Because CEOs in general lean pretty right?

Great to see them get them get back on track. PopOS has been a holding pattern for a very long time.

While this is an LTS release, they also say they will release 26.04 LTS in May (just 5 months after 24.04). So, clearly this is a bit of a final beta for that release, at least from a COSMIC desktop point of view.

They are already shipping hardware with the new COSMIC, so things are usable now. I have no doubt though that there will be a lot of improvement over the next six months before 26.04 comes out.

It will be really interesting to see where things go after 26.04 when they are not having to invest everything into just getting to the starting line. Will they continue to pour all this effort into COSMIC? It has a lot of potential.

It is lots of modules but not really that modular. There is little concern about working with anything else.

I was very excited for COSMIC but I have kind of moved on the Niri now. I am not sure it will lure me back.

That said, I have been using COSMIC Term and COSMIC Panel with Niri. So they still have their hooks in me.

I live in fear of distros like Debian shipping ancient drivers and having to listen to 3 more years of people saying Wayland does not work. Debian 13 may ship with NVIDIA 535 drivers.

As good as this comment is, neither has the range or targeting capability that the US does or that the USSR did.

The security council veto was designed to keep the US and the USSR at the negotiating table and off the battlefield.

October 2024. I cannot wait for that to happen!

They were just looking for an excuse to remodel the basement and “the computer” made it seem like something they were doing for the family.

1 in 2 professional developers use Linux ( many of the others probably use Macs ).

If you are working with containers ( the cloud ), Linux is the native environment. So Linux provides a great environment for most of what is headed for AWS or Azure. If you are building websites ( eg. React ), Linux is the nicest environment to work in. Node is best on Linux. Java and Python IDEs work great on Linux. C / C++ work is often embedded with is often Linux and again the tooling works great on Linux. The more offbeat your platform choice, the more likely it is to be Linux first ( Gleam anyone? ). Even the .NET experience is great on Linux ( maybe better than Windows depending on what you are building ).

I would certainly benefit if more hardware supported Linux out-of-the-box.

Many people will benefit if that one key application they need is supported on Linux.

We all benefit from the paid developers working on Linux. The number of such people are linked to the profitability of Linux for companies which is a function of popularity.

Have you ever heard of Velox ( based on SWC )?

It is a tiling Wayland compositor that is only a couple of megs in size. On Oasis Linux, I launched into Velox, opened a terminal, and checked the memory usage. It was under 30 MB of RAM. That is for the whole system!

That experience made me think differently about Wayland.

There was only one Xorg. For me, the evidence that it was big and complicated is best expressed by the fact that, over decades, the number of projects that competed to provide X had dwindled to one. There was loads of unhappiness with it and yet, there were no forks. Why?

Now Wayland. There are new Wayland compositors all the time now. I just saw one yesterday—Louvre. The basis for Velox above is SWC. There is Wayfire. There is Weston. There is of course wlroots. And both KDE and GNOME have made their own. I think somebody even wrote one for Haiku! For me, this is evidence in itself that making a Wayland compositor is easier than implementing X.

It also means that all these Wayland compositors can compete with each other and drive each other. It means that I, as the end user, can pick a super stripped down version when that is what I want and an all-singing, all-dancing version when that is what I want instead. In some situations I will be happy with, and thankful for, Velox and in other situations I will want GNOME.

It is taking a long time and the journey has not been smooth. That said, I am becoming quite confident that we are in a much better place. For normal uses, Wayland is in a good place now. The level of innovation is very high. Dev can start to shift from the basics to the extras. I fully expect that we are heading into an exciting time on the Linux desktop.

Not requiring and not offering are two different things.