I love it when people leave solutions in long-open GitHub issues.
Thanks *checks notes* me from two years ago!
pop#2186
1 like
[COSMIC] My wallpaper is a kingdom simulation fed by my system: browsers are empires, compiling summons storms
**Wallpaper**: [Kernel Kingdom](rsmedrano-cloud/kernel-kingdom) (OC, my own project): a live pixel-art kingdom simulated from my running processes, RAM, CPU and containers
**DE**: [COSMIC](system76.com) 1.0 on [Fedora 43 COSMIC Atomic](fedoraproject.org)
**Theme**: COSMIC Dark (default) · GTK: [adw-gtk3-dark](lassekongo83/adw-gtk3)
**Icon Theme**: [Cosmic](pop-os/cosmic-icons)
**Fonts**: Noto Sans / Noto Sans Mono
**Panel applets**: [minimon](cosmic-utils/cosmic-ext-applet-minimon), [weather](cosmic-utils/cosmic-ext-applet-weather), [bitrate](avomar/bitrate)
+ **Other**: [COSMIC Tweaks](cosmic-utils/cosmic-ext-tweaks)
**About the wallpaper:** each heavy app is a realm (browsers become empires), containers and services are fortresses, compiling brings storms, and realms go to war on their own: armies, trebuchets, burning cities, sacked capitals. A procedural chronicle narrates it all. It runs on the background layer via gtk4-layer-shell and pauses at 0% CPU when covered by windows. Python + GTK4, MIT, one-line install in the repo.
I've been building Kernel Kingdom, a pixel-art isometric live wallpaper / idle game for Linux where the world is built from what your machine is actually doing.
- Each heavy app becomes a realm: browsers grow into empires, smaller apps become hamlets. RAM is territory, CPU is activity, process count is population.
- Containers and long-running services are fortresses that get walls the longer they stay up. Compiling brings thunderstorms. Network traffic sends ships around the island, typing sends messenger birds.
- Realms go to war on their own: armies march, trebuchets fire at cities, buildings burn, capitals get sacked and move elsewhere. Borders really change over the day.
- Kill an app and its realm falls and leaves ruins. Reopen it and a new dynasty is born somewhere else.
- A procedural chronicle tells all of it (rulers, heroes, religions, named wars), and you can export each day's story as Markdown or plain text for TTS.
- You also get a few "god powers" (lightning, rain, festivals, lighthouses...) paid with resources the world produces.
It runs as a wallpaper on the background layer and pauses (0% CPU) when it's covered by maximized windows. There's also a window mode with zoom and the full chronicle. Capped at 30 FPS; a frame takes about 1 ms.
Install: curl -fsSL raw.githubusercontent.com | bash (installs to ~/.local, so it works fine on Fedora Atomic)
Python + GTK4 + gtk4-layer-shell + psutil. Wallpaper mode needs a compositor with layer-shell support. I've only tested it on Fedora 43 / COSMIC; on other desktops expect rough edges, and reports are very welcome. English and Spanish.
Repo: rsmedrano-cloud/kernel-kingdom (MIT)
I'd love to hear what other system signals you'd want to see turned into world events.
133 points · 10 comments
This post is a reaction to the 3rd person asking me for patterns on _how_ to use Nixtamal with NixOS configurations—specifically those coming from flakes looking to adopt system.nix + overlays. The cookbook is for patterns with the input pinner.
1. Yep, I have as well… but I have seen many places that if you are using a configuration.nix file, it’s you can’t put it it version control (which is almost certainly why the Nixmap project shows as much)
2. Yes. there are several input pinners—I made a comparison table to the best of by knowledge of the common ones. None check all boxes.
3. Flakes aren’t stable. The API has drifted, the manifest has no version, & there are 3 different flake implementations now (NixCpp, Lix, Determinate Nix). Folks are free to try them out, but a) they shouldn’t act like it’s stable b) without much effort you can get backwards compatibility without adding dependencies if using the patterns here. I was wanting to get a piece out that showed these patterns on how a stable Nix system would be consuming projects to help both system.nix adopters & upstream project think about compatibility (slapping flake-compat isn’t the right solution).
The goal isn’t to consume or generate manifest files from Nix so probably not a huge issue, but there is a KDL feature request & a pull request. KDL is used in Zellij, Niri, Miso, & even the System76 scheduler to name a few.
> I'm happy to switch off flakes if I'm offered something better.
That would be the goal, but Nixtamal only handles inputs. You’d need another project such as Nilla (not affiliated, not an endorsement) if you want the schema side. The problem is baking this buggy kitchen sink into the binary means its a) hard to iterate & b) hard for competition when folks say an experimental feature they can flip on. There are some neat ideas out there—& the ones that aren’t flakes all tend to be pluggable, but flakes owning a project in the way folks use it it practice, make it very difficult or impossible or expensive to get what could/should otherwise be classic Nix expressions. This ends up leading to tight coupling that’s hard to use at scale which leaves a sour taste in folks’ mouth about Nix. A lot of $BIG_TECH, even when using flakes set flake = false; on all inputs to get back control & lower complexity which also requires stable-friendly code.
(I’m also proud of handcoding up all the stuff to get Asciinema + Webm (AV1) video + GIF fallbacks for <noscript>… it was a lot of things to learn & plumb)
4 points
@Razer @intel @minliangtan pop#3620
forums.developer.nvidia.com
forums.developer.nvidia.com
dasharo-issues#1849
But Razer's tech support did not even able to recognized the error and customer service guy BS me said I have a falty unit, and reject to fix or replace due to out of warranty.
17 views
Is the timeline no longer being updated?
howdy howdy, just wanted to ask if the timeline here is being updated any more or if im just being impatient, from the looks of it, it hasnt been updated in months. please let me know if im wrong!
20 points · 9 comments
何気に致命的な不便さを被っていた、Pop!_OSの fcitx5 が使えなくなる問題について、PRがmergeされ、リリースされたっぽい。
ちゃんと各種ツールで日本語モード切り替え&入力が効くようになった!
cosmic-comp#2944
24 views
Am i using Cosmic wrong? Window position
Every update i just go and look if this Issue is merged. So i wonder if i am just the only one who gets insane by the current behaviour. What are you guys doing that i seems like you aren't bothered by this?
10 points · 2 comments
どうもこのバグ踏んじまったらしい
現時点で修正版がないのでhermes agentにビルドしてもらうハメに…
cosmic-comp#2947
1 like · 133 views
Features from macOS I GNOME needs
This has been on my mind for a while and I’m want to ask what alternative GNOME might come up with.
I think GNOME needs to have desktop widgets because GNOME clearly wants to work well on tablets and phones too.
The main reason I want widgets is simple: quick access to information without opening apps.
Stuff like todos, calendar events, reminders, messages, photos/memories, etc. These are things you check constantly, and opening a full app every time just feels unnecessary.
All of that comes from different apps, and keeping multiple apps open just for that is not great UX.
On phones/tablets, widgets make total sense, like, you would unlock with a fingerprint, glance at messages, todos other info, done, then turn off. Without widgets you would have to open 3 different apps glance at the info then switch off the phone. Its simply faster.
On the desktop it is simply the same people won't be distracted by widgets. They themselves would place it on the desktop, its not something that's done by default.
Extensions don’t really feel like a real solution either:
1. They are not app based
2. They break with every update
3. They depend on shell internals (more stuff for the devs to learn)
4. App developers aren’t going to hack GNOME Shell just to add a widget
Without a standard, everyone would do their own thing.
Something like portals or something like WidgetKit for Apple devices, something cross-de the devs can code against.
Or the developers would just give up if its not a streamlined thing.
All the other clean and mature environments like macOS, IOS, Android all have good implementations of widgets.
I’m not saying GNOME should copy other platforms. But a solution is required, even if it’s a very opinionated “GNOME way”.
2. Always visible/Intelli-hide Dock, docks with recent apps, are the most intuitive way of using your laptop, and GNOME should target all form factors
if the counter argument is extensions then "Without a standard, everyone would do their own thing."
People won't be able to build upon it
3. Font rendering
I’ve been trying to understand why macOS fonts look noticeably better than they do on GNOME, even when both are running on the same hardware (my Hackintosh laptop). The common explanation I keep seeing is “Apple tunes fonts for Apple displays”, but that doesn’t really hold up here: this is non-Apple hardware, and macOS still looks significantly better than GNOME on the exact same setup
Font smoothing / stem darkening is one of the reasons
macOS applies subtle glyph thickening (stem darkening), which makes UI text feel more solid and readable at common sizes. This is a huge part of why macOS text feels “heavier” and easier on the eyes.
On GNOME/Linux, this generally isn’t enabled by default, so text can look anemic unless you manually tweak fontconfig. Even though I have done that it still isn't as pretty as macOS.
The best result I’ve been able to get so far is installing Ubuntu’s. It helps a bit, but it still doesn’t come close to macOS.
Users shouldn’t need to tweak font rendering at all and that aligns with GNOME.
I want GNOME to have the same level of font rendering quality as macOS.
GNOME doesn't have gamma correction supposedly,
Look into this please (for anyone working on GNOME)
reddit.com
freetype.org
Even there, on hardware Apple never officially supported, you can clearly see the thicker strokes, smoother curves, and overall readability I’m referring to.
I can attach screenshots but they would do no justice to what font rendering actually looks like on mac.
But here are some anyways:
sixcolors.com
dortania.github.io
itsfoss.com
blog.driftingruby.com
4. Blur for the interface, which hopefully comes into libadwaita with recent updates
5. Universal text prediction, like macOS (even works within browsers)
appleinsider.com
6. An active way for the community to pay to develop something specific ie we need a way to spearhead development, because I don't trust giving it to GNOME get's distributed correctly. This is the only way to have more developers onboard, motivation through money.
How do we get these? Upvote this post and tell the community that this is what you want
10 points · 9 comments
I wish @COSMIC_desktop had scrolling window management like Niri/Gnome+PaperWM:
cosmic-epoch#322
2 likes · 47 views
Mentions
I love it when people leave solutions in long-open GitHub issues. Thanks *checks notes* me from two years ago! pop#2186
[COSMIC] My wallpaper is a kingdom simulation fed by my system: browsers are empires, compiling summons storms **Wallpaper**: [Kernel Kingdom](rsmedrano-cloud/kernel-kingdom) (OC, my own project): a live pixel-art kingdom simulated from my running processes, RAM, CPU and containers **DE**: [COSMIC](system76.com) 1.0 on [Fedora 43 COSMIC Atomic](fedoraproject.org) **Theme**: COSMIC Dark (default) · GTK: [adw-gtk3-dark](lassekongo83/adw-gtk3) **Icon Theme**: [Cosmic](pop-os/cosmic-icons) **Fonts**: Noto Sans / Noto Sans Mono **Panel applets**: [minimon](cosmic-utils/cosmic-ext-applet-minimon), [weather](cosmic-utils/cosmic-ext-applet-weather), [bitrate](avomar/bitrate) + **Other**: [COSMIC Tweaks](cosmic-utils/cosmic-ext-tweaks) **About the wallpaper:** each heavy app is a realm (browsers become empires), containers and services are fortresses, compiling brings storms, and realms go to war on their own: armies, trebuchets, burning cities, sacked capitals. A procedural chronicle narrates it all. It runs on the background layer via gtk4-layer-shell and pauses at 0% CPU when covered by windows. Python + GTK4, MIT, one-line install in the repo. I've been building Kernel Kingdom, a pixel-art isometric live wallpaper / idle game for Linux where the world is built from what your machine is actually doing. - Each heavy app becomes a realm: browsers grow into empires, smaller apps become hamlets. RAM is territory, CPU is activity, process count is population. - Containers and long-running services are fortresses that get walls the longer they stay up. Compiling brings thunderstorms. Network traffic sends ships around the island, typing sends messenger birds. - Realms go to war on their own: armies march, trebuchets fire at cities, buildings burn, capitals get sacked and move elsewhere. Borders really change over the day. - Kill an app and its realm falls and leaves ruins. Reopen it and a new dynasty is born somewhere else. - A procedural chronicle tells all of it (rulers, heroes, religions, named wars), and you can export each day's story as Markdown or plain text for TTS. - You also get a few "god powers" (lightning, rain, festivals, lighthouses...) paid with resources the world produces. It runs as a wallpaper on the background layer and pauses (0% CPU) when it's covered by maximized windows. There's also a window mode with zoom and the full chronicle. Capped at 30 FPS; a frame takes about 1 ms. Install: curl -fsSL raw.githubusercontent.com | bash (installs to ~/.local, so it works fine on Fedora Atomic) Python + GTK4 + gtk4-layer-shell + psutil. Wallpaper mode needs a compositor with layer-shell support. I've only tested it on Fedora 43 / COSMIC; on other desktops expect rough edges, and reports are very welcome. English and Spanish. Repo: rsmedrano-cloud/kernel-kingdom (MIT) I'd love to hear what other system signals you'd want to see turned into world events.
This post is a reaction to the 3rd person asking me for patterns on _how_ to use Nixtamal with NixOS configurations—specifically those coming from flakes looking to adopt system.nix + overlays. The cookbook is for patterns with the input pinner. 1. Yep, I have as well… but I have seen many places that if you are using a configuration.nix file, it’s you can’t put it it version control (which is almost certainly why the Nixmap project shows as much) 2. Yes. there are several input pinners—I made a comparison table to the best of by knowledge of the common ones. None check all boxes. 3. Flakes aren’t stable. The API has drifted, the manifest has no version, & there are 3 different flake implementations now (NixCpp, Lix, Determinate Nix). Folks are free to try them out, but a) they shouldn’t act like it’s stable b) without much effort you can get backwards compatibility without adding dependencies if using the patterns here. I was wanting to get a piece out that showed these patterns on how a stable Nix system would be consuming projects to help both system.nix adopters & upstream project think about compatibility (slapping flake-compat isn’t the right solution). The goal isn’t to consume or generate manifest files from Nix so probably not a huge issue, but there is a KDL feature request & a pull request. KDL is used in Zellij, Niri, Miso, & even the System76 scheduler to name a few. > I'm happy to switch off flakes if I'm offered something better. That would be the goal, but Nixtamal only handles inputs. You’d need another project such as Nilla (not affiliated, not an endorsement) if you want the schema side. The problem is baking this buggy kitchen sink into the binary means its a) hard to iterate & b) hard for competition when folks say an experimental feature they can flip on. There are some neat ideas out there—& the ones that aren’t flakes all tend to be pluggable, but flakes owning a project in the way folks use it it practice, make it very difficult or impossible or expensive to get what could/should otherwise be classic Nix expressions. This ends up leading to tight coupling that’s hard to use at scale which leaves a sour taste in folks’ mouth about Nix. A lot of $BIG_TECH, even when using flakes set flake = false; on all inputs to get back control & lower complexity which also requires stable-friendly code. (I’m also proud of handcoding up all the stuff to get Asciinema + Webm (AV1) video + GIF fallbacks for <noscript>… it was a lot of things to learn & plumb)
@Razer @intel @minliangtan pop#3620 forums.developer.nvidia.com forums.developer.nvidia.com dasharo-issues#1849 But Razer's tech support did not even able to recognized the error and customer service guy BS me said I have a falty unit, and reject to fix or replace due to out of warranty.
Is the timeline no longer being updated? howdy howdy, just wanted to ask if the timeline here is being updated any more or if im just being impatient, from the looks of it, it hasnt been updated in months. please let me know if im wrong!
何気に致命的な不便さを被っていた、Pop!_OSの fcitx5 が使えなくなる問題について、PRがmergeされ、リリースされたっぽい。 ちゃんと各種ツールで日本語モード切り替え&入力が効くようになった! cosmic-comp#2944
Am i using Cosmic wrong? Window position Every update i just go and look if this Issue is merged. So i wonder if i am just the only one who gets insane by the current behaviour. What are you guys doing that i seems like you aren't bothered by this?
どうもこのバグ踏んじまったらしい 現時点で修正版がないのでhermes agentにビルドしてもらうハメに… cosmic-comp#2947
Features from macOS I GNOME needs This has been on my mind for a while and I’m want to ask what alternative GNOME might come up with. I think GNOME needs to have desktop widgets because GNOME clearly wants to work well on tablets and phones too. The main reason I want widgets is simple: quick access to information without opening apps. Stuff like todos, calendar events, reminders, messages, photos/memories, etc. These are things you check constantly, and opening a full app every time just feels unnecessary. All of that comes from different apps, and keeping multiple apps open just for that is not great UX. On phones/tablets, widgets make total sense, like, you would unlock with a fingerprint, glance at messages, todos other info, done, then turn off. Without widgets you would have to open 3 different apps glance at the info then switch off the phone. Its simply faster. On the desktop it is simply the same people won't be distracted by widgets. They themselves would place it on the desktop, its not something that's done by default. Extensions don’t really feel like a real solution either: 1. They are not app based 2. They break with every update 3. They depend on shell internals (more stuff for the devs to learn) 4. App developers aren’t going to hack GNOME Shell just to add a widget Without a standard, everyone would do their own thing. Something like portals or something like WidgetKit for Apple devices, something cross-de the devs can code against. Or the developers would just give up if its not a streamlined thing. All the other clean and mature environments like macOS, IOS, Android all have good implementations of widgets. I’m not saying GNOME should copy other platforms. But a solution is required, even if it’s a very opinionated “GNOME way”. 2. Always visible/Intelli-hide Dock, docks with recent apps, are the most intuitive way of using your laptop, and GNOME should target all form factors if the counter argument is extensions then "Without a standard, everyone would do their own thing." People won't be able to build upon it 3. Font rendering I’ve been trying to understand why macOS fonts look noticeably better than they do on GNOME, even when both are running on the same hardware (my Hackintosh laptop). The common explanation I keep seeing is “Apple tunes fonts for Apple displays”, but that doesn’t really hold up here: this is non-Apple hardware, and macOS still looks significantly better than GNOME on the exact same setup Font smoothing / stem darkening is one of the reasons macOS applies subtle glyph thickening (stem darkening), which makes UI text feel more solid and readable at common sizes. This is a huge part of why macOS text feels “heavier” and easier on the eyes. On GNOME/Linux, this generally isn’t enabled by default, so text can look anemic unless you manually tweak fontconfig. Even though I have done that it still isn't as pretty as macOS. The best result I’ve been able to get so far is installing Ubuntu’s. It helps a bit, but it still doesn’t come close to macOS. Users shouldn’t need to tweak font rendering at all and that aligns with GNOME. I want GNOME to have the same level of font rendering quality as macOS. GNOME doesn't have gamma correction supposedly, Look into this please (for anyone working on GNOME) reddit.com freetype.org Even there, on hardware Apple never officially supported, you can clearly see the thicker strokes, smoother curves, and overall readability I’m referring to. I can attach screenshots but they would do no justice to what font rendering actually looks like on mac. But here are some anyways: sixcolors.com dortania.github.io itsfoss.com blog.driftingruby.com 4. Blur for the interface, which hopefully comes into libadwaita with recent updates 5. Universal text prediction, like macOS (even works within browsers) appleinsider.com 6. An active way for the community to pay to develop something specific ie we need a way to spearhead development, because I don't trust giving it to GNOME get's distributed correctly. This is the only way to have more developers onboard, motivation through money. How do we get these? Upvote this post and tell the community that this is what you want
I wish @COSMIC_desktop had scrolling window management like Niri/Gnome+PaperWM: cosmic-epoch#322