, I guess, appreciate System 76 for being like, well, we'll make our own

thing, you know? Gnome is not offering what we need, so we'll make our own thing. And we're going to make it open source and all the good stuff that we appreciate about the software we currently use. And I like that because it provides insulation for the project as well. It means that if something were to happen to system 76, at the very least someone can pick it up, but it would probably take a lot of work to do so. But at least at least it's not like, you know, something that could be hoarded. Right. Like, oh, we're going to take the source down and all that.

So I appreciate GPL for that reason. Yeah, I appreciate all the work that system 76 has done. And obviously, it's still not done yet. But yes, I think that look, I think how needs to stop mentioning dates. Like that's what he said. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing with like same thing with the GIMP developers.

Stop saying dates. it yeah you you you've clearly shown you are like system 76 they've just made one date it's clearly wrong but like the GIMP people need to stop talking about dates like they clearly have no ability to judge when things are gonna happen yeah yeah they do what i do at work i i want to be optimistic and i'm like i think I can get this thing done like here. And then it always ends up that there's issues and you know, that's just the nature of software. But yeah, someone should take his mic away and tell him to stop doing dates. Like after the after you know, the third, fourth, fifth delay, like just stop saying dates. Just it'll be done when it's done.

It'll be done when it's done. Yes. And that's uh, that's the GIMP the GIMP way That's gonna be the cosmic way. I I think GIMP has an RC. So, you know, they're on their way They're getting there. Do you use GIMP for your thumbnails by the way? Yeah, I use I've been using the GIMP 3 I've used it since like maybe six months ago before the RC happened Nice. Nice. Yeah Do you think it's stable and ready then? Yeah, yeah, there's a couple little bugs. The undo system is a little bit weird, like if you copy text in, the text you copied in isn't part of the undo, so if you should undo it, it

undoes like the last act, like different so weird yeah interesting yeah but the global history is got to be nice yeah but it's mostly there I remember early on when I tried it it just the especially the running on Wayland it was just a little little little bit rough very crashy no it's pretty much solid at this point that's great. Yeah. Uh, I've never really used GIMP, but I guess nowadays I don't really have a reason to. Um, I remember when I was making thumbnails back in my YouTube days, I used a program on

Windows called Paint.net. I don't know if you've heard of it. Uh, it's, I don't know if it's, it's probably Windows only. Yeah. heard of it. It's I don't know if it's it's probably windows only. Yeah, but yeah. Because I mean, especially if it's old.net old.net wasn't as cross platform. I mean, it's been is only. Yeah. I and I also hired a Photoshop at point, but I didn't really use it a whole time. But yeah, um, I don't know. YouTube was fun for a time. Well, I think we've pretty much hit on everything I wanted to talk about. So I reckon that's as good a place as any to end off.

Yeah, it sounds good to me. So, I mean, thank you for, oh, sorry, go on. No, don't, what you to me. So thank you for. I'm sorry, going. No, I don't. What are you saying? I'll do what I'm saying. I mean, I was going to say thank you for having me on. It's been a lot of fun. And I always love a chance to to nerd out about Linux and Cosmic and all that stuff. So yes, much appreciated.

Yeah. And I I also love listening to your podcasts. I mean, thank you. Whenever I'm whenever I'm driving between here and my home in Texas, it's nice noise for the drive. And it's fun to hear all sorts of different perspectives on all things Linux. So yeah, I appreciate it. So if people want to get involved in the Fedora Cosmic SIG or anything else, if they want to get involved in Cosmic itself or anything you want to direct people to, give them places

they can go. Sure. So I always recommend building things for upstream. If you have a feature that you really want, I think the best way to take action is to, you know, make it come to life yourself. But also, if you're not a programmer and you want to do stuff like documentation, that's something that they very much need over time. As their stuff gets more complex, be nice to have built documentation, explanations of what all the sub reposed do and all that stuff.

And if you want to get involved in Fedora Cosmic, we also need that same kind of stuff. And we have a matrix group for that. And I don't know if you do links in the description for podcast guests, but we can link that in the description. And I would say definitely join, even if you're not, even if you just want to lurk, because I'm a huge lurker and all sorts of Matrix chats, you know, that is totally fine. You don't have to say anything. You can just watch what's going on.

But yeah. Awesome. Nothing else you want to mention? Try out the Cosmic Spin when it comes out and report bugs it we definitely need bug reporters and all that stuff and Me and a couple others are are working on making the spin as stable as possible. So yeah We met with hell available in rawhide now, so I might have it's available in ride I might yes down and give that a try on stream

Yes, and you know if it if it sucks. Let me know if the experience is terrible I want to know and if the experience is good. I guess I also want to know that too awesome Okay as to me my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six days a week. I've got the gaming channel. I stream over there twice a week. Right now I'll be playing through probably, I'll probably be done with my side. So I'll probably be playing Ender Magnolia and Nine Souls. Nine Souls? Nine Souls? Yeah, I'm streaming nine souls. It's very good. Yeah, I'm almost done with that game.

I love it. It's great. I love Metroidvania games. It's so fun. Yeah, me too. I'm waiting for Silksong. Yeah, one day. One day it'll happen. Maybe I'll go find the... Look, Silksong, Team Cherry,

they're like in Adelaide. So I'll like find their studio and knock on their door. Go bash their door down. Yeah, I wonder how many fans they get all the time for that. But yeah. Actually, just random thing about Silksong. When Hollow Knight was, I think it was when it was first demoeded they demoed it at the really small like anime and video game con that we have in my state I was like I wasn't even like

involved in like I didn't really care too much you at gaming at point so I didn't actually play it is something I learned like way after the fact but like that would have been so cool to play it when that when that happened Yeah, like pre-release and everything that would be so cool. I Don't know maybe they probably won't do that again, but I can always hope Now I think they'll do packs next time rather than some little car. Yeah So I've got my reaction aware upload stream clips as well, that is BrodyRopsandReacts And if you're watching the video version of this you can find the audio version on YouTube at- No, you can find the audio version on Spotify at Tech Over Tea

I have an RSS feed as well, if you want to find the video version it is on YouTube at Tech Over Tea Yeah, um, we have fun episodes, we have KD people, we have sex toy developers, we have Cosmic Spin people. A whole gamut. Yeah, exactly. So I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say? How do you want to sign us off?

Ooh, and I always know you do this to people and I still don't know. It's fun. Try Cosmic. Yep, fair enough.