I had high hopes that System76 would take advantage of the chance to establish a clear design language around their new desktop environment from the get-go, but from the screenshots it looks like they're happy to repeat the mistakes of GNOME. There is no visual indication of which elements are clickable and what's just text.
I guess "GNOME but in Rust" is still a win, but I must admit I was hoping for something more disruptive given that it's not "just" a fork like so many other desktop environments out there.
Completely different theming, performance, stable applets, applets in their own process, supporting server side decoration and a host of other wayland protocols Gnome isn't interested in, control over GPU usage, integrated tiling, customization and more. All that is irrelevant and 'just' a fork of gnome. The thing that really matters is if there is a visual indication if something is clickable?
They have a pretty clear design language. Its just one you don't seem to like.
I probably could have worded my criticism more clearly. I know there are interesting technical details under the hood, and I'm sure they are great, but that's not really what I was talking about. I was talking specifically about interaction design which is by far the thing I've been most dissatisfied with in all of the existing desktop environments. When it comes to interaction design Cosmic looks and feels just like GNOME because all of the design patterns are the same. The lack of visual indicator for interactive elements was only meant as an example (perhaps the most obvious one) of something that's copied from somewhere else without thinking deeply about how it "reads" and feels to use.
I guess "GNOME but in Rust" is still a win, but I must admit I was hoping for something more disruptive given that it's not "just" a fork like so many other desktop environments out there.