tl;dr (understandable, to be honest): on a technical level, modern GNOME prioritizes polish at the expense of flexibility, and COSMIC is focused on customizability. Bad communication aside, they have fundamentally different goals and audiences.

Acknowledging that this is a 4-year-old article, I think it’s important to read this as a very one-sided perspective. However, I am certainly not defending System76, as it does seem like some pretty poor behavior if the article is to be believed.

I’m going to look past the issues over communication and behavior, as others have already addressed that in this thread. Other than that, it seems that the main issue is arguing over the role of GNOME in the software ecosystem. How I see this is that:

• System76 is arguing for backwards compatibility and and more customizability.
• GNOME is arguing for “bulletproof” theming of apps by restricting user choice and modularity.

Honestly, I think this is pretty reflective of how the current state of the respective DEs.

GNOME is the cleanest, most polished Linux desktop environment, if you use it exactly as the designers of GNOME envision. If you want any options outside the extremely limited set GNOME provides by default, you need to rely on extensions, which are less stable and less polished, and may or may not be updated to new DE versions.

COSMIC is a clean-sheet implementation designed around modularity. It’s really the main thing they talk about. It has the advantage of being Wayland-only, and (supposedly) pretty much every element of the DE is modular, and there is a pretty substantial amount of customization available even in the fairly barebones 1.0 implementation.

In terms of COSMIC “just being GNOME with extra color options”, I disagree. I really like the UI design concept of GNOME, and ten versions ago I used it all the time. However, over the last few versions it’s become very locked-down into only supporting one narrow way of using the desktop, and I need features outside that (e.g. system tray, options for window tiling, etc.). Even with ten extensions modifying the behavior – which causes stability issues when I get a new GNOME version – I still find things which bother me and are only fixable with manual dconf editing, which means I just can’t daily-drive GNOME.

I think that’s who COSMIC is really for: someone who wants less windows-y, more intentional UI design than KDE, but with good customizability. It sucks if the creators of a pretty neat new DE were not effective participants in their previous DE, so I really hope they don’t make the same mistake with COSMIC, and manage it properly as an open source project.

FYI, OpenSuse maintains .rpm builds of the signal app in their repos, specifically targeted at OpenSuse Leap and Fedora. They work great for me.

Krohnkite is incredibly janky, I tried it recently and it made all the window animations lag. Also every third boot or so it would fully stop kwin from starting, and lead to a black screen on login.

Theres no equivalent to Windows Defender on Linux, because it’s like 14 tools in one, and Linux by nature is a lot more modular. If you want something whcch scans files for malware, the tool of choice would be ClamAV. By default it only scans files which you manually tell it to, but you can set it up to automatically scan any file when it’s downloaded. It’s a lot less sophisticated than Defender, but there’s also just not as much malware for Linux (yet), and if you stick to installing software through the package manager and never giving other files execution permission, you should be fine.

I would also add that the more you modify the system (PPAs, packages not installed via the package manager, nonstandard partition layouts) decreases the stability of your system and makes it harder to get back to your current system state if something goes wrong. I like to think about it like balancing a tower of blocks as a kid. Mint is the first block, and is very stable, but each additional block makes the system less and less stable. Mint itself is really stable, but if you do weird stuff the Mint devs can’t do anything about it, which puts you in a bad position until you really know what you’re doing.

The Snap store is intentionally left out by Mint, because they don’t like how Ubuntu manages it. This means that even though the Ubuntu version Mint is based on supports Snap, there’s no guarantee that snaps will work with the same stability which .deb/apt and flatpak packages will, because it hasn’t been tested in Mint. I would advise against using it.

Yes it’s placed flat, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to turn off but it certainly doesn’t.

I do love my bangle.js 2. i was feeling some nostalgia for my Pebble Time 2, so I pulled it out to try it with the new app, but then I remembered that I hadn’t updated anything on my Bangle in ages (dont generally have chrome enabled ony phone) and the updates made everything so much smoother. No reason to switch back to pebble, especially in its current state.

My only complaint is that there is no way for the watch to tell if it’s on your wrist, and the heart rate monitor and screen can’t be woken up separately. So it can be annoying at night, when unless it’s fully shut off the HRM and screen will light up the room every 10min.

Absolutely! I’m certainly not going to insist that things should only be published on RSS feeds! Anything is better than the authoritative source for evacuation warnings being a Twitter account. Every platform has its place, I’m just a big fan of always starting with an RSS feed for announcements as the “root source”, then pushing changes to the feed to all other platforms.

Not really. RSS feeds are better for announcements in my opinion, as there’s no account associated, and the ways of viewing them are even more flexible and simple than the Fedi infrastructure.

If it’s WebKit-based, it is still using one of those four engines owned by large companies…the engine isn’t the selling point. As I read it, Orion is to Safari as Brave is to Chrome.

Same for me…wierd.

+1 ro this. The obfuscation tunnels traffic through the QUIC protocol used by https/3. Basically, it’s almost impossible to block QUIC without sabotaging the web. This is opposed to traditional VPN connections, which send encrypted (usually AES) packets over UDP, which is much easier to tell is a VPN.

I know what you asked about is the Machine and Frame, but I’m super excited about the controller. I love my old steam controller I got on fire sale, but its an extremely flawed device. If they can polish that to the standard of the Deck, I’m so in, especially since you know it’ll work well on Linux with no firmware BS.

Honestly? I have more or less the same use case, and I use Gnome or KDE and just use super+left/right to do the half-screen windows, and super+page up/page dn to switch between workspaces for fullscreen windows.

Is is the most optimal TWM experience? No. But is is fast to set up, easily usable, and requires no keyboard shortcut configuration? Yes.

My god the headline of the Fudzilla article is misleading.

Yes, they froze the samples of polymer, but the actual change to the technique is to increase the post-emulsion bake!

Well, first of all China does make lithography equipment (for instance, Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, who are currently at 28 nm). There are a couple of others iirc, and they typically got started by licensing lithography technology from Japanese companies and then building on it.

The issue is mostly one of economics – fabs want higher-resolution lithography as soon as possible, and they only buy it once, which means that the first company to develop new litho technologies takes the lions share of the revenue. If you’re second to the technology, or are more than half a dozen nodes behind like SMEE is, theres not a lot of demand because there are fabs full of litho machines from when that node was new, and theres not as much demand for them anymore.

The issue with a new company making leading edge nodes is the incredible R&D and development cost involved. Nikon, Canon, and ASML shared the market when they all started developing EUV tech, and it took ASML 15+ years to develop it! Canon and Nikon teamed up, spent tens of billions of dollars on R&D, and dropped out once they realized they couldn’t beat ASML to market because there wouldn’t be enough market left for them to make their money back.

If you want to learn more about the history of the semiconductor industry, I recommend the Asianometry YouTube channel!

If you are truly starting from scratch, shooting for Raspberry Pi performance isn’t starting small, thats a huge goal. It’s a complex chip built on a fairly modern process node (28 nm for the 4B) using the second-best-established architecture.

The reasonable goal to shoot for would be an 8086-like chip, then perhaps something like a K3-II or early Pentium, then slowly work your way up from there.

There are a couple of further questions to be able to answer this best. First, when you say using only tech that is in the open, nothing proprietary, how strictly do you mean that? Historically, what Chinese foundries have done is buy a fab line far enough from the leading edge to not be questioned, then use that as a starting point for working towards smaller nodes. If thats allowed, it would be fairly trivial, 40 nm doesnt perform that badly.

If you want the equivalent of “open-source” fab equipment, as far as I know that has never existed. In better news, if you go back to DUV/immersion lithography, its not just ASML manufacturing lithography, Nikon and Canon were still in the game, so power was less centralized.

Second, what is the actual goal? If it’s just compute, no big deal. As long as you can write a C compiler for your architecture (or use RISC-V as other folks have mentioned) getting the Linux kernel running shouldn’t be too hard. However, you’re going to have to deal with manually modifying the firmware of any peripherals you want to run – PCIe devices, USB, I2C, etc. Not a firmware engineer, so I have no idea how hard it would be, but this is one of the things that’s been holding back Linux on Arm over the years.

All in all, depending on how strict you want to be, it could be anywhere between slightly difficult and effectively impossible.

Okular is the way to go for anything that’s typed, it has a lot more capabilities than Evince. For handwriting, I’ve used Inkscape, and Libreoffice Draw. They’re roughly similar in capabilities.

I had no idea! It seems like it was a really unruly project to manage, but it’s a shame to lose the centralization of having one app that can configure anything. I don’t see any problem in having package management split off into Myrlyn, but it sounds like Cockpit is much more limited in scope, which is a shame, since handling the edge cases gracefully was what made YaST so useful.

Here’s a source for others who didn’t realize.