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.
Last edited by Shmerl on 10 November 2021 at 12:47 am UTC
fenglengshun Nov 10, 2021
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.
Quoting: fenglengshunConsidering 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.
Quoting: F.UltraThen 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
Quoting: CreakApparently 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.
CyborgZeta Nov 10, 2021
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.
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
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