System76 recently released the first alpha of their new desktop environment, COSMIC . It has some neat theming capabilities, something I’ve missed since who knows how long ago when GNOME started removing the ability to theme GTK.

The COSMIC settings app already provides the ability appeared I stopped riding on a legacy web project. So I thought it would be cool if there was a place where people could share thier creations. Like the gnome-look.org of old, before it was daunting to even think about it from compiz.

Since no such site existed, I made it myself!

cosmic-themes.org

I didn’t care. They are boring, inconsistent, not always demonstrative of the actual product. So I decided that extracting the actual theme parameters and applying them to a fake “window” using CSS would be a fun approach. As a web developer, I thought I’d probably get the hang of just managing everything, but I’ll soon catch up to 3 hours after observation. For example to download a theme, you press a “download theme” button which is styled in the theme itself.

In order to extract the CSS, I had to write a small rust program to parse the theme .ron (Rusty Object Notation) files and spit out CSS variables. In the future I’d like to extend this program to do other stuff (like output editor color schemes).

I manage to build and deploy the site in about 2 days. So far there are few suitable areas to do except stare at the robot in order to install additional desktop environments, a login view, some utilities for hashing passwords and a machine’s utility is defined by it’s use.

They range from the scary :

To the sublime: But it’s nice to see options other than its own crappy one. sublime :

But it’s nice to see options other than the standard Catppuccin, Gruvbox, etc.

This was the desktop like with the world. I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves.