Disclaimer: (Incoming long rant - I was an early and often adopter of the S76 machines when I ran a dev team ~10 years ago - S76 Gazelle was my first full-time production linux-only laptop that I ran (I still have 2 of them, and they are bother broken because between model releases CLIO (the OEM) changed the screen interface connector so a dead screen on one laptop couldnt be moved to the other, and lots LOTS of internal screws would fall out an rattle around - and then S76 wanted a retarded amount $$ for a replacement power adapter - etc... and their service went poor as they grew (Hellow Penguin Computing) -- with that said:

---

If you want to redo the desktop, this is a Fisher-Price level of "why should I care" -- HERE Are the features I want in a desktop redux - (ita ll about the WORKFLOWS - not the fricken applets/widgets (the applets idea is a pullover, even if they dont know it, from when Android was seeking to be a good desktop, rather than a tablet, like vision (hospital devices - could give a tech talk on this)...

But hear me out WORKFLOW or CONTEXTUAL desktopping:

I can have multiple desktops on any OS - with a click-swipe left or right I can have another desktop. Which is akin to switching a clear spot on the physical desk.

What I would want within a "new desktop environment" is that I can swap between my "coding" "gaming" "research" "kids-screen-time" "python rabbit hole" "AI Image gen" contexts... with a differing visual clues to which setting im contextualizing:

Imagine you boot to your primary "normal desktop" - its just like any OS' vanilla post-login experience. Blank, no apps open, grab a browser, open a file, go to email - whatever.

Now - I want to swap over to Context[0] - coding.

I switch to that context, I get a visual cue (sure we can load pretty backgrounds, but a subtle change to the overall visuals of the windows dressings switch showing me I am in that context - it would load appletts that give me a preset of context that important (I select a series of things to pre-load, such as "Open VS Code with these folders, and launch FF with this set of contextual tabs. From this context block reddit, [other sites] - and ssh to this machine, give me a widget that shows connections to [environment] etc - give me a summary history of previous commands I was running, current active procs within [context scpoe] etc -- so effectively I have my development desktop context available.

Then I switch to research and its opens the things I want for that - connections to whatever GPTs, rstudio/some BI tool... whateer - and a bucket of tabs and history that are appropriate.

Kids tab is a sandbox for the kids as I teach them certain things... Or a Cooking context thats related to all things cooking. has a timer widget, last recipes looked up etc...

---

You get the idea.

(I wrote a white paper about this ages ago - and attempted to recruit some buddies from Goog multiple times to make the contextual computing relevant once motorola came out with that phone that could be docked with data (My white paper on the subject was written in ~2002-4 (cant recall now) -- which was that you held your environment in your mobile and you could walk up to any empty compute/gpu/KVM - slot your phone there, it is the key - it opens your context from device, and cloud, and gave your the local resources of GPU/CPU/KVM whereever you needed it. No storage on the local HW... but you could take advantage of it

(aside: A great alt model that is a modern version would be able to walk up to a heavy GPU with pre-loaded giant models - and you can plug into them for context and run your stuff locally against them and get your results - but walk away from them (think Hot-Desking but for big-ass-GPUs -- I havent thought too much about this - but its an effective analogy for when I first wrote about this)

Anyway -- What I want is a revolutiuon in HOW we see the desktop.

The analogy for a desktop, a physical desktop is dated -- now its "conscious compute contexts" -- Where the whole environment shifts to support what one is attempting to do.

###

This really sounds like it could serve the above.

The sharing it with friends:: or team members -- you should be able to invite folks to a context - such that you can have a multi-user context whereby you send an @COSMIC link to a context to a colleague over slack - they load the link, and it effectively launches a "docker" context of the environment to the other user... now they have all apps and deps to jump fully into the context.

This would be useable for teaching, guiding, troubleshooting, development, collaboration...

Set a master context and its all in a repo - and when other users need to upstream a dependency to the context they simply install whatever within their context and it acts like PR to the context owner. It allows for ephemeral installatino of dependencies - and you can tick for perm inclusion - else they evap on leaving context - yet the history of the ephemerals is kept incase you want to resurrect them/include them in the master context settings.

from a window management aesthetic -- KILL ALL WHITESPACE -- meaning all the superflous padding. Stop making desktop buttons look like shit I should be using on a kiosk.

With all that said:

Im down to try it I will give it an honest go - and if any Sys76 folks are here - I still have my gazelles - and my ticket about you swapping out the connector on the same model of box still stands! Ill see if I can make an applet -- specifically I want a context applet that is imbued with RAG -- mayhaps building the applet on txtai libs so that my entire bash hist is txtAI rag'd ...

Ill try out COSMIC on a flagship OMEN 3070 gaming box and see how this works...

I really want to see if I can imbue (imbue was the name of my white paper from ~2002 on the subject) the workflows I would like...

(I've Forrest Gump'd through a lot of technical tides in my sordid life in Silicon Valley)