Are We Desktop Yet?
summary
System76 builds a full desktop environment in Rust called COSMIC and proves it ships: a Rust-native toolkit (iced + a custom widget layer), a text stack (cosmic-text) that lands in multiple projects, and a compositor based on Smithay that integrates the GUI with Wayland and DRM. Integration of iced into the compositor is about 1,000 lines of glue, runs with software rendering on GLES2.1 hardware, and exposes real async pain points (zbus workarounds, caloop executor) that are solved but not ideal.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Cosmic desktop intro
- 3:15Cosmic background
- 8:55GUI toolkit for Cosmic
- 13:52Why iced for Cosmic
- 17:23Rust-native GUI challenges
- 21:15Rust for desktop GUIs?
- 22:40Integrating iced into compositor
- 26:12Cosmic Comp async delay
- 31:58Future async plans
- 35:47Q&A
