Edit: after reading the post, the below is not really relevant to the blog post

Interesting one

I guess it is fair that nobody wants to deal with GNOME and their reluctance of theming. I like theming and despise "light" (white) themes or not well readable dark themes (that dont save any energy on non-OLED displays).

I am on KDE, using GNOME at work (it is okay but worse in like 20 aspects I regularly use). Tried COSMIC on lower end hardware and it was not great.

I like that they support theming but agree, their desktop is pretty ugly.

Tho I use GNOME with dash-to-panel and blur-my-shell as well as the breeze cursor. The default theme is kinda weird (not blurring wastes potential) and the macOS like top bar is worse to use and wastes screen space (most importantly on Laptops).

GNOME is way worse than KDE, COSMIC has a couple of nice things but is worse than GNOME still for my use cases. No surprises.

I have to stress though that statically linked binaries are not good. Many distros shipping COSMIC use those, wasting RAM, optimisations and potentially vendoring outdated dependencies.

I also believe people when they dislike C++ and say KDE has a messy codebase. So I very much hope that COSMIC (with a substantial theme) can replace KDE for me. But I highly doubt that.

More importantly is, how old DEs make the transition from C and C++ to Rust, Zig, Go or whatever else you prefer.

With Windows going all in on Javascript you can see how not to do it XD