The release of Cosmic is one of the most exciting developments in Linux that I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time.
Many of us have. I enjoy KDE but COSMIC looks very slick and when listening to the developers it sounds like it’s really thought through. They have considered so many details. For selfish reasons I’m glad to see it’s already being worked on for openSuse.
Cosmic has a lot of potential
It’s based on Iced, but it looks like they have their own fork. Anyone know how extensive their changes are and how much gets merged upstream?
Not based on, but built on top of Iced.
The fork wouldn’t be that different from whatever upstream Iced snapshot it last synced with. There are two major, if peripheral, changes still. A renderer for some Wayland special needs, and some integrated accessibility support. At least that was the case until a few weeks ago. I don’t think anything significant changed since.
So the Iced API itself is largely the same. However, since this is built on top of Iced. COSMIC apps are more inclined to use abstractions and tools from libcosmic wherever applicable instead of using Iced API directly. But you still see plenty of direct Iced API use.
I’m pretty sure they try to upstream as much as possible. They have made some pretty large upstream contributions which started out in their own fork.
