I use it pretty often to keep my desktop, laptop, and server configs in sync.

To setup new systems, I created this bash script: https://lemmy.world/post/41584520/21545156

Then I would run the commands in my original post to create the symlinks.

I’ve been happy with GNU Stow. Super simple and clean. I keep all the files in ~/stow and follow this workflow. You can avoid the git bits if you want and update ~/stow however you want.

cd ~/stow

# pull latest changes from git provider for syncing
git fetch
git status
git pull

# if made any edits and wanted to push them
git add .
git push origin main

# do a dry run of stow just to make sure it won't do anything weird
stow -n -v --no-folding .

# do a real run of stow if nothing is wrong
# note: --no-folding prevents folders from becoming symlinked, only files will be symlinks,
# this prevents unintended files from going into ~/stow
stow -v --no-folding .

Sometimes

flatpak remote-modify --enable flathub

is necessary.

It can conflict with some programs. A lot of modern design programs make use of middle click drags to move around a canvas.

That caused problems for me and it took me days to realize it was middle click paste causing the issue of all these random segments of text appearing all over the canvas.

It was also annoying to disable. I was using Chromium at the time and you simply cannot disable it, even by disabling it in Gnome. I had to use Firefox exclusively when using that design program since at least Firefox has a hidden option to disable it.

Hardware/driver bugs are one thing, but COSMIC has plenty of purely software/logical bugs discoverable on any hardware.

That’s what the alphas, betas, and user studies are for.

Pushing buggy software out as stable is a feature of modern corporate software development that should be avoided. It gives a poor impression of the software.

Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.

Shocking, a 3 year old project is not as well established as a 20+ year old desktops. Its feature set is enough to me, but they did release it too early as it is still quite buggy.

COSMIC is very poorly designed, it might be written in the “memory-safe programming language” but it’s clear that they don’t have a design backbone

It looks “fine”. I agree that modern Adwaita looks better, but it’s not terrible. The default theme is meh, but themes like Catppuccin makes it look nice. There’s also missing things like drop shadows and animations, which I believe are toolkit limitations.

They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME

Gnome and System76 had different goals and UX ideas that were incompatible. Rather than continually patching Gnome and updating their patches to keep working, they decided to build their own thing, that’s fine.

I don’t quite get why Gnome people see this as a negative. If System76 is a poor downstream, then System76 no longer being a downstream is beneficial for them.

rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time

I think that’s a good thing in the long run. Gnome and KDE both have a significant amount of technical debt.

One of the things I love about COSMIC is how sanely it’s built, following modern programming principles.

• Rust helps avoid memory issues, helping with security and bugs
• A lot of things run as their own processes, which would typically all be running under a single process in Gnome/KDE. So even if something does crash, say the power applet or notifications applet, it won’t bring down other components like the shell.
• Clean layout of configuration, data, and state files. KDE is an absolute mess in this department. Gnome is better than KDE, but COSMIC does even better.

So while COSMIC is worse now due to its bugs and lack of features, I think it’s built on better foundations. That is, if System76 continues to invest in it. I’m not sure how profitable/unprofitable it is for them. My guess would be unprofitable.

It’s not atomic or cloud native either if you want to be strict with definitions.

The old Cosmic was built on top of Gnome using extensions, but the new Cosmic was written from scratch. It largely mimics the look of old Cosmic, but has introduced a few new things.

There are desktops try do mimic the look of MacOS, but none I’ve used actually felt like using MacOS. The first time I used MacOS, I was shocked at how many quirky things it does, the way it operates. No Linux desktop prepared me for that.

The only thing MacOS and Gnome have in common is a top bar and app grid. Other than that, MacOS is closer to Windows than Gnome.

• Windows and MacOS have always visible panel showing favorite apps and open apps, Gnome dosen’t
• Windows and MacOS have appindicators on panels, Gnome doesn’t

And to further differentiate Gnome from MacOS,

• Gnome’s UX is closer to Windows. There are many, many reasons why, but some are: don’t need to click a window to focus it before you can interact with it, fullscreening behaviors, assumes Windows-style keyboard layout
• No global menu, Gnome doesn’t even use that paradigm.

Honestly the closest DE to MacOS is Cosmic. The launchers work similarly, the overviews work similarly, it has the option to handle minimized windows similarly to MacOS, uses menubars (but not global).

There’s an unofficial version of Bedrock for Linux that runs “natively” using the Android x86 version of the game. Unfortunately it currently does not support Mounts of Mayhem. https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.mrarm.mcpelauncher

Wine didn’t work for Bedrock in the past because of how it was packaged on Windows. However, they recently switched the package type to something that Wine might support? Haven’t tested or personally or see anyone else do it.

Yup, been that way for a while unfortunately. Especially annoying for Linux and MacOS users who can’t just launch Bedrock on their computers. Trying to complete challenges on a touchscreen is super annoying.

Yeah, it’s really annoying. For a game that many children play, I’m surprised they don’t give super clear-cut instructions on how to actually get things.

I went for the simplest option

1. Installed a distro (in this case Debian)
2. Installed tailscale on the server, logged in
3. Installed tailscale on my other devices, logged in
4. Used sshfs to mount the desired directory on the server to my client
5. SSH in once a week or so to run updates

Found it very simple. Avoided the tedious setup of samba and samba had weird reliability issues for me when copying large files. Took a bit to learn how ssh works, but very much so worth it.

It’s so terrible…

I like the fact it includes the year information, but it does not solve the problem of Bedrock and Java being misaligned.

I don’t see why they didn’t just do year.dropNumber.patch version. So, the third drop of 2026 would be called 26.3.x for Bedrock and Java. But that last number will differ for Java and Bedrock to represent fixes made.

Not a security issue, copyright/license issues.

No, it’s a limitation with swaybg so they created a tool that doesn’t have that limitation.

Sideloading or preinstalling?

Sideloading already existed, but only for ostree flatpaks. Flatpak also supports OCI flatpaks, but the support for those aren’t as good, hence the previously missing side loading support.

I question their motives with Bedrock more than Java. Though there is some stuff like the chat censorship in Java that is questionable.

I hope the performance significantly improves by then. Beta 1 felt pretty rough to me. And also, animations.