Category: Linux

system76’s alpha 2 cosmic desktop environment

whbeebe

I re-installed System 76’s Cosmic Desktop Alpha 2 into a virtual machine tonight. I know I was a little harsh about Alpha 1, and accused the system of not properly handling keyboard input. It turns out that the problem was actually with QEMU/KVM itself, because the keyboard input problem affected all the virtual machines I have installed on this system. That problem seems to have mysteriously fixed itself (probably with an update), so that keyboard input is acting normal again.

I’ve managed to install Hack Nerd Fonts and the PowerLine packages for both the bash shell as well as vim. I also grabbed and installed fastfetch from the fastfetch git repo. You’ll note that fastfetch shows the desktop is Cosmic under the Wayland graphics subsystem. The overall Cosmic desktop environment alpha 2 has shown solid improvement over alpha 1. I won’t go over any specifics as there’s already plenty written on this releases new and improved features. Rather this is a personal validation of the glowing praise I’ve read so far. It does live up to the praise it’s receiving right now.

Is it good enough to use as a daily driver? For me, not yet. For anyone else, that’s something they’re going to have to determine on a case-by-case basis. Even if it is an alpha, it’s good enough to begin that consideration for many.

pop!_os and the cosmic desktop environment is gone

whbeebe

I wrote earlier about the alpha release of Pop!_OS, with its new Rust-based desktop environment written from scratch. I’d installed it into a virtual machine via QEMU/KVM on my Linux Mint daily driver system. It worked, at least for an alpha. Every time I’d start it up I’d pick up any updates, reboot the VM, and then try out various features to see what state they were in. This morning I started up the Pop!_OS environment and attempted to perform an upgrade, and I noticed a rather hard failure with the keyboard.

In order to update from the command line I would type sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y. The special characters being the ‘&&’ characters between the apt commands. This morning I could not type those characters. Those characters are on the ‘7’ numeric key, and are accessed with the shift key. In other words, Pop!_OS suddenly stopped handling the shift key. I don’t know how or why, but any shifted keyboard character was ignored, only showing the unshifted keyboard character in the terminal.

I though about that for a few minutes and then made the decision to delete the VM. I have no idea how long it will be before Pop!_OS hits a release candidate stage, but I won’t be holding my breath. There are already many excellent Linux distributions to choose from such that another entrant had better have a powerful reason to be noticed, let alone used. At this rate of progress I don’t ever see that happening with Pop!_OS.

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pop!_os and the cosmic desktop environment