I'm a System76 engineer / Pop!_OS maintainer. I've been a Linux user since 2007; and Rust since 2015. I'm currently working on COSMIC-related projects.
Speaking of being defensive, not only are you being far more defensive than I, but these bullet points are both misleading and wildly inaccurate. It's also telling that you think none of my points are good, when they are the truth. Could you possibly be even more a hypocrite?
Ubuntu is Debian with more up-to-date packages and a lot of additional third party packages. There's a lot of companies who produce development toolkits, frameworks, and applications that are explicitly built for the Ubuntu base. Some governmental agencies and organizations also require access to packages and repositories that have been audited by security agencies, which Ubuntu has gone through the process of getting certification for certain kernels and their Ubuntu Pro repositories. All of which are useful for real world customers.
Regardless of shortcomings in Snap, Pop does not rely on Snaps, and offers its own packaging for things that would otherwise require Snap on Ubuntu.
GNOME Shell extensions are JavaScript monkey patch injections to gnome-shell's JavaScript process. They're only compatible with the exact version of gnome-shell that they target because most of them require to override private internals of gnome-shell that are sensitive to order of injection and names of private variables and methods.
COSMIC uses a modern Wayland-based approach to shell interface design with layer-shell applets. Each applet is its own process, using the layer-shell Wayland protocol to render their windows as shell components, and communicating with the compositor securely with the security context Wayland protocol. The protocols they use are standardized, so they will be stable across COSMIC releases. Other Wayland compositors could integrate with them if they desire to.
There's a very large gap between having tiling, and having excellent auto-tiling capabilities with intuitive shortcuts and behaviors. COSMIC's autotiling was designed from the ground up to be just as usable with a mouse as it is with a keyboard.
If COSMIC is pathetic, then GNOME must be abysmally unusable.
COSMIC was already planned long before there was any beef with GNOME.
We listen to user feedback and prioritize development of features that our developers and users want.
Good luck trying to replicate COSMIC's theming and tiling capabilities in GNOME.
Let alone the overall stability and performance of COSMIC.
COSMIC Store is the fastest app store on Linux now. I'd recommend everyone to try it out.
sudo apt install cosmic-store
How so? 22.04 is actively maintained and updated by Ubuntu, and is still the latest LTS release. On top of that, the most important packages in Pop!_OS are updated frequently, so we are on Mesa 24.0.3 and Linux 6.8.0.
As for when COSMIC releases, you should read last month's blog post.
Did you not read the blog update? That is exactly what the blog update covered... The user's theme colors are applied to the Adwaita theme used by GTK4/libadwaita, and GTK3 theme support is provided by adw-gtk3.
All desktops use the Super key nowadays. Sway, i3, GNOME, Plasma, etc. are all using the Super key. Have been for years. The standard convention is that the Super key is reserved for system-level shortcuts handled by the window manager; and Alt key shortcuts are reserved for application-level shortcuts. Your desktop might have bound both Alt and Super because of legacy reasons.
You might be surprised how much disk space those GNOME Circle applications actually require, despite being dynamically linked to a lot of GTK/GNOME libraries. Unless they're written in a scripting language, they're much closer to a COSMIC application than you think.
I don't see the issue with an application having a static binary within the realm of 15-25 MB. Even if you had 100 applications installed, that's only 2 GB of disk usage.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a cosmic-applets-community package which bundles third party applets, or the gradual inclusion of popular applets into cosmic-applets. Given that an applet would only become popular if there's a lot of need for those use cases, then it would make sense to open a path to getting them mainlined.
Wayland compositors have to implement the whole display server, including special handling of XWayland windows. XWayland windows can be very finicky and require caution to handle.
That's not implemented, but you can click the maximize button, or press Super+M to toggle maximization.
You can open the Appearance settings page and change that to your preferred color scheme. We've already selected our default colors and they're not going to change from here on out.
What do you mean by minimal? The PrintScrn key opens the screenshot utility, which lets you choose between capturing a selected region, a specific window, or the whole display
What's wrong with the file manager and editor? You can use whatever editor and file manager you want, so that shouldn't be a blocker for daily use.
This can be configured in the cosmic comp config, but will be implemented in the settings app soon.
Super+W opens the workspaces view
Your distribution should make sure pop-launcher is installed, and each of its plugins symlinked.
That is already possible in the Desktop and Panel settings page. As you can see, I'm not using a GNOME style panel or dock here.
It should be noted that COSMIC itself hasn't been delayed. Development on the core applications progressed much faster than expected, so we decided to skip the Alpha 1 release and release Alpha 2 instead.
Why wouldn't you like using it right now? I wouldn't call it "very alpha".
Consumes less energy (CPU) while also rendering more responsively.