I don’t believe there are plans for a start menu, it’s not how they envision the desktop. However anyone is welcome to cook their own, like this project.
I believe the team is focused on Flatpak. There’s a community project adding some AppImage functionality.
For feature requests you can search/raise issues on the COSMIC GitHub repositories.
Yeah, my squad was maphopping in WvW and got a new Elon Gnashblade mail for each map change. Quickly filled up the mailbox.
It's a temporary thing and it's likly Kent will just spend the time too continue development and prepare patches for next cycle instead. The ambition is to take it out of Experimental status sometime in the next year so there's at least motivation to figure out these things. During the delay testers of this FS can still submit bug reports.
It is default XWayland and will only fallback to Wayland if no XWayland found.
It has replaced idly making selection squares on the desktop.
Various projects. With C I wrote drivers and networking stacks for embedded systems, with C++ I worked for years on a the networking layers of a now long gone smartphone OS. With Rust I've been doing hobby projects like a library+application (win/linux/macos) for controlling WeMo switches on the LAN. Most recent is a Memory+CPU usage monitoring applet for the nascent COSMIC desktop environment.
I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can't be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.
So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.
COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.
Yeah, GuildWars2, Valheim, Pathfinder WotR, etc. those sort of games.. So I’m a bit niche, some gamers have more issues than I.
I got a gnome-session installed for games that have problems with COSMIC but fortunately haven’t needed it for a while now.
I started with Slackware in the nineties, have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed.
I could use anything really but these days my focus have moved; I kinda just want functional and well configured up front. Using Pop!_OS 24 alpha on my gaming/dev laptop, it works well/is well put together and I’m having fun writing COSMIC apps. I’m using Ubuntu on a few servers, I picked it many years ago and they’ve been through a number of painless upgrades.
GIMP 3.0 makes it a lot easier for devs to add functionality and they're starting a UX working group.
But I find it usable, I've been using it weekly for a very long time. I'm happy to see development picking up though with more people joining.
It's certainly safer though one can probably still do some damage in /etc, if determined.
Yes I encountered that when I used Tumbleweed on my laptop, the solution was to run "sudo prime-select boot offload". It set up my laptop to use iGPU for desktop environment and NV offload for gaming. I made it part of my update script. No idea why that wasn't handled better.
But generally I'm done with rolling distros, I now use an Ubuntu derivative that still keeps kernel and mesa quite up to date, I enjoy a stable environment.