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.
Nov 9, 2021
Pop!_OS Facebook
Quoting: 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.
Linux fragmentation is already one of the primary downsides of the entire ecosystem vs a system that gathers and focuses developers on improving only a few alternatives.
On the other hand, I can't say that I'm particularly happy with Gnome and have switched away from it on every single OS installation I have at home.
Either towards KDE or Cinnamon (which, I know, is technically still based on Gnome but splitt off quite some time ago).
Don't really care much about another one written in Rust, but whatever works in the end is fine, and Rust can still support C/C++ libraries, so all should be well in that department.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 9 November 2021 at 2:56 pm UTC
soulsource Nov 9, 2021
Quoting: 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 the
As unhappy as I am with recent Gnome, Unity was imho even worse...
morgancoxuk Nov 9, 2021
Not many people have forked KDE for example as you are treated like an adult and can configure it how you want (usually easily)
Last edited by morgancoxuk on 9 November 2021 at 3:05 pm UTC
EagleDelta Nov 9, 2021
Quoting: scaineExciting, but I don't hold out much hope for their success. If a company like Canonical couldn't justify making 10 years worth of Unity development stick, I doubt System76 will somehow make it work either.
Unlike Canonical, who had to split their team between Desktop and Server, System76 has the capability to focus purely on the Desktop experience. Additionally, System76's primary revenue doesn't come from support contracts for software, but from Hardware sales, so Pop!_OS also isn't the revenue driver, but supports the revenue generating hardware sales.
QuoteI'm still happy to use Pop as a base for KDE though. It's a really slick foundation. The Pop shop is superb and I've never experienced a crash since using them.They have already note they will be using GTK for the DE. Simply because there is more GTK tooling available and it's easier to find developers that have experience with GTK.
QuoteOnly contender? You're joking, right!? KDE is superb, XFCE was excellent last I tried. Budgie is slick as hell. Cinnamon? Mate? We're tripping over DE's that absolutely rock - functional, beautiful, varied desktops that only look as much like Windows as you actually want.
Cinnamon (and Mint) has many issues unique to that DE. So much so that the Lutris project has dropped community support for Linux Mint and Cinnamon due to the amount of issues they were having to monkey patch just for them (I.E. they won't fix issues specifically related to that distro or DE).
Last edited by EagleDelta on 9 November 2021 at 3:08 pm UTC
Quoting: 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!
To be honest, I frequently hear people talk about "desktop stability", and I just don't get it. I've very occasionally seen desktop crashes after heavy AAA gaming - I suspect some DEs are sensitive to compositing changes. But outside of that, how on earth do you crash your DE?? Honestly, if I saw my DE crash as a result of user-driven changes, I'd have to question using that DE. But I've used Mate, KDE, Gnome3/shell, and Cinnamon over the past two or three years while trying to find a new "home" and this just isn't a thing. I can't be that lucky??
As I say, Unity was rock solid too. I miss it, but I'm kind of happy that I ended up on a viable KDE desktop as a result of Canonical's decision to ditch it.
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