🔗The Year of Linux on the Desktop

I'll write about this more later, but I wanted to take the opportunity to make the above joke that only works right about now since I've been using Linux as my main work OS for about a year.

Briefly: I've used macOS for work and personal computing for over 20 years, and lately Apple's monopolist/duopolist tactics have led me to consider alternatives. I have a lot of Apple stuff and it's not all equally easy to move away from, but for the work I do and my personal needs, swapping in Linux in place of macOS was probably the easiest of the options I had.

🔗A New Desktop Environment: COSMIC by System76

COSMIC is a new from-scratch desktop environment for Linux, similar to Gnome or KDE. I found it originally because it's written in Rust, my latest programming language BFF. It just recently hit v1.0, so it's definitely rough around the edges.

🔗Fixing a Rough Edge

One of those rough edges is the notification system, especially in presenting notifications from the browser:

Unreadable notification
The notification before: raw HTML and no app icon

This is clearly not great. It's showing raw HTML, the intended message is missing, and the app icon is absent. After spending about ten minutes with Claude Code I had a change to cosmic-notifications that made it look like this for the same notification:

Readable notification
The notification after: clean text and proper icon

Nice! I packed up the changes and submitted them as a pull request to the cosmic-notifications repository. While writing this post I noticed that someone else had submitted a similar fix… in December. That's not great, and I'm hoping that the developers will be a little more responsive to external PRs in the future.

Here's hoping this is fixed one way or another in a near-future version of COSMIC!