cosmic VS apt

I think there might be some confusion in this poll and thread -- COSMIC is the name of both a suite of components in Pop_Shell, which modifies (but does not replace) GNOME shell components like the dock and workspaces, as well as a full-fledged desktop environment that replaces GNOME.

The 'Cosmic' name also indicates that; see https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic.

Could you explain a bit more what you mean by arranging the folders manually? I wonder if you might be talking about the Launch Applications window, which is part of Cosmic: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic/blob/master_jammy/applications.js (This is different from the "Pop Launcher", which is the small window that pops up when you press and release the Super key).

Just to be clear, you are talking about the Pop Launcher and not the Cosmic Applications Launcher, correct? (since there may be some confusion around what the "Pop Launcher" is vs. the "Cosmic Applications Launcher" ... see https://imgur.com/a/XN34drv for images)

https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic - This? It's based on GNOME shell, isn't it? Just with extra stuff on top of it.

It is possible. It should be available in repos (ppa might be required). Or you could also compile it.

Start here for the top (part of COSMIC). And here for the bottom (part of pop-shell)

And if that's not enough, you yourself seem to have been responsible that exactly this change was added to apt. If I may refresh your memory: https://github.com/pop-os/apt/pull/1 It even links to upstream Debian work mentioning exactly this method: https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/merge_requests/196

And no matter how hard it is, if it's possible to break it, someone will find their way to completely breaking the system. Look at what Linus had to do to break his Pop!_OS install - go to the terminal (which already renders it far out of reach for the average user), run sudo apt install steam, and ignore a giant error. And that wouldn't work anymore anyway, because Pop now uses a version of APT that completely forbids breaking the system unless specifically configured to allow it - so there is now an extra step in there, telling APT not to preserve pop-desktop.

ah, I thought you mean https://github.com/pop-os/apt/pull/1

- Improve the GUI package manager error message: https://github.com/pop-os/shop/pull/302 - Make the apt message more explicit and make the bypass much harder: https://github.com/pop-os/apt/pull/1

https://github.com/pop-os/apt/pull/1/files Here is the code change. Note line 311.

And they already issued a "fix" to prevent people to easily "break" it.

And their fix for the issue Linus had is downstream only. Not a word said about working with Debian on this.

If I'm just installing a program, I shouldn't even have to consider that it might uninstall an essential part of the system. That's not even in the realm of possibility. And yes, it did output a warning, but the warning was mixed in with a lot of jargon that Linus couldn't be expected to understand. I think this change (where you have to create a file to allow dangerous operations like this, and it doesn't even tell you what file to create, so you'd have to search for it and would likely find severe warnings) is far better than the approach that Linus encountered.

You need to add some file if you really want that. https://github.com/pop-os/apt/pull/1/files