The old Cosmic was built on top of Gnome using extensions, but the new Cosmic was written from scratch. It largely mimics the look of old Cosmic, but has introduced a few new things.

There are desktops try do mimic the look of MacOS, but none I’ve used actually felt like using MacOS. The first time I used MacOS, I was shocked at how many quirky things it does, the way it operates. No Linux desktop prepared me for that.

The only thing MacOS and Gnome have in common is a top bar and app grid. Other than that, MacOS is closer to Windows than Gnome.

• Windows and MacOS have always visible panel showing favorite apps and open apps, Gnome dosen’t
• Windows and MacOS have appindicators on panels, Gnome doesn’t

And to further differentiate Gnome from MacOS,

• Gnome’s UX is closer to Windows. There are many, many reasons why, but some are: don’t need to click a window to focus it before you can interact with it, fullscreening behaviors, assumes Windows-style keyboard layout
• No global menu, Gnome doesn’t even use that paradigm.

Honestly the closest DE to MacOS is Cosmic. The launchers work similarly, the overviews work similarly, it has the option to handle minimized windows similarly to MacOS, uses menubars (but not global).

The CEO does also mention

Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off

Let’s hope that is true. I’m not counting on it.

I disagree with that. The main problem is that Nouveau was stagnant for years because it just wasn’t feasible to use since NVIDIA blocked reclocking support, so it would only ever run at its base clock, resulting in terrible performance. So nobody wanted to use the drivers, all that mattered is that they worked well enough to let users install the proprietary drivers.

But now that NVIDIA allows reclocking again, there’s actual reason to improve the performance and fix bugs in it.

All of those, apart from loop devices, are not technical limitations, but results from Canonical’s poor management and monopolistic desires.

Snap is interesting for me it can do more things than flatpak and has some really interesting sandboxing features coming up such as permission prompts for filesystem access.

But Canonical management is a significant hindrance. The Snap Store simply cannot be trusted after so much malware got in and they still have not improved their processes. So many snaps including Canonical’s own, are still using core22 for some reason. And there’s the broken snaps Canonical pushed on users.

I would love to see a snap repo that takes the best parts of Flathub and Fedora Flatpaks. Because as a technology, I think snap beats flatpak (if you’re using AppArmor). But it’s Canonical’s poor management that really drags it down.

Not a security issue, copyright/license issues.

The bar is meant to be very minimal and not distracting.

It takes up space, sure, but it’s close to the minimal height while still having easily readable time up top

Sideloading or preinstalling?

Sideloading already existed, but only for ostree flatpaks. Flatpak also supports OCI flatpaks, but the support for those aren’t as good, hence the previously missing side loading support.

[Blockchain] technology is neutral. People make it good or bad.

Sure, maybe. But you’re making it clear you’re in the bad camp too when you’re announcing this with NFTs.

I hope the performance significantly improves by then. Beta 1 felt pretty rough to me. And also, animations.

The security and privacy don’t matter much when most of the emails you get are coming from unprivate servers like Gmail or outlook.

You could run the game under Wayland before, but it was not default behavior nor provided as an option.

I used to force the game to use the Wayland version 3 years ago to work around a bug in GLFW that caused inputs to be ignored under X11.

But then Minecraft updated to use a fixed version of GLFW so I stopped needing to do so.

I ran 1.21.10 and snapshot 25w34a. With xeyes, I was able to confirm that 1.21.10 was using Xwayland and 25w34a was using Wayland.

I do keep it on for touchpads, they are too small to used without it. But with a mouse with proper hand space, it’s just more consistent to have it off.

True, but my issue with OpenBSD is that the performance is really lacking in terms of desktop smoothness. It feels like sub 60 fps compared the smoothness of Linux and FreeBSD.

I hope it’s just a current driver incompatibility and not related to their hardening. Will try again once 7.8 releases.

Maybe Secureblue?

That also comes with its own hardened browser based on GrapheneOS’s.

And if you don’t go with Secureblue and its browser, I’d recommend using a browser Chromium based, probably Brave. I know that’s a controversial choice, but in terms of security and ad blocking, it’s one of the better options. And disable JIT for V8.

To my understanding, you just need a phone number to make an account. I think it can be a burner number. But then if you ever lose access to the account you can’t recover it.