Adventure in Cosmic DE

So a few days ago I heard online that CosmicDE hit a new version and decided to try it out. For context, Cosmic is a desktop enviroment that uses its own toolkit insted of GTK or QT, and unlike Enlightenment it is actively developed. I use Void Linux so I ended up having to use a 3rd party repo on github. Unfortunetly, the version packaged was a bit outdated but I was still able to experience it.

Positives

CosmicDE feels like a unified and tight-knit experience and comes with a few applications (terminal, video player, and file manager). I liked the hybrid between a tiling WM and traditonal DE useage, I haven't seen many DE/WMs try and tackle that and IMO Cosmic does a solid job. Theming is also present (and shown below) unlike GNOME and is consistent with applications that share its toolkit. Cosmic also has more quality of life features, such as a system tray.

Normally I use Emacs but I wanted to show off the default text editor

Issues

Cosmic is still rather buggy, and because I don't use systemD I had some issues. For example, volume does not work properly and the system tray doesn't work for all applications. Some animations felt rough and so far I cannot figure how to autohide the dock. Cosmic is also Wayland only, so some utilities I use like redshift and xscreensaver don't work properly; because of the latter I had issues locking my screen. I know CosmicDE does have its own display manager but it didn't come with the repo I used to install Cosmic. Emacs also had an intermittent issue of not displaying the minibuffer. For some bizzare reason Alt-Tab is completly absent and WILL be disorenting to experience. Yes Cosmic does have its own key shortcuts for navigating windows but it is still baffling why Alt-Tab support isn't included. Some of the suite applications themselves were buggy, for example the file manager has this weird bug where it will also display in the background(?).

Additonal thoughts

Overall it feels promising and what GNOME should be, but it still needs some time in the oven. I also hope System76 (creators of Cosmic) lean into having a scripting language to quickly create GUI applications. If it can do that, I belive Cosmic will have serious adoption rates and dethrone GNOME.