 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Nicola tries to tackle a quite tough to tackle subject today we're going to talk about system 76 and their fact that they are doing their own desktop and I don't know where to start so when I was first asked I remember this there was this interview and somebody asked me what did I think of it and my initial direction was like okay but can they actually do it because an entire desktop with application it seems is quite complex to achieve and I've seen projects like take Maui as an example there is just an handful of developers if not just one working on so many applications plus a desktop environment like the shell and yes they are able the Maui project to deliver the application and the desktop however when you actually use them it's clear that they are not ready to be used that's your like main applications in my personal opinion so it's important when you have to when you have such a complex task to be able to actually achieve it so is that the case well my personal answer to that question was it really depends on how much they want to reimplement from scratch because it's pretty easy to like take GNOME make some modification of GNOME and then call it your own desktop environment you could do that and it's actually quite easy and you preserve all of the functionalities of GNOME and that's kind of what PopOS was doing before this but it seems like they want to actually ditch GNOME entirely they do want it so my question was like how much do they want to reimplement will it be another GTK thing will they go with another toolkit will they do their own toolkit or are they going to implement all of the core applications this kind of questions like how much are they going to rebuild because especially if you've followed the coverage of the news about Cosmix sometimes it seems like they want to try slow just port some things to this new concept some other times it seems like they are ready to just do a whole new operating system like not even just a new operating systems but we'll get to that so let's start two months ago and I guess we knew sooner than this but apparently they do want to replace GTK or as much GTK as possible with Iced so if you don't know what Iced is it is a toolkit to you know make apps and a GUI in general using Rust so it's made for Rust and that actually came to no surprise because one of the main developers of System76 Jeremy Solar is a big Rust fan if I understood that correctly and even has its own operating system written in Rust I've actually talked about this before in my podcast and yes this was promptly confirmed by developer of System76 it's also rather interesting although I do not really want to get really too much into it that this also sparked some discussion over the GNOME side with some I think we can safely call them attacks towards this idea this is a public chat from GNOME where you can see some skepticism towards this project you know and there has been like in 2021 much prior to this a lot of discussion between System76 and GNOME folks and it's quite a controversial matter and I really don't want to get to it especially these particular messages but they do kind of raise an interesting point okay so you're switching from GTK to Iced and currently Iced has no accessibility whatsoever support so how are you going to provide that upon the first release of this comic desktop which should be next year actually how are you going to achieve that accessibility is quite a big task to tackle and this really again builds into the fact that if you're redoing a lot of stuff from scratch then you know a lot of effort is needed so there is actually this comment that nicely put forward all of the issues that you might have by switching to a toolkit that is not really like Iced if that's you know the claim and there is that a nice answer by the System76 developer that addresses this kind of things and say that all of that was taken into account and many of the things that were raised were already fixed in a fork of Iced made by System76 with the idea of adding this kind of features so of course it's not like they're doing this randomly they do have a clear idea of what they're doing it seems we do also get some nice Q&A regarding the new features of this system as an example we do have GPU acceleration via OpenGL and also it says it circles around GTK so it seems like performance could be improved by switching to Iced and also something that makes me happy on the inside is that there should be support for transparency blur and gloss if you know the work that I do in cataplasma I just love transparency blur and gloss like I've actually spent like months trying to get the right amount of the contrast effect to use blur so that it's transparent and pretty I've actually made cataplasma much more transparent but if also you know it's just a detail but I'm kind of biased and now we get back to January for some reason and there has been this very nice blog post that explores some of the things that are going on for the new Rust based at this point we know that desktop environment so what do we have here it seems like at this earlier stage it wasn't so clear whether System76 would change GTK to try to use Iced for its toolkit so there has been work to do some example applications in GTK4 that were supposed to be used in this cosmic desktop you can see as an example these new system settings compared to the old one on the right now the article does goes on with some interesting stuff some comparison about what has changed like there's no visible distinction between the window title bar and the body of the window that's true but I mean only interesting up to a certain point considering that we're switching to Iced anyway apparently they were also working back then on stuff like a launcher which again was then using GTK maybe that will be rewritten in Iced and so on the app library the dock the panel you can get kind of an idea of what design was meant to be which is not too different from what you had previously with PopOS I think the idea was really not to change too much too much sorry for the user experience and for me another question that goes here is how much of this new desktop environment upon release will we expect to have to be using Iced because do they want to redo everything in Iced for the very first release because that seems like quite a complex task maybe they're absolutely able to I just don't know so let's just say that I really wouldn't be surprised if the very first release of this cosmic desktop had some parts in Iced and some other parts in GTK or if it included I think that's going to be obvious GTK applications out of the box I really think that's going to be obvious we do also get here some hints about when this desktop should come out which is 2023 probably late 2023 and it will be called epoch one which is nice I guess and will likely have an alpha release this summer now as far as I know that didn't happen but it makes sense if you consider that again they apparently made some significant changes in how they wanted to address things by switching from GTK to Iced so even this initial release date 2023 might change significantly and maybe isn't even switched to 2024 because there's so much more work to do and we'll actually get to what this kind of work is so now is finally the time after 10 minutes of video sorry about that that we finally arrived to the news of these days which is system 76 has decided to start giving us regular updates on the development of cosmic desktop and we get the first one so it talks about two major components the compositor and the text rendering so about the compositor this says that the compositor is the part that's responsible for making sure application window reacts on screen to the action you perform within it now I'll be fully honest I'm slightly confused at this point at what a compositor is because it seems to mean different things depending on whether you're on x11 or will and it seems like a will and compositor is like the window manager I'm really not sure and if any of you has the answer please explain it to me in the comments and I will make sure to pin the comment but considering that in the comment in the blog post sorry they mentioned that core functionalities such as tiling has to be implemented in the compositor and workspace behavior makes me think that this really is similar in task to a window manager so what are they promising with this compositor which is again the whole point of the video they're promising a lot of things like support for fractional scaling which is really interesting I've actually talked a lot about fractional scaling and what it means in a previous video of mine so if you want to refresh your idea on what would it mean to have fractional scaling inside of a compositor then you can go watch that one but also support for for high dpi and hdr again three really big promises considering that they are doing everything from scratch it seems finally they also want to spend time they say to ensure a smooth experience on nvidia which will sure be very highly appreciated again this is particularly impressive considering that again they're doing everything from scratch so the more I read this blog post the more I think okay I'm more and more worried about the release date it seems hard to think that they would be able to do all of that and implement new applications through ist and a new desktop through ist in just a year so maybe not 2023 I don't know it seems so unlikely to me but maybe they pull it off but if they do pull it off what's going to be missing you know accessibility I don't know secondly we also have a lot of things talking about the text rendering which is actually pretty difficult you have to correctly render text in any size resolution orientator orientation font typeface language and do it there's even talk with apps upstream ist or as on data this discord server on how to do with this how to deal with this finally regarding the application and desktop and how to build them there's work going on on lib cosmic which you can see as an alternative to lib at white up for jk or in the context of kitty either plasma components or kuri gami depends that is it's a widget library it will have all of the things that should be used across the desktop and applications and outlets the idea is to allow allow application to be switched from jtk4 to ist making it compatible with will and chell and use its capabilities like fractional scaling I guess because jtk4 let's remember it does not support fractional scaling all of the main desktop components so the applet launcher app library all of this kind of stuff are all in ist with more stuff switching to ist soon it seems now if you're more interested on the design side of things instead of the libraries and stuff there has been a bit of time ago this figma that was that got publicly released and you can kind of see what the idea is with the design using this we have this design mock-up of the application which is the same one that you saw previously and then we also have widgets and how they should look like which is roughly what you had previously again it seems like the idea of the design is not to change that much compared to what we previously had in popo s but nonetheless some stuff are particularly interesting like this notification manager is real pretty now last couple of things before we go because I really want to give an overview of everything that has been said or publicly about what this new desktop should be so that everybody can work out of this video knowing the stuff is a couple of tweets by this lead developer Jeremy solar because you know he talks about the development of ist and also what seems to be his personal project redox os which again is written in rust firstly we have a nice comparison that was recently tweet uh tweeted tweet what I don't know that shows a comparison between the old and the new tax rendering I think that with the compression of twitter the change is not that noticeable but nonetheless you can give it a look and most interestingly is that it seems like he's trying to run a cosmic application and maybe also the desktop in the future using is redox which would mean that there is this operating system called redox os which is written in rust that runs at desktop and application that are written in rust so it's a bit like rust paradise like if you like rust there might be an entire operating system with desktop and application coming coming I can do this all in rust so pretty interesting and I mean what else I don't have much to say myself it's an interesting project there's surely rightful doubts on doubts and uncertainties on how much they will be able to deliver and when since this is such a big project but if they are able to do it then wow what else let's keep following this project and see where it goes