COSMIC Desktop ALPHA: a unique & important project for Linux!

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Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
01:06 Sponsor: Proton Mail
02:10 Desktop Layout
04:27 Layout customization
06:33 Window management
09:26 Theming
12:28 Applications
16:24 General info & why it’s important
20:17 Support the channel

#Cosmic #linux #linuxdesktop #popos

The default will be very, very familiar to anyone who already used PopOS. You have a bottom dock and a top panel. The dock has your app icons and access to the app library and the launcher, the top panel lets you access the workspaces, the apps, the time and date, and your system tray.

The settings let you do whatever the hell you want to these panels and docks. You can move any of these to any screen edge, you can move any applet from one to the other, size them how you want, make them fully transparent, you can replicate any layout you’d like, basically, and if you’d like to just have one single taskbar at the bottom, you can always make the top panel transparent, and auto hide it, after removing all of its applets.

Of course, one of the main advantages of PopOS was always its auto tiling features, and they return here in Cosmic. You can obviously manually tile windows on screen edges, or corners, to half tile, maximize, or quarter tile, but you also get the nice auto tiling applet in the top bar.
You can turn on auto tiling for the current workspace, and keep a different behavior for other workspaces, and you can even set that behavior for any new workspace that is created, since these are dynamic, like in GNOME.

After that, you can either navigate using the keyboard or the mouse, and you have a nice visual hint around the currently focused window as well. You can also stack windows by placing them on top of one another, and this will add tabs in the titlebars of these windows. These stacks will persist even if you untile the desktop, and you can create these stacks even with floating windows, and if a stack is currently focused, all new windows will open inside of this stack. You can destack things by just dragging them out of it.

Now, in terms of theming, Cosmic has the usual light and dark mode, and accent colors, from a palette, or with a color picker. Then, you can change the other colors: you can change the window background color, the color of containers, so the sidebars and options popovers, the color of the interface text, the tint of the controls, and the color of the hint for the active window, if you want it to be different from the accent color.

Other options let you change the shape of the controls, rounded, rounded squares and pure squares. And as the cherry on top, you get the ability to change the icon theme, and to apply your color theme to Gnome apps, including libadwaita and flatpak apps.

Finally, let’s look at the apps. The app store is nothing crazy, it works with apps from the PopOS repos, and flatpaks as well, with flathub being turned on by default, at least in the PopOS alpha, you can’t see app permissions, links to the developer’s website, verification status, or anything like that.

The terminal has themes, profiles, lets you split the current terminal, it supports tabs, it can even be semi transparent. it’s a good terminal app for most people.

The Text editor will be fine for most people as well, it does have some development oriented features, like tab width settings for identation, or a project view for navigating a directory. It also has git management features baked in, but it won »t replace your favorite IDE any time soon.

Finally, the file manager is very barebones for now, it does support tabs, and it has a sidebar, you get a grid view and a list view, the ability to show hidden files, and a few view settings, but that’s it. No archiving features, no split view, no terminal integration, no side panels, it’s more Nautilus than Dolphin for now.

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