• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Thanks for the detailed explanation!

    Distribution and user theming is also significantly improved over GTK with programmatic generation of themes—automatically adapting colors at runtime to the most ideal contrasting color values via OKLCH and other related algorithms—which distributions can use to customize to their preferred branding, and app developers can freely adopt without needing to worry about user themes breaking their apps. Users also get the convenience of generating their own custom themes with COSMIC Settings, even if that means creating an abomination of conflicting colors.

    I’ve themed my 22.04 install to death – literally – as one would expect from a first Linux install. I’ve been clicking through multiple GUIs where only the checkboxes, dropdowns and radio buttons showed, zero labels or descriptions. Most recently the Raspberry Pi Imager.


  • They initially made a GNOME extension that contained their theming and an (optional) tiling for windows. Also some GTK apps, such as their app store frontend.

    I still use it daily on my gaming pc (Pop!_OS 22.04) and it sucks. Slow, unresponsive, janky. And this is an extension that they had been maintaining for years. Apparently GNOME devs don’t really consider extension developers and it was like building on quicksand for the Pop team.

    For better or worse, they made a decision to build their own fast, responsive COSMIC DE due to these frustrations with GNOME.

    I am still on the old 22.04 with GNOME, but already started using the new COSMIC Store app GUI last year.

    It is a HUGE leap from the old Pop!_Store and feels great.

    The rest of the DE is probably not ready yet, otherwise they wouldn’t call it Alpha.

    Oh and apparently they’ve made it really easy to brand the whole desktop env and are hoping for more orgs and companies to adopt it.




  • GitOps + Renovate

    Gives you:

    • automation of updates
    • smart notification of updates that are below a certain confidence that it won’t break stuff
    • rollback: simply git revert
    • the whole shebang

    Some stacks that work well with GitOps are:

    • k8s + Flux or ArgoCD
    • Nix(OS)

    Mixing them is a LOT of complexity though. Just pick whichever you are most comfortable with. If you want a declarative immutable OS just for running k8s, check Talos Linux.

    If you don’t want to deal with GitOps, Nix or k8s, and you don’t need recent versions, just run Debian and set a cronjob for auto updates. Then only deal with potential breaking changes just once every 5(?) years or thereabouts.



  • I would strongly recommend not to dive into NixOS yet.

    It has its benefits and I think it’s awesome, but it has a bit of a learning curve and you already have plenty of learning to do with going mouseless and the whole interface stuff. You do not want to deal withbreakages in unstable NixOS, or broken Nvidia drivers in stable.

    If Bazzite’s immutability is holding you back, just switch to another distro you are familiar with: Be that Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, whatever.

    Hyprland is the most complete and configurable tiling window manager today, so definitely start with that. You can install it in any Linux distro.