Support us on Patreon
PayPalDo 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.
I'd use Budgie, but since it seems to inherit the input issues of gnome (having a mouse like naga having a second keyboard input makes it freeze noticable using the mouse-keys) makes it impossible to play on anything on top of the gnome stack for me. So I use KDE for now, but I am looking forward to leave it behind one day. They move fast, but tend to break stuff I reall use (as USB connections to Android devices).
Rust is a good choice, and GUI toolkit written in Rust with a desktop to it would be interesting. But creating a toolkit like Qt, GTK or EFL takes years, in comparison a desktop shell is a lot less work.
Mountain Man Dec 12, 2021
Quoting: drmothI want a slick, highly usable, modern DE, that preferably doesn't look like Windows. Gnome is the only decent contender at the moment, but it's not great. Canonical's Unity, once the bugs were fixed, was actually really good. We need something like this again.KDE says hi.
Mountain Man Dec 12, 2021
Quoting: scaineAgreed. I've never had a desktop environment just suddenly break on me for no reason. I've been using KDE for over a decade, and it has always just worked.Quoting: drmothDo I really have to spell it out for you?
Yes? Because I've never experienced any breakage?
You listed four issues from your 2 minute search, three of which are unofficial theme issues and one appears to be a broken Manjaro install. Maybe KDE has some quality issues on the "Get New Themes" site, but I have about 20 themes installed and as I say... never experienced an issue. As for Manjaro, I had lots of issues with it, but KDE ran flawlessly, so presumably that near-two year old bug you referenced has been addressed.
I'm trying to decipher the weird language people employ when they have (often misplaced) preconceptions about things. It's frustrating to hear generalised, unconstructive feedback on anything ("it's clunky", "it's bloated", "it breaks") - but it's even more frustrating if/when you discover it's entirely unjustified.
As for Gnome, btw, I've never had it "break" either (visually or otherwise). The only problem I have with Gnome is that extensions frequently refuse to install. That's not "breakage" in my book, just a maintenance issue (and sometimes a dependency issue). It could use more polish, for sure.
See more from me