It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community.
How does the community hear feel about this distribution and the company that has brought it to us?
I think their current modified gnome is the best desktop that exists anywhere. Cosmic is a full desktop environment with an actual tiling window manager… a combo I think should be more common in desktops. The way they implement the tiling makes it really easy for beginners to use because you can turn it on/off by keyboard shortcut or clicking the plugin icon, and because you can just drag n drop windows to change their tiled positions (along with keyboard shortcuts if preferred). It’s hard to go back regular “window managers”.
The System76 devs have good ideas, they seem really cool, and sane! They have been a net positive for the Linux community and desktop development IMO. I am SO hyped for the new Cosmic DE!
You realise KDE’s had tiling for years, right? (Bismuth and then native)
There’s a very large gap between having tiling, and having excellent auto-tiling capabilities with intuitive shortcuts and behaviors. COSMIC’s autotiling was designed from the ground up to be just as usable with a mouse as it is with a keyboard.
Bismuth (and Krohnkite before) never worked nearly as well for me, and AFAIK are both abandoned. The built in tiling is closer to FancyTiles/tiling zones, not auto-tiling like Pop Shell. Pop Shell also has been here for “years” by that metric lol