Do we need another desktop environment? There's already KDE Plasma, GNOME Shell, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon and the list goes on for a while. System76 at least seem to think another is needed, one they control.
The news tip comes courtesy of System76 engineer Michael Murphy, who mentioned on Reddit their plans for it to be "its own desktop" and that it won't be based on GNOME like their most recent attempt with Cosmic but instead "it is its own thing written in Rust".
It's not a whole lot to go on right now but interesting regardless, because System76 are one of the biggest vendors of Linux hardware and they're the maker of their own Pop!_OS distribution based on Ubuntu. So they already supply the hardware, the distribution and later the desktop too. This will put them in quite a unique position, since they will have even more room to fully tailor the experience for their customers.
Pictured - the current Cosmic desktop in Pop!_OS
Not a huge surprise either, considering if you follow the System76 crew closely, you might have seen some friction between System76 engineers and GNOME recently with things like theming and customization. Seems there's some deeper technical problems that lead to this decision though.
Part of the problem appears to be the extensions system in GNOME, which many users of GNOME will know how twitchy it can be and how extensions often break with new GNOME releases. Discussing this Murphy mentioned "What are you expecting us to do? We have a desktop environment that is a collection of GNOME Shell extensions which break every GNOME Shell release. Either we move towards maintaining tens of thousands of lines of monkey patches, or we do it the right way and make the next step a fully fledged desktop environment equal to GNOME Shell.".
Murphy continued explaining some of the reasoning behind the decision, in reply to a user asking about what they plan to do versus GNOME to which Murphy replied "Significantly better stability over GNOME Shell, with much less resource usage, and more configurable out of the box. Achieving a modern software architecture for the desktop in Rust.".
What do you think to this? Let us know in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: rustybroomhandleI don't like this. Already if you use Gnome, but maybe you like Ark, you cannot drag files from Ark to Nautilus. We love all the choice, but we're half forced to use "pure" desktop environments to ensure a consistent experience. Mixing apps from different desktops mean loads of additional bloat and applications that look like they do not belong together.
AFAIK drag-n-drop should work between Qt and GTK applications. It's not that one of these are using Wayland and the other X11?
Schattenspiegel Nov 9, 2021
soulsource Nov 9, 2021
Quoting: scaineQuoting: soulsourceQuoting: drmothCanonical's Unity, once the bugs were fixed, was actually really good.
Canonical's Unity was basically the Gnome desktop environment with Compiz as Window Manager (and some hacks to GTK). It only worked as long as you didn't dare to even think about opening CompizConfig. Once you even remotely considered changing any Compiz setting away from theGodCanonical-given default, your desktop was messed up beyond repair and your only option to get it working again was to nuke your compiz config files from orbit.
As unhappy as I am with recent Gnome, Unity was imho even worse...
As someone who frequently messed about with ccsm while using Unity, I do have to wonder what on earth you were changing to cause desktop instability!
Of course I exaggerated.
However by adding new features for Unity, some other features of Compiz got broken, and it seems I was just unlucky that those were settings I really wanted to use...
My memory is not that fresh any more, so I can't point my finger on which settings exactly caused Compiz to crash on launch, though... I think it was about focus following mouse or window snapping, but yeah, I'm not certain any more. In any case, it was nothing super-exotic, just stuff that I had been using with older Compiz versions before that.
I just remember that I was annoyed enough to replace Ubuntu by Debian due to this, and to never look back...
(Funny enough, with the switch to Debian I also ditched Compiz in favor of Xfwm, because I regularly hit swapping-hell on my office PC back then, and I found out that disabling compositing freed about 200 MB of RAM.)
Last edited by soulsource on 9 November 2021 at 4:59 pm UTC
Quoting: soulsourceI just remember that I was annoyed enough to replace Ubuntu by Debian due to this, and to never look back...
You say that, but isn't that a Gentoo logo next to your avatar??
soulsource Nov 9, 2021
Quoting: scaineYes, but that came much later and not for any work-related stuff (if I could use Linux for work nowadays, I'd still be running Debian on those machines - the same for servers, btw.). Also, Gentoo isn't Ubuntu, is it?Quoting: soulsourceI just remember that I was annoyed enough to replace Ubuntu by Debian due to this, and to never look back...
You say that, but isn't that a Gentoo logo next to your avatar??
Ben Flanagin Admin
Answer
We're still planning on releasing our Desktop sometime in 2023.
21.10 will see some of the design choices we are going with as well as some minor tweaks to things that get us closer to the final design.
Quoting: eldarionSo why are they not switching to KDE? Creating a good DE is no easy task and I don't think they have the means to do that or are they prepared to support it in the long run. I have zero expectations on this.
I bet someone in System76 tried Rust and loved it, so decided to start a project for the sake of using Rust.
Quoting: tuubiQuoting: STiATWhat UI library are they going with would be interesting. Rust certainly is a good choice, I do not know of a lot of UI libraries or bindings which are reall well maintained at the moment.gtk-rs seems to be further along (and more official) than the available Qt bindings, but I couldn't say if it's quite production ready yet. That's no reason not to use either in an open source project of course. Nothing better to push these bindings along than actual projects using them.
I did not notice they got that far already. Interesting indeed.
Quoting: sarmadQuoting: eldarionSo why are they not switching to KDE? Creating a good DE is no easy task and I don't think they have the means to do that or are they prepared to support it in the long run. I have zero expectations on this.
I bet someone in System76 tried Rust and loved it, so decided to start a project for the sake of using Rust.
May be, may not be. Qt always has the licensing dangling above it, and KDE is flexible, but a own desktop on top of Plasma by no means easy to accomplish. A new shell on top of KDE libs makes no difference to using other libraries / implementations for similar functionality.
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