I started my journey into Linux as my main OS last decade, sometime in 2013. I started with Cinnamon. I used it for couple of years. It must be around 2015 when LMDE 2 was being developed when I finally settled with Fedora and GNOME after going through dozens of distro-hopping and trying out different DEs.

No more GNOME

I’m not saying this out of spite or hatred. GNOME is a good desktop and I love it. I like the simplicity. I like the aesthetics. I like that its snappy and I don’t need to tinker much to get it going.

However, I’m falling in love with something else: COSMIC. It’s new and shiny. Well that’s primarily it. But also it’s so much closer to GNOME, something I love. I also love that it’s written in Rust. Apart from the usual benefits of Rust: speed, performance, safety; I’m more interested because the code will be simpler due to it sitting on the shoulder of giants and I will be contribute back.

I’m not planning on doing regular contributions and all that. But even if I can contribute to COSMIC occasionally, that’s better than nothing. Not only that, but also, I’ll be more comfortable knowing I will be able to tweak the code instead of waiting for someone else, just the feeling I felt when moved from Windows to Linux.

GNOME no more?

This is my radical thought - Will GNOME not exist anymore? Not immediately but say in 5-10 years. I can see this happenning. If COSMIC get to the place where it is aiming to be, a set of tools for developing any kind of DE, would it be so easy to make a GNOME on top of COSMIC and its tools? Would it make more maintanable that GNOME, in its form would feel like legacy? I can see that happening in next 5 years. I already feel it today but I can see more people feeling it this way with time.

Farewell?

I’m not at that stage yet. However, I’ve been running Cosmic Alpha 4 since last month and it has been mostly stable for the most part. I only had to login with GNOME once, and because it lost my audio devices and wouldn’t show my headphone and monitor mic and speakers in the audio selector. And that was once.

Other than that, COSMIC session wouldn’t start. I create a second user and see if COSMIC was broken. It wasn’t. Must have been my configuration. I think an update wasn’t compatible with my previous configuration and it broke without me changing anything. ALPHA SOFTWARE :hehe:.

Today, they released Alpha 5 and I’m not that excited because I daily check their logs and update my system daily with my Universal Blue image. I already knew most of these changes and had already been using them.