There are valid criticism to be made about cosmic desktop, like

*Lists two positives*

If that’s the best example of criticism to be had about COSMIC, then it’s practically flawless. Except of course, though, it isn’t. Aside from the general lack of polish, I’d argue that there’s not enough customization. E.g. things that should really be a slider or spin control (or better yet multiple sliders/spin controls) like corner radii are multiple choice button things (not to mention that the ‘square’ style is anything but.) Some of the sliders that do exist (particularly the size ones) have very few set points that make them essentially disguised drop downs. I could probably find dozens more things to criticize if I cared to sit down and nitpick everything.

C++ is pretty alright, IMO, but the syntax is kinda clunky though, I think probably because of some historical baggage.

As much as I sympathise with developers over headaches caused by themeing, I believe users (myself included) would be less up-in-arms about it if applications were less ugly by default. And boy howdy is libadwaita ugly as sin.

I’d be perfectly willing to tolerate a mismatched system, if the individual components looked at least okay. Like I’m not going to get e.g. steam or discord to match an e.g. Windows 9x theme, and I’m mostly okay with that because they aren’t horrible to look at. But, say, File Roller? Absolutely not. Horribly ugly.

A program that I use often uses an embedded MPV window for video playing, and Wayland doesn’t support that, and apparently won’t: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/74

So until something changes with that program, MPV, or Wayland, or I decide to rewrite the program myself, I’m stuck with X11.

Personally I quite like zstd, I find it has a pretty decent balance of speed to ratio at each of its levels.

Definitely. As nice as it would be, I don’t think it will significantly change any time soon, for several reasons. Not least of which is because several programs would likely just flatly refuse to implement such a change, judging by some of them refusing to even consider patches to implement the XDG Base Directory Specification.

Not really software but, personally I think the FHS could do with replacing. It feels like its got a lot of historical baggage tacked on that it could really do with shedding.

There was a bit of drama on tumblr (owned by Automattic) not too long ago where a relatively well known trans blogger got banned as a part of an alleged harassment campaign. I recall Matt Mullenwag (Automattic’s CEO) being accused of following the user on to other platforms and harassing them. There were also accusations of, IIRC, tumblr staff taking payments to ban users. Which isn’t great. So if my memory is accurate, your gut feeling is probably right.

Edit: typo, slleged -> alleged

Am I missing something or do two cloud computing services, two database systems, and a search engine have nothing to do with a game engine? Cuz this looks like a false equivalency whataboutism two-for-one combo to me.