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.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The comments on this article are closed.
All posts need to follow our rules. For users logged in: please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Guest readers can email us for any issues.
I 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?
0 Likes
Schattenspiegel Nov 9, 2021
Can only bee good if one of the bigger names start shipping with something else then Gnome as standard DE. Gnome is simply not the best first impression DE, IMHO (To much learning coming from somewhere else and to limited features once you get serious) and is to widely endorsed for what it is or has become over the last years - although for some people the shoe may fit. If the better known distros Ship with different default Desktops and polish their respective user experience a bit, we can only profit.
2 Likes, Who?
soulsource Nov 9, 2021
Canonical'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
2 Likes, Who?
I 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??
0 Likes
soulsource Nov 9, 2021
Yes, 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?I 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??
1 Likes, Who?
I get the feeling that the future of Linux desktops involves a whole lot of GTK, but not all that much actual Gnome.
3 Likes, Who?
There is still time, also, you could ask these questions to Ben in the Pop!_OS facebook group, he opened the Q&A yesterday:
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.
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.
0 Likes
So 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.
0 Likes
What 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.
1 Likes, Who?
So 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.
0 Likes
What I'm interested in is someone creating a Qt replacement in Rust from scratch.
Last edited by Shmerl on 10 November 2021 at 12:47 am UTC
Last edited by Shmerl on 10 November 2021 at 12:47 am UTC
0 Likes
fenglengshun Nov 10, 2021
Honestly, my main requirement these days are Activity Overview, Global Menu, and Borderless Maximized Windows. Plus ideally a UX Switcher so I can safely recommend it to Newbies. That's why I'm probably looking at staying on Gnome and KDE, as much as I respect Budgie from my brief time with it.
Considering today's release of Linus and Luke's Linux challenge, I think this is a good step seeing how much of a mess Gnome became while Linus only wanted to install Steam.
Pop!_OS is the go-to recommendation for gaming on Linux for newbies but it's been very messy in my experience, so a way for them to tailor the experience for gamers while pruning issues would be great. And it's just neat to see more projects in Rust.
Considering today's release of Linus and Luke's Linux challenge, I think this is a good step seeing how much of a mess Gnome became while Linus only wanted to install Steam.
Pop!_OS is the go-to recommendation for gaming on Linux for newbies but it's been very messy in my experience, so a way for them to tailor the experience for gamers while pruning issues would be great. And it's just neat to see more projects in Rust.
4 Likes, Who?
Considering today's release of Linus and Luke's Linux challenge, I think this is a good step seeing how much of a mess Gnome became while Linus only wanted to install Steam.
That lies entirely in the hands of Pop!_OS, they decided to release an ISO with a version of steam having a dependency on a version of the pop-desktop package that wasn't included in the disc so apt uninstalled the entire desktop.
Then let's face it, Linus did that deliberately, or rather he choose to take advantage of the situation to prove some kind of point.
0 Likes
Then let's face it, Linus did that deliberately, or rather he choose to take advantage of the situation to prove some kind of point.
I find these kind of videos with "let's use the worst case scenario for show" both not really helping actual potential Linux users and not helping general perception of Linux. Instead of making a show about it, he can report bugs.
Last edited by Shmerl on 10 November 2021 at 1:41 am UTC
2 Likes, Who?
Apparently communication between System76 and GNOME is not exactly as System76 describes it: https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2021/11/10/system76-how-not-to-collaborate/
2 Likes, Who?
Apparently communication between System76 and GNOME is not exactly as System76 describes it: https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2021/11/10/system76-how-not-to-collaborate/
Oh, look, GNOME devs burning some more bridges.
Q.E.D. I guess.
2 Likes, Who?
CyborgZeta Nov 10, 2021
Not interested.
Just another DE, and one that will be GTK-based at that. They don't want to be based off GNOME, but they also don't want to leave GTK...which is dominated by what GNOME does. Seems rather silly.
They could help contribute to KDE and Plasma, but whatever, it's their call. As much as I like Xfce, I'm sticking with Plasma, and not going back to the GTK ecosystem.
Just another DE, and one that will be GTK-based at that. They don't want to be based off GNOME, but they also don't want to leave GTK...which is dominated by what GNOME does. Seems rather silly.
They could help contribute to KDE and Plasma, but whatever, it's their call. As much as I like Xfce, I'm sticking with Plasma, and not going back to the GTK ecosystem.
0 Likes
Honestly I ve used pop and it was a pleasant experience but I moved on as I hate gnome with a passion. With regard to Linus I would of put him on Zorin so he literally couldn't brick anything that thing is bullet proof for noobs
1 Likes, Who?
Sad how this turned out, I think in the end nobody will gain anything by this move.
Edit: Sry, this link had already been posted here.
Last edited by jens on 10 November 2021 at 10:01 pm UTC
0 Likes
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me