I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch.
If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux.
After watching their talk with Louis Rossman I really like this company. Hopefully one day they'll have a product that will match my needs.
The link to the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGle6z9KfZQ
Note the latest AMD 5850U chip is 40% faster [1] than the M1 for the same wattage! It really deserves more media exposure than the M1 which has the only merit of beating Intel.
TDP rating != wattage consumed. In an ideal world it would, but it has long since stopped meaning that generally. This includes the M1, which will happily exceed 15W of power consumption, and the 5850U almost certainly does as well since AMD's previous generation CPU in that class happily exceeded 15W.
You'll have to wait for a proper review that does power measurements to get a sense for how they actually compare on that front.
Is it? I see Geenbench gives the M1 as having 1733 (single) and 7652 (multi) GeekBench score, whereas a AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U system has 1414 (single) and 8140 (multi), so the M1 is quite faster in single core than it (22%) and slower but close in multi-core (the AMD being 6% faster).
And that's with the M1 having 4 slow cores for better battery life / consumption (with 8 full speed cores it would obliterate the 5850U).
I had a laptop with a similar amd cpu and even though it was rated for the same wattage, it was a lot more inefficient. The laptop would get warm just watching youtube videos and the fans would always kick on.
In contrast to the M1 which is so efficient that Apple doesn't even put a fan in it on its lower end models, and it still barely gets warm.
Can you buy one today other than the HP EliteBook 845 G8, which starts over $2300? Because you can buy M1 laptops yesterday for less than half that and I can't find any other 5800U series laptops for sale.
4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit
I currently have XPS 15 with 4k screen and I can easily see pixels, so 14 should be a little better. There is also the feeling that it is 2021 and should I still be seeing pixels? I think crisp high resolution view is much better for the eyes and feels more natural. I am also almost always within reach of a mains socket, so I don't particularly care about battery life, just that I can move the machine from one place to another easily.
Use a Mac with a Retina display for a week and see whether you don't notice a difference — and it's certainly nowhere near half the battery life. Everyone I know who's done this has never wanted to go back.
I really try to avoid looking at higher res screens too much. I like the lower price and better battery life of the HD screens and they look fine to me, but I think once you really try the higher res it will ruin the lower res for you.
Since they resell Clevo designs, they'll definitely offer such a laptop but it may take them a few more months to have one available.
They seem to be several months behind new hardware launches, which as I understand is partially because their value-add is rigorous testing and hardware support for linux. They will often patch or back port the newest kernel for the latest drivers.
There are a few things that they've never even tried, and would be obvious for the type of folks that use linux. High resolution and power efficiency are two of them that almost everyone wants.
No kidding. The OP posts a list of 10 very specific things, including some that are difficult to accomplish, expensive or nearly pointless (4k on a 14"?). "If you do this, I will support the company". So noble.
...And use a panel that covers at least 100% DCI-P3 color gamut.
I bought an Acer at the tail end of last year because I need color accuracy (and couldn't get my hands on high-end HP or Dell or Lenovo in Thailand because markets).
You know, I thought that that would bother me on a keyboard. However, it turned out that having PgUp/PgDn/Home/End on Fn+arrow keys, after getting used to it, is a speed improvement (at least for me). I don't have to move my hand as much. In fact, I liked so much that I have Alt+Left/Right arrow mapped as Home/End in AHK (on normal keyboards).
Laptops that aren't apple are dog slow at adding HDMI 2.0, USB-C in sufficient numbers, etc etc etc.
You'd think the amount of business laptops still made by Dell and HP would lead to a better set of mobos for laptops in general (since they are made by such a smaller number of vendors I think), but it is dog slow. The Desktop is supposed to be totally dead but the mobo support for features runs way ahead of still kind relevant laptop market by 12-18 months.
When I bought a linux laptop 4 years ago I was between System76 and Dell Developer Edition. I ended up going with Dell and I’m very happy with it but I’ve kept an eye on these guys ever since.
Really like what I see from PopOS and I will probably buy from them next time.
Take a look at the Thinkpad P14s - I don't think they offer a 4k screen but apart from that I believe it ticks all your boxes. I'm running Fedora 33 on mine and it's brilliant.
+1 on HP Omen. Fits most of your demand except for the 4k screen. I have the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H version and it's significantly faster than the beefiest macbook pro you can buy.
Nice to see! And glad they are...gasp...listening to people. The Gnome devs could learn a lot from that approach. The most popular distros all include a dock. And yet with Gnome 40, they not only refused to add a dock, they moved what gimped dock they had to the bottom of the screen. But you can't see it until you hit the top left corner. I wish I was making that up. (keyboard shortcuts aside, in fairness)
Rant aside, I'll definitely give it this a go. PopOS is a really nice distro.
I mostly like Gnome. I have been using it for years. But the development team of Gnome is so closed minded that it makes my head hurt.
I asked on the bug tracker if Evince could have a tabs feature, so I can have 10 pdfs open in one Evince window. They asked me to cite a usability study showing that it would objectively improve user experience.
It's clearly unreasonable for a developer to ask a bug reporter to cite a usability study out of the blue.
However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a developer to do so if the person commenting explicitly claims that not having a feature hurts usability:
If you want a laugh, duck for the thread where the developers debate how to implement .epub format in Evince before ultimately deciding that Evince doesn't actually need to be able to open the most popular ebook format in the world.
Can they cite a usability study suggesting any of the changes they made from gnome 2 to gnome 3 (or current) were not major regressions to the user experience?
I use gnome as my daily driver. Was OSX previously. Now, I can’t stand the wasted real estate of a dock. I really love Gnome, so maybe they’re listening to some of us and not to others.
I think most people just want the option. I don't want to force a dock on you. I also don't want you to force a barren wasteland on me. That's what I liked about this design shown in the video, it's all optional!
To be pedantic, you can see the dash/dock when you hit the super key, I don't believe anyone actually uses the hot corner.
Also to be pedantic, there are plenty of desktops that don't use a dock, in the form of most window managers. I'm currently running opnebox with no dock and it's totally fine, though the approach is better suited to tiling window managers.
I love the hot corner. In some distributions this behaviour is disabled and I always turn it back on to the point that I automatically make the gesture on other operating systems as well. When I'm browsing on my laptop, I often end up with my finger on the touchpad. A quick swipe to the top left is quicker than moving my hand to the super key. On desktop, a low-precision swing of the mouse is also quicker than moving my fingers to the super key. I don't get the hate the hot corner gets.
All in all, I honestly don't really care about the changes they made to the dock. As long as my shortcut buttons work, I can deal with some small changes if they improve the polish of the system overall. I like the Gnome aesthetics that improve with every version, so I'm open to the tweaks made in Gnome 40.
Seems recently the Gnome team have been too busy demanding RMS' cancellation to listen to their userbase. That's clearly more important work than, you know, actually writing good open source software.
Although I know some who would say Gnome has never been good. Opinions on DEs can be pretty harsh.
When you say 'dock', do you mean the top bar? Well, that would be a development. If you mean a menu of application icons at the bottom, I never had that in GNOME 3 on Fedora.
I actually like GNOME 3 as a desktop: the streamlined process of hitting the Super key or moving the mouse toward the corner and typing in the application name that I want to launch, with the whole screen used for the preview. I also never put anything on the desktop (as in icons, files etc.). Even saying this I get strange flashbacks to 2000s computing.
What pushed me away from it at the end (to KDE) was the applications. The trend in GNOME is clearly removing or at best hiding everything except the barest minimum required for pretending we have an app. At some point it shifts from very annoying to unusable. And now I'm putting up with KDE's own weirdnesses, like insisting on creating a cryptographic wallet for everything, or broken hibernation on desktop (a.k.a. big people computer). I hope it's just standard Linux jank and not sign of decline of the space.
I've recently switched from my usual MBP upgrade to System 76 (Oryx Pro). While yes, Apple's walled garden does feel like a Rolls Royce compared to anything, the price tag difference this time was just way too step for me to keep buying a new Mac: It was basically 2x or more for roughly similar hardware, if not slightly worse on the MBP side. Overall, using Pop_OS! with its specialized GNOME3 setup has been a bliss, and I must say I had expected a far more difficult migration. In a few days I was happily up and running with my new machine. And then, there is the support - Apple's support outside of visiting a Genius Bar is basically non-existent. System76 has diligently helped me even set up external hardware that wasn't theirs! Long story short, very much looking forward to COSMIC and continuing this experience. The only thing I do miss a lot is my iTerm2... :)
iTerm2 is a beauty, is there a closest equivalent on Linux?
There seem to be 25 popular choices especially now with the GPU-accelerated ones. Tried a few of the classics like Termite and they all seemed painfully outdated and crappy compared to iTerm.
I originally discovered and started using iTerm2 because I was looking for an OS X equivalent to Yakuake, which is pretty much the same thing as Konsole but with a dropdown/Quake-like UI.
My solution is tmux. I’m using white status line with C-z prefix on localhost, and green status line with prefix M-z on servers. This way I can reuse my finger memory, be equally productive on macOS, local Linux, remote Linux.
I use iterm at work and a combination of alacritty, fish and i3-wm (so I don't open multiple tabs but just several terminal windows) on my personal machine, I'm really happy with that setup.
That's exactly what I did a week ago (with a Fusion 15, but System76 was a serious competitor). It took a day to customize the thing to my heavily-apple-influenced habits and it was a joy to find out I could actually feel _pleasure_ using the machine, something I had forgotten 3 or 4 macOS updates ago.
Now, do we need another DE? Dunno, wouldn't make the top of my wishlist. I realize the good I'm getting comes much more from intelligent choices of sensible defaults rather than specific features. It's removing - or, if you prefer amend - the noise (apps/utils/extensions/clutterware) the key here, even more so for the open-source software ocean of half-baked solutions. Yes, that's what distributions are for but unfortunately even the biggest struggle to keep a steady route (think Ubuntu and Unity, for instance) and often fall for the latest shining tech everybody wants (hint: no, there's a whole lot of people who'd better like a stable, predictable, coherent environment to a new set of flashy icons and widget palettes).
And if you wonder what would make the top of my whishlist, it's solid a development environment (again, a-la macOS but it's actually a-la OpenStep and NextStep, where it all started) enforcing good defaults at the OS level, letting people/companies build quality apps easily and preventing them to disrupt/reinvent existing OS patterns/paradigms (without a reason). Or we could keep on downloading browsers-disguised-as-applications and call it a day.
When Ubuntu dropped the hammer on Gnome2, I saw Unity desktop and was kinda... ewwww. And next I have installed Gnome 3. After 15 minutes with it I decided that Unity is actually not that bad, so I switched to it.
In the following years Unity kinda grew on me, so I'm sad that it was axed and now everyone use this Gnome3 abomination. It is not as bad as it was five years before, but loss of top menu and general preference for biggins buttons instead of drop-down menus is a bad idea for desktop computers.
I wish someone would fix Gnome3 by making it look back like Unity .
As someone who has used too many distributions and window managers to count (over the course of many years), I've settled on Ubuntu and whatever their default UI. And I quite liked Unity as well after a while.
Of course if there was a major reason to switch away from Ubuntu or their default DE, I would, but it's the pragmatic choice. The constant "finding" of the perfect fit gets in the way of actually doing stuff. Once you adjust expectations towards a system, I'm still far happier with Ubuntu I could ever be with macOS or Windows, and don't waste time having a different system to work with every two weeks (slightly exaggerating).
Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough? Yes. Is it great compared to alternatives (factoring in speed of deployment and productivity from the get to)? Definitely yes.
I'm glad popOS uses Ubuntu and Gnome as backbone and tries to give you a customized experience rather than completely reinventing everything. Though for me, as long as Canonical doesn't screw it up in a major way, stock Ubuntu it is.
I never liked Gnome3 and I never liked Unity. I have however been more than happy with XFCE distros. Simple task bar, simple menu, doesn't waste space and can look quite nice if a little attention is given to design. If you are unsatisfied with the major DEs it's worth at least trying.
To me, XFCE feels like a visual evolution and refinement of Windows 98 - and I mean that in the best possible way. Windows has three or four separate and inconsistent visual styles that get mixed nowadays, macOS has UI style changes in every single yearly update for seemingly no other reason than to change things, and Gnome 3 threw any good sense in usability out the window, but XFCE is still trucking along with a single style that stays consistent and highly usable without being ugly.
The best thing about Unity is that now it will never change for better or worse and still works with Ubuntu 20.04. It's fairly minimalist and frozen in stasis like I wish Apple had done with the SnowLeopard UI.
The only thing I liked about unity was the HUD that allowed you to search through application menus by typing the setting you were looking for. Do you know if there’s anything offering that functionality for Gnome3?
I had abandoned all the desktop environments for xmonad and then stumpwm. However, I’ve recently given KDE Plasma a chance, and it’s really grown on me: especially for my current setup (55” TV), it’s much more ergonomic than tiling WMs and it doesn’t have the annoyances I had with KDE4, Gnome 3 or Unity.
Yeah, I’m really glad the KDE world seems to have recovered from the KDE4 disaster. However, the Linux desktop ecosystem largely feels like it’s just sort of rotting: I really like KMail, for example, but it had a bunch of show-stopper bugs last time I used it.
I'm using a dozen extensions to make Gnome 3 behave like Gnome 2 as much as I can. No animations, no menu on top, no top bar, task bar at the bottom, no dock, no activities, one virtual desktop per project. That was impossible with Unity.
First off.. this is not an official release (kairos) like my Kinto project, but you can install https://ubuntubudgie.org and use their global menu or run my script which will fully configure everyone w/ my Kinto project and other various fixes.
You will have a modern desktop with a global menu.
> general preference for biggins buttons instead of drop-down
I could never understand the strong revulsion some people have with that design language. To me the Windows 95 "File Edit etc." toolbar is terribly eye straining and has no place in the 21st century. Besides, with the ubiquity of touch screens in laptops the GNOME team has been entirely vindicated in their decision to take a more touch oriented approach. Larger buttons are easier to click with the mouse too.
And we can't understand your revulsion to having usable screen real estate and high quality (non-touch) screens and input methods. I don't want to paw at my screen all day with gorilla arms.
I installed Mint on a 9 year old iMac for my girlfriend to use, who's not particularly technically inclined. She picked it up immediately, without issue, which is honestly a great selling point of Cinnamon in my opinion
You're not alone. Once I had the keyboard shortcuts down-pat, I adored Unity honestly. I can't seem to get used to Gnome 3 no matter how hard I've tried, so I've given up sadly. I don't have any desktop Linux installs these days aside from my old iMac running Linux Mint downstairs that only my girlfriend uses!
Unless they also fork Gtk3 and Gtk4 the GNOME will still seep in and ruin the desktop. Things like gtkfilechooserwidget are terribly broken in gtk3 and gtk4 but at least gtk4 finally got a patch that allows you to paste into a file->open window without it error'ing out. But gtk4 is still firmly in the "no text entry window for you" in file chooser menus by default.
Also, I looked at the github repo for cosmic under pop!_os's stuff and there's no actual code. It's all boilerplate with a single gsettings schema .xml file. There's no DE in that repo.
My favourite “UX bug” is when Discord wants to upgrade, it downloads a newer deb, you open it in App Store, and it only shows the “delete” button. Wonder if it’ll ever be fixed.
Yeah the AppStore is a joke...the search especially, thats one big point where devs don't eat their dogfood, i bet that 99.9% of Gnome-devs never try'd "AppStore" (so much for linux desktop year), but a working thing like synaptic is probably too complicated for "normal" Linux-Users (do they even exist?)...just give them a Store (that does not work)...thanks gnome.
I wish my discord did that... it just errors after timing out trying to connect to their update server. Sometimes force killing helps, sometimes trying the next day does. Once it connects the rest is all automatic though.
That's an application specific feature. For example Firefox or Gimp implement this preview and add it to the file chooser, but most applications don't.
Way to go, it's nice to see the innovation. System76 seems like a company that is paying attention to what their customers want, creating something useful and unique out of various well-considered parts.
I've been hearing a surprising amount of positive feedback from people who have tried the current Gnome based DE on Pop OS. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard that they have some sort of tiling / snapping that works well. I'd like to try it, but I'm heavily invested in upstream Debian and am not really interested in installing another Debian derivative. Are there plans to package this up?
I'm currently using XFCE on two computers with key bindings for snap left/right and snap top-left/top-right/bottom-left/bottom-right. On a big display, this setup is excellent. On a laptop it works, but often feels a little cramped, and it's particularly painful with a laptop trackpad instead of a mouse. It would be nice if there was an option to split ~67%/33%... apparently Windows(!) can do that.
I've also been playing with i3 on another laptop, and for a lot of things the experience is clearly better (e.g. web browsing on a laptop without a mouse), but for others (e.g. kicad) it either doesn't work well, or I haven't managed to configure it well enough yet. The rabbit hole is infinitely deep, and while I enjoy tinkering with it every now and then, I'm probably not going to use it as a daily driver anytime soon.
It's just a set of about 3 gnome extensions, at least on Pop OS 20.10 right now. So in theory you just need to install the gnome extensions and you're good: https://github.com/pop-os/shell
I've been using it for a year and love it--typing this reply in a browser window tiled next to a terminal. It's easy to add little exceptions too for modal apps you want to hover outside the tiling.
I recently upgraded from a 10 year old Lenovo W520 to a System76 Lemur Pro, and have been extremely pleased with the purchase. It is lightweight (~2 lbs); software is fast, responsive, and free of bloat; chassis feels robust; specs are above average for the ultra book category (40GB RAM and 2 NVMe drives); good battery life (around 6 hours real world use); and good online documentation. Overall, I would highly recommend, and I am excited to see what direction they continue to go in as a company.
Readit News
[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...
You'll have to wait for a proper review that does power measurements to get a sense for how they actually compare on that front.
And that's with the M1 having 4 slow cores for better battery life / consumption (with 8 full speed cores it would obliterate the 5850U).
1: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Apple-M1-8-Core-3200-MH...
In contrast to the M1 which is so efficient that Apple doesn't even put a fan in it on its lower end models, and it still barely gets warm.
Also the battery life is a lot better on the m1.
Can you buy one today other than the HP EliteBook 845 G8, which starts over $2300? Because you can buy M1 laptops yesterday for less than half that and I can't find any other 5800U series laptops for sale.
Dead Comment
While QHD is enough for me, 4K is great because it is a factor 2 compared to 1080p.
I'm holding out for 13" 1440p, which is a perfect 2x.
Marketing specs?
They seem to be several months behind new hardware launches, which as I understand is partially because their value-add is rigorous testing and hardware support for linux. They will often patch or back port the newest kernel for the latest drivers.
I bought an Acer at the tail end of last year because I need color accuracy (and couldn't get my hands on high-end HP or Dell or Lenovo in Thailand because markets).
You know, I thought that that would bother me on a keyboard. However, it turned out that having PgUp/PgDn/Home/End on Fn+arrow keys, after getting used to it, is a speed improvement (at least for me). I don't have to move my hand as much. In fact, I liked so much that I have Alt+Left/Right arrow mapped as Home/End in AHK (on normal keyboards).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/20/syste...
You can offer suggestions for their laptop manufacturing project here:
https://github.com/system76/laptop-suggestions
You'd think the amount of business laptops still made by Dell and HP would lead to a better set of mobos for laptops in general (since they are made by such a smaller number of vendors I think), but it is dog slow. The Desktop is supposed to be totally dead but the mobo support for features runs way ahead of still kind relevant laptop market by 12-18 months.
Really like what I see from PopOS and I will probably buy from them next time.
Linux runs great on it. It costs ~$1000
Rant aside, I'll definitely give it this a go. PopOS is a really nice distro.
I asked on the bug tracker if Evince could have a tabs feature, so I can have 10 pdfs open in one Evince window. They asked me to cite a usability study showing that it would objectively improve user experience.
However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a developer to do so if the person commenting explicitly claims that not having a feature hurts usability:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues/182#note_3837...
Also to be pedantic, there are plenty of desktops that don't use a dock, in the form of most window managers. I'm currently running opnebox with no dock and it's totally fine, though the approach is better suited to tiling window managers.
All in all, I honestly don't really care about the changes they made to the dock. As long as my shortcut buttons work, I can deal with some small changes if they improve the polish of the system overall. I like the Gnome aesthetics that improve with every version, so I'm open to the tweaks made in Gnome 40.
I like the dock on the left of my screen and I'm happy that there is ways so everyone can customize this the way they want.
Although I know some who would say Gnome has never been good. Opinions on DEs can be pretty harsh.
I actually like GNOME 3 as a desktop: the streamlined process of hitting the Super key or moving the mouse toward the corner and typing in the application name that I want to launch, with the whole screen used for the preview. I also never put anything on the desktop (as in icons, files etc.). Even saying this I get strange flashbacks to 2000s computing.
What pushed me away from it at the end (to KDE) was the applications. The trend in GNOME is clearly removing or at best hiding everything except the barest minimum required for pretending we have an app. At some point it shifts from very annoying to unusable. And now I'm putting up with KDE's own weirdnesses, like insisting on creating a cryptographic wallet for everything, or broken hibernation on desktop (a.k.a. big people computer). I hope it's just standard Linux jank and not sign of decline of the space.
There seem to be 25 popular choices especially now with the GPU-accelerated ones. Tried a few of the classics like Termite and they all seemed painfully outdated and crappy compared to iTerm.
On Linux, I just use whatever ship with the distro Gnome Terminal, Konsole... and they work fine.
Its GPU accelerated and super fast. hard to go back to term after feeling how snappy it is. Plus its available on linux as well!
https://hyper.is/
Now, do we need another DE? Dunno, wouldn't make the top of my wishlist. I realize the good I'm getting comes much more from intelligent choices of sensible defaults rather than specific features. It's removing - or, if you prefer amend - the noise (apps/utils/extensions/clutterware) the key here, even more so for the open-source software ocean of half-baked solutions. Yes, that's what distributions are for but unfortunately even the biggest struggle to keep a steady route (think Ubuntu and Unity, for instance) and often fall for the latest shining tech everybody wants (hint: no, there's a whole lot of people who'd better like a stable, predictable, coherent environment to a new set of flashy icons and widget palettes).
And if you wonder what would make the top of my whishlist, it's solid a development environment (again, a-la macOS but it's actually a-la OpenStep and NextStep, where it all started) enforcing good defaults at the OS level, letting people/companies build quality apps easily and preventing them to disrupt/reinvent existing OS patterns/paradigms (without a reason). Or we could keep on downloading browsers-disguised-as-applications and call it a day.
In the following years Unity kinda grew on me, so I'm sad that it was axed and now everyone use this Gnome3 abomination. It is not as bad as it was five years before, but loss of top menu and general preference for biggins buttons instead of drop-down menus is a bad idea for desktop computers.
I wish someone would fix Gnome3 by making it look back like Unity .
Of course if there was a major reason to switch away from Ubuntu or their default DE, I would, but it's the pragmatic choice. The constant "finding" of the perfect fit gets in the way of actually doing stuff. Once you adjust expectations towards a system, I'm still far happier with Ubuntu I could ever be with macOS or Windows, and don't waste time having a different system to work with every two weeks (slightly exaggerating).
Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough? Yes. Is it great compared to alternatives (factoring in speed of deployment and productivity from the get to)? Definitely yes.
I'm glad popOS uses Ubuntu and Gnome as backbone and tries to give you a customized experience rather than completely reinventing everything. Though for me, as long as Canonical doesn't screw it up in a major way, stock Ubuntu it is.
It's not like they're not trying, with snaps and all... we shall see.
You will have a modern desktop with a global menu.
https://github.com/rbreaves/kairos
I could never understand the strong revulsion some people have with that design language. To me the Windows 95 "File Edit etc." toolbar is terribly eye straining and has no place in the 21st century. Besides, with the ubiquity of touch screens in laptops the GNOME team has been entirely vindicated in their decision to take a more touch oriented approach. Larger buttons are easier to click with the mouse too.
There's a Unite extension for that: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1287/unite/
- Breaking alt-tab
- Moving window controls
Full disclosure: I'm a former EM for the Unity dev team. I have heard more mindless opinion disguised as fact than you can possibly imagine.
Also, I looked at the github repo for cosmic under pop!_os's stuff and there's no actual code. It's all boilerplate with a single gsettings schema .xml file. There's no DE in that repo.
https://wiki.installgentoo.com/images/b/b9/Gloriouskdefilepi...
I'm currently using XFCE on two computers with key bindings for snap left/right and snap top-left/top-right/bottom-left/bottom-right. On a big display, this setup is excellent. On a laptop it works, but often feels a little cramped, and it's particularly painful with a laptop trackpad instead of a mouse. It would be nice if there was an option to split ~67%/33%... apparently Windows(!) can do that.
I've also been playing with i3 on another laptop, and for a lot of things the experience is clearly better (e.g. web browsing on a laptop without a mouse), but for others (e.g. kicad) it either doesn't work well, or I haven't managed to configure it well enough yet. The rabbit hole is infinitely deep, and while I enjoy tinkering with it every now and then, I'm probably not going to use it as a daily driver anytime soon.
I've been using it for a year and love it--typing this reply in a browser window tiled next to a terminal. It's easy to add little exceptions too for modal apps you want to hover outside the tiling.
Additionally, it's by far the best tablet experience I've had not just on Linux, but period.