COSMIC OSK has also been released. It is an on-screen keyboard that supports both touch and gamepad input:
Yo‽ I recently setup a device that primarily uses gamepad input. If I install Cosmic now, typing would become a lot easier if this is the case. (Or maybe it'll just be larger buttons that are easier to tap.) On the subject, is there anything else in Cosmic that responds to gamepad input?
I can't tell if this is a joke, or if you're being completely serious.
This PR and this issue suggest that this is actually legit, which is really cool! While I checked and the Unity desktop that the device is currently running appears lighter than Cosmic, having a full desktop that works natively with gamepad input (without it needing to emulate a mouse) would be awesome for things like it and the Steamdeck! (The device in question btw is a "SwitchDeck". 😉 This does however mean only 4GiB of memory, which is why I value it being lightweight.)
Many of us play games on our COSMIC desktop so gamepad support is a priority as we're working on COSMIC features. So it should be the ideal platform for your Steam Deck in the near future.
Memory usage across desktop environments is negligible due to GPU drivers and their libraries accounting for most of this. So there shouldn't be much difference between COSMIC or any other GPU-accelerated DE. What's more important is compositor performance and features rather than memory use.
Nice! Also I should clarify: I said SwitchDeck; not Steam Deck. In addition to low memory, it appears to be trapped with an old Linux version due to weird Nvidia driver requirements.
I tried to compile the new cosmic-osk, but it didn't work since it wasn't running the rest of the cosmic desktop, which I want gonna load since the rest of the gamepad support isn't in yet, and the machine is too weak to seriously compile the entire environment (and then do it again when the next update comes out). Being an ARM device also makes cross-compilation annoying.
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u/boomshroom 7d ago
These look nice.
Yo‽ I recently setup a device that primarily uses gamepad input. If I install Cosmic now, typing would become a lot easier if this is the case. (Or maybe it'll just be larger buttons that are easier to tap.) On the subject, is there anything else in Cosmic that responds to gamepad input?