COSMIC Does KDE’s Motto Better Than KDE

It's been a while since I last tried Cosmic and I can prove it. Last time I tried it, it was a late alpha. Now it's stable. So yeah, I should probably try it again and see if I should switch to it. Spoiler alert, I'm too much of a Kitty fanboy to do that. But still, still I'm going to explain my reasoning. So let's get through that. And you know, trying things out, the vibe that I get, and I'll get to why is it does a few things, but like really well. and it kind of mocks Plasma in its own motto. It goes without saying that there's like no other desktop environment that does customization like Plasma does because mostly a it has a great community for many years that have built so many application plugins outlets and also b it's popular also in commercial uh devices such as the Steam Deck. So there's no comparison there really yet. But still, Cosmic is not really trying to compare to plasma in that regard. It's trying to do its own thing and it's trying to do it really well. So, does it do it well? It does. Let's go through a few things that I'm deeply envious of in talking about cosmic. Firstly, all of the settings in the appearance section, but in the settings application, uh apply instantly. Like you click them, they apply. Sounds obvious. Uh, well, Kitty Plasma doesn't do that. You have to click the apply button every time you change something. And by the way, on Cosmic, there's also a few animations when you do that. Not a lot yet, but I think they're working through it. As an example, if you switch between light and dark mode, there's the top bar, which fades, which is nice. K Plasma has just always been thought of as [music] you apply things, and that's the structure underneath. And it's not very easy to just switch to. Yeah, I will just make sure that everything applies instantly. It's not that easy. Although there has been some progress. I'll try to defend Plasma Year a bit. Also, as an example, there's uh recently, like a couple of years ago, uh a new Kwin plugin that basically takes a screenshot before you change a setting so that when you change it, it fades the entire screen from the old setting to the new one, which I think is really nice. two consistent rounded corners. Uh yes, in cosmic options you get three um choices which is round, slightly round and square and you just switch instantly between them and they apply everywhere. So you get the panel, the uplets, the applications all using uh the corner radius that you selected which is great because yes people do have different tastes in regard to this and maybe I don't want whatever uh Android is doing by making everything a circle. Maybe I don't want that. Maybe I do like rectangles. Maybe I'm more of a Microsoft guy apparently. Again, this is something that Kitty plasma struggles with a lot because yes, there actually is a consistent corner radius metric that applications and the shell use to do things. Uh but at the same time, a lot of the shell is drawn by the plasma theme which actually is SVGs uh under the hood which means that uh SVGs can't actually read that metric. So the corner radius is hardcoded there and so even if we allowed the user to change this corner radius metric which we currently don't as far as I know at least uh it wouldn't apply to a bunch of stuff such as buttons such as applets such as the panel so it kind of defeats the whole purpose and cosmix just has that now yes we are trying to solve that and by we I mean other kitty developer I'm not doing anything here. But there's a new theming system that's being built which is called Union. I'll talk more about it later, but the idea is instead of just having SVGs doing the plasma theming, you have a lot of different options to do theming that gets pulled into this abstract representation of a theme and then that gets used to do applications, to do the plasma theme and everything. And so in that abstract representation, you could go ahead and change just the corner radius of things. Uh so that could be an option but is you know union is still early alpha let's say I don't know if that's the right term but there's still a bit of work to be done um and also even if it was done we would still need to implement that feature and we don't have it so you know kudos to uh cosmic for having this and three interface density basically the same thing here again you get three options and you can make things more dense or more sparse Which again this is a great idea because people have different taste and personally I quite like Gnome where everything has a lot of spacing because you know I have touch screens and I do appreciate being able to use like a tablet mode that doesn't change everything. Kitty plasma is more dense, but at the same time it tries to add more spacing selectively when you switch to tablet mode, which is sort of makes sense, but it's just nicer to have a interface density option in settings. And maybe in the future you could make it so that if you switch to a tablet mode by as an example detaching a keyboard, it automatically ramps up ramps down the density. That could be a very nice feature. And they already have everything they need to do this. It could just be a script. Actually, this is great. [music] Again, it's not like K Plasma doesn't have metrics for interface density. There's al all of the spacing uh stuff. But again, it doesn't really matter because anyway, the plasma theme isn't following that. So, it makes no sense to try to change it. So, Union will fix it, I guess. Hopefully. Will you Union? Please. Four uh simple color options. And yeah, you get five options which are accent color, background of windows, background of side panels, foreground of text, and foreground of controls like the background of a button, I should say. Um, and that's it. These are all of the five colors you get to pick. And honestly, yeah, what else would I want to pick? Like this is everything. All the applications are drawn based on these five colors. [music] And they're all very intuitive. And as soon as you change them, you see things changing live on the screen. So it's perfect. What else do you want to do now? PD plasma on the other hand does things completely differently because you have color schemes which are so much powerful. Obviously you get the ability to change every single color for every single component in seven different sections which I won't even try to explain to you because I don't understand them myself fully. And then of course each color scheme also has a lot of options uh for how the color scheme behaves. As an example, how tinted are certain colors based on other colors. And when if you want to change just the background color of something, you have to go into the color scheme, create a new color scheme, go changing a lot of uh colors into these seven different sections and then save a new color scheme and apply that which is much more powerful. But also, I I I personally don't want to do that. There's a lot of already made color schemes, which is nice. But if you just want to change a few colors, yeah, it's it's kind of a hell. And I wouldn't be surprised if a new user wasn't able to do that. I'm not sure I'm able to sometimes to be honest. It's a lot of colors. Believe me, go check it out. It's a lot of colors to pick from. So, it it really feels like sure it it's cosmic isn't as powerful. it only gets I don't know 95% of the weather. But who who is this user who really wants to customize just the color of the separator between elements and not like the text just just the separators? And are there really users that are that sold on having complete full control of all colors or or probably everybody or almost everybody is just happy to change this five. Five, the ability to import and export appearance settings. Now again, you can do something similar with Kitty Plasma because you can go ahead and everything is modular. So you can create a new color scheme, a new plasma theme, a new overall theme, and then you can go ahead and package that color scheme, package the plasma theme, and package everything into a look and feel theme, which by the way, I always get wrong myself, and then upload that to the store. or in cosmic you can just click export and it's going to give you a dotfront file which you can give to a friend and that friend can import it and that's it. It's not the same obviously because uh you know those plugins those modules from Kitty Plasma give you a lot of more functionality and power but um at the same time again it feels like 95% of the people are just going to be fine with just exporting and importing the run file which is going to change all of the appearance settings and that's easier. I I would guess that for most users uh the difference between Cosmic and Kitty Plasma is that in Kitty Plasma they cannot share their own um appearance settings. If they customize anything packaging that is pretty difficult and they're probably not going to do that. So it's a different it's the difference between being able to share settings and not being able to show settings and that's a big difference. Six. Uh yes. Yes. I I just had to frosted glass. So my kitty friends know that I have a thing for blur and transparency and frosted glass and you know cosmic has implemented it um few months ago and it looks great. What do I have to say? Especially because you can actually apply it selectively to yes panels, yes applets, yes the whole system interface, but also windows like applications which is where Kitty Plasma doesn't shine because sure you can make Kitty apps transparent sort of. It works for cute widgets applications but then the Kirugami apps don't really get transparent and maybe you can hack around it but doesn't really work. It's a bit of a mess right now to get that to work on all Kitty apps consistently. And in here, it's just a button and you click it and it works out of the box. And I love it. What do I have to say? I just love it. Now, making frosted glass is actually much harder than it looks because you don't just, you know, make a thing transparent, blur, and then apply some noise over it. You actually also have to make sure that there's enough contrast between the application and the background at all times. Which means that you have to lighten up, brighten or darken the background depending uh like selectively depending on how dark or light the background is. It it's actually really not simple and there's a lot of logic that Kitty Plasma does to achieve this. Uh it also boosts the saturation of the background or anything that's behind a transparent uh panel uplet to make sure that even if the outlet is quite opaque, you still get that tinted look from the background which looks very nice. So there's actually a lot of logic behind it, a lot of work, a lot of my work. Finally, can can I say that I'm proud of how things look because I put a lot of effort into changing the values of this frosted look that Kelly plasma has. Cosmic doesn't really achieve all that, but also probably most users won't notice any difference. Sure, it doesn't boost contrast and saturation as much as Kitty Plasma does in a nice way, but also who cares [laughter] me. But apart from me, again, it's a thing of it gets 95% of the weather. Uh but it's the 95% that matters to people and also it means that the thing actually works nicely out of the box. It instant applies to windows as well as panels and uplets. It's just a nicer experience overall and you don't have to switch themes in order to make the panel transparent. So yeah, but you know sure it's not actually that hard. I mean it is but it's not that hard to do a desktop that's simple by default. But then if you have to like make it really powerful, that's where it gets much harder. Like as an example, of course, Kitty Plasma allows you to change the panels, move them around, change the size, change every uplet within the panel, move them around, add new uplets, add third party uplets. That's the cool part. But of course, Cosmic has all of that, too. [laughter] Wait. Cosmic offers one uh panel and one dock which sure KL offers more panels as an option, not just two. But at the same time, again, I've never seen a person use three panels in their setup. Maybe a segmented panel, which looks like multiple panels, but actually it's the same one just transparent where there's no uplets. I've never seen a person really wanting to have one, two, and three panels or docks or whatever. So, so maybe two is fine. Why allow more than two? I guess [music] uh to these panels and now to this panel and doc you can apply a few settings that plasma also offers namely dodge windows uh change position on the screen floating mode um extend to borders versus fit content width and the thickness. This is actually more than I expected. Like it's a good selection of settings. Uh, of course they also offer a few things that we don't offer, such as the ability to mirror the same panel onto multiple monitors. I would love to have that in Ky Plasma. I have no idea how to implement it. I I I really thought about it, but the issue is that uh you can't really mirror an applet. And because we have this uplet thing, it's kind of hell because if you change the settings of an uplet in a monitor, it also needs to update to all of the other applets live. And then there's also a lot of logic that just assumes that there's going to be just one instance of an outlet, which is not going to happen if you mirror the panel. And then what if the uh screens have different resolutions which means one panel has to be bigger things are going to look different. It's not that easy actually and they just have it. They also have the ability to change the color scheme of the panel and the dock individually and the ability to change the opacity of the panel and the dock individually on top of the system opacity for the frosted glass mode. Yes, I'm reading my notes here. Yes, these are all very nice options that K plusban does offer, but you need to switch to a third-party themes to do that. Instead, in Cosmic, it's just a slider. Nice. [clears throat] Now, of course, K Plasma offers some options that Cosmic doesn't have for panels and docks. namely the ability to align docks uh left or right or just as any specific point in your monitor and the ability to switch between uplets that float versus uplets that are attached to the panel. And that's kind of it. Like I I started writing this list thinking ah it's going to be a bunch of it's just this couple things. I thought it was I really thought that it was going to be more than that. Now, of course, we also have plasma themes, which means that you can customize entirely the look of the panel. Have very different looking panels, not just transparency, not just color, but also if you want, I don't know, a texture or an image, but also most people that I see around don't really care for that. Not that much at least. Like all the themes that I see people actually use, apart from maybe oxygen, are just changing color, transparency, and the icon theme. That's mostly it. People seem to be happy with this. And then of course, Cosmic has a page that shows you all of the uplets within that panel and you can just drag and drop to um reorder them. Now, you could say actually here Koplasma wins because we have what you see is what you get type of editing where you just enter edit mode and you can drag and drop things around directly within the panel. And that's cool. But also as somebody who has maintained that feature uh for a bunch of years I think uh I kind of grew to hate that because it's kind of so unreliable. It breaks so easily. It's actually finicky because sometimes uplet are quite small and the idea to just have a list and you just drag and drop things between a list. Yes, please give me that. Even just as as I use I actually don't want to go into the panel and drag and drop things around. I just want a good list with big targets that I can actually click and drag and drop without things breaking. And in K Plasma, if you drag the wrong way, uh the updates actually gets dragged away from the panel and into the desktop, which is a feature that Cosmic doesn't have. But also, I don't want that if I'm trying to just re reorder things within the panel. So, it ends up kind of being in the way, even though, yes, it's cool to have it. So yeah, just having a list that you can reorder make made me happy. And then you can remove uplets just clicking on the delete icon and you can add new ones and there's a selection of systems on one. Even nicer, Cosmic does offer um example template uh to develop third party uplets. So evidently that's a thing. However, they don't really have a store yet as far as I know. So it is still nice that if I want a custom widget, I can still go at new widget, open store, search, and then I just download it directly within Kitty Plasma instead of having to download it from I don't know how it works to download third party cosmic uplets. Maybe that's something they're going to work on next. I don't know. Of course, maybe the fact that they don't have a store is linked to the fact that I don't think there's many third party applets at all yet. uh they don't yet have a community around cosmic to do this dot run files for appearance and for this custom uplets and they don't even have settings for uplets yet. I think this is something they said that they are working on. [clears throat] So yeah, plasma still wins hands down because of the community the amount of options that you have. You know, Cosmic is super new and this is just things that they're going to work on. Which brings me to the next thing that I love about Cosmic, which [clears throat] is the tiling. Obviously, the tiling is so great. There's an applet always there. I mean, I guess you can remove it again. It's customizable, but but out of the box, it's there. And it has a button to switch between floating and tiling. And you can change the default behavior for new workspaces because this is a per workspace feature. And there's also all of the shortcuts that you need to uh handle the tiling which is super nice. Could have been a very easy mistake just not to expose the settings the sorry the shortcuts directly within the applet. instant they do that [clears throat] and they they allow the user to stack windows which basically is like getting two different windows into one and then you have um a tab I think on the top and you can click the different tabs to switch between the applications. It's called tabbed windows basically instead of stacking in my heart at least. And this is a feature that KD had I think back in Kitty 4 or was it Kitty 3? I don't remember like a while ago. This was a feature uh it was never ported to the next major release of Kitty and [music] it never came back. So it's actually really good to see it here especially because the idea is actually pretty nice being able to [music] stack windows together. I love that. And then you actually try out the tiling and they just nailed it. Like it works so well. The the UX is great. The shortcuts are easy to use. There's all of this uh outline to uh show you the groups and switch with things within a group. It It's just perfect. It's how I would want tiling to be everywhere for me. [music] And especially good, I think, is that the fact that I'm not a ting person. You probably will have guessed by now. I don't use like I don't know hyperland. I'm not that kind of person. Uh and probably most people on the planet earth are not taling p people persons I don't know they they've never tried it. And the idea of just having something that works so intuitively out of the box that it feels like everybody could just try it out and give it a shot and understand how it works. It really means that they nailed the implementation and that it's super intuitive and that it just works. So again, very big congratulations to whoever designed the tiling mode because it's perfect and I love it. So is it perfect? Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect. Thank god. [clears throat] Uh there's still bugs, which again, fair enough. When you do this kind of things from scratch, there's going to be bugs. It's fine. Uh, I did it a couple. Uh, but it was very small stuff. As an example, the search button, if you click on it, it moves one by one pixel. No big deal. It's a very small thing obviously, but but you see that and you think, uh, but yeah, which explains, I think, why they spent much of the last year just doing polishing and making sure it's stable, completely reasonable, and it's what I would expect out of them right now instead of shipping new major features. They still managed to get frosting glass through which is awesome. And by the way, Frosting Glass, I forgot to say this, uh uses a wheeland API under the hood. So applications could also implement that API and we could have a a common way for applications to be transparent throughout uh window managers. That would be nice. I'm hoping that will happen, but that's just me. And secondly, u there's still a limited amount of applications and community. This one is obvious, a very new project in the grand scheme of things. There's still not a big community around it. There's not many third party things. And of course, all of the nice spacing and corner radius and frosted glass things only apply if there if the applications are using the uh cosmic toolkit to their applications. Uh which is also partly new. That's nice. probably almost all applications that you will need to actually do work are not going to be using that toolkit. There's not this big community around the toolkit. So less cool because but again this is just a question of time. Over time I I'm certain that they will get more people using this more people doing applications using their toolkit and more people doing applets as an example. Thirdly, and I'm terribly sorry to say this. I'm I'm terribly sorry. I just don't like the design. I'm sorry. Like, yes, everything you see that it's done with care, but when you open an application and that there's the sidebar as a random rectangle within the application, which is more opaque. I just don't like that. And then sometimes you you open a sidebar and it kind of is drawn on top of the cont content of the window and it's a bit weird. I I I just don't feel the design. That's not my thing. It's fine. But of course, if I said that for Kitty Plasma, I I would have an option to just change the theme, change how things look in here. Yes, I can do a lot of customizations. I can change the colors. And believe me, that is almost enough for me. But still at the very end, I'm still kind of like, h I wish this was designed more like Gnome. Sorry. But I I really like how Gnome designs things and the Gnome applications usually look very good. And also Kitty Plasma, I still think that's a better design. I I quite like how Kitty Plasma applications are done, but obviously I'm biased, but but still this it's just not my taste. It happens. It's not an intrinsic problem with Cosmic. It's just a reason why I, Nicola Vanerandi have a little bit of trouble switching to it, but I I could eventually, just not right now. So, putting this all together, it feels like Cosmic has managed to do a desktop that is simple by default and powerful when needed, which is the KD motto. It It really feels like it's a very powerful desktop. This ability to just change all upsets, all the panels, looks very easily, that's very powerful to me. And sure, you don't get this crazy custom themes, but is that what power is custom? I don't know. It still feels like on the very Kitty Moto Cosmic does a little better there. But I do think that Kitty Plasma is something that makes it so much more awesome. And that's why I'm seeing with Kitty Plasma obviously. And it's not just the community, although that's a big part of it of of course like there's an insane amount of themes and it's a lot of them are super creative doing super interesting stuff and it's lovely to just go through the store and see what I I really feel like Kitty Plasma is like the desktop environment of creativity. Not necessarily like the best design. Possibly Gnome has the best design in my very humble opinion. But just the raw amount of creativity from the users, from the the theme developers were like order of magnitudes better in in my opinion. I just love that. But also, it's almost reductive to call Kitty Plus by just a desktop environment. like it it's built in such a modular way that it makes sure that if you need to something else entirely, not just a desk environment for your laptop or desktop. Uh you can just do that and preserve all of the good stuff of Kitty Plasma. Like obviously good examples are Kitty Big Screen for TVs and Kitty mobile for mobile phones. They get to use the same technology as Kitty Plasma and also like retain the applets. But I I'll give you a better example. One time I was actually paid to do a UI for a smart mirror. It was which cool, let's do that. Now I could have done that from scratch, but for me the smart part was just taking K plasma doing a custom theme that resembled the branding of the company doing the smart mirror and then you know doing a custom shell for this because uh the dressup is just the shell. You can swap it out with something else. So you can do custom shells. And the upside is that I still need to offer like an ability to connect to Bluetooth the Wi-Fi. I'm not going to handle that manually. Of course, I can just use the default Wi-Fi and Bluetooth applets that K offers out of the box. And instead of being inside of panel, I put them into a hardcoded position. And if you click click them, it they open in the middle of the screen with the custom theme. It actually feels very different, but it's just KD Plasma with a custom shell and it just works and a custom theme. I I I truly love that Plasma is built in a way that allows you to do so much more than what you would normally think. I just love that. I just love Kitty Plasma. What can I do? Sue me. So overall my my my uh bottom line review of Cosmic which I have written down so I feel like I should read it is that um Cosmic is a desktop environment that nails the desktop part and is still working on the environment part which is fine. They're very new. So I'm really excited for them and I'm really interested to see what's going to happen. Now last thing which I should have said during the video but uh if you dislike my voice understandably uh in the video description there's a link to this whole thing but as an article which is what I was referencing uh while reading stuff and also if you want to donate you can go to that website and [music] subscribe and you get a few perks they're on the website and uh you know just help me out. You don't have to. I'm fine. But like if you want to help out, that's also cool.