Thanks for the detailed explanation!

Distribution and user theming is also significantly improved over GTK with programmatic generation of themes—automatically adapting colors at runtime to the most ideal contrasting color values via OKLCH and other related algorithms—which distributions can use to customize to their preferred branding, and app developers can freely adopt without needing to worry about user themes breaking their apps. Users also get the convenience of generating their own custom themes with COSMIC Settings, even if that means creating an abomination of conflicting colors.

I’ve themed my 22.04 install to death – literally – as one would expect from a first Linux install. I’ve been clicking through multiple GUIs where only the checkboxes, dropdowns and radio buttons showed, zero labels or descriptions. Most recently the Raspberry Pi Imager.

They initially made a GNOME extension that contained their theming and an (optional) tiling for windows. Also some GTK apps, such as their app store frontend.

I still use it daily on my gaming pc (Pop!_OS 22.04) and it sucks. Slow, unresponsive, janky. And this is an extension that they had been maintaining for years. Apparently GNOME devs don’t really consider extension developers and it was like building on quicksand for the Pop team.

For better or worse, they made a decision to build their own fast, responsive COSMIC DE due to these frustrations with GNOME.

I am still on the old 22.04 with GNOME, but already started using the new COSMIC Store app GUI last year.

It is a HUGE leap from the old Pop!_Store and feels great.

The rest of the DE is probably not ready yet, otherwise they wouldn’t call it Alpha.

Oh and apparently they’ve made it really easy to brand the whole desktop env and are hoping for more orgs and companies to adopt it.

Based on Ubuntu, so: also Debian

Windows XP… such expressive, truly material-like, design, only Vista comes close. But XP ran so much better.