Actually there is a market for this in my view.<p>Pop_OS has an useful Gnome implementation, I liked especially the option to switch from normal to tiled windows (and I hate childish UI/UX of Gnome).
If they pull this off I am willing to pay for it.<p>I hate the new direction of Mac OS UI. They have forgotten what made them beloved from UI/UX perspective and I have no interest anymore in "vertical integration" for ruling the world.<p>So, if System76 invests in learning the best practices (and especially the old Apple HIG documentation) they can create the Real Linux Desktop revolution.<p>Just focus on serious minimalism, accessibility and traditional interface paradigms without trying to be liked by the masses or following any "trend".<p>As a designer I love their identity. They have the courage to create difference in a world filled with mediocrity, conformism and wishful "colorful" thinking.
Terrible business decision. Existing DEs have centuries of collective engineering hours poured into them. They work. They are free. There is no compelling reason to throw that all away. Likely a new system will be worse along every metric of concern for the foreseeable future.
I miss Unity. It was leaps and bounds better than Gnome. Wish Canonical never killed it. Whatever System76 makes will be better than Gnome. System76's implementation of Gnome is the best I've used.
I wonder what toolkit they will use. I guess since they will be using Rust, it's easier to use bindings to GTK instead of Qt which is C++.<p>KDE has so many useful libraries [1] that can be used to build trailored desktops, like LXQt.<p>[1] <a href="https://develop.kde.org/products/frameworks/" rel="nofollow">https://develop.kde.org/products/frameworks/</a>
Great, what desktop Linux needs, yet another DE, written in a language whose GUI ecosystem is miles behind something like SwiftUI, WPF, WinUI, Qt, Jetpack Compose, Flutter.
I've had two System 76 laptops in the last 3 years. With the first one, I found PopOS! to be very glitchy, and battery life was less than 1 hour. About a year in the hardware failed. I then got a second newer System76 laptop and with that one the hardware failed within 6 months.<p>Recently I bought a new Dell XPS, installed Ubuntu, and it works perfectly.<p>I really wanted to like System76, but I've lost all faith in them and will never buy from them again.
I think as long as it follows the freedesktop specification [1] and can work with existing apps and other DEs (for example, when you have two DEs installed, you don't want they fight each other), it's not a bad thing.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/" rel="nofollow">https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/</a>
I don't have a great feeling about this. They put up the job posting for this last month, and since they're in CO, they have to post a salary range. $90k-$110k. Even in Denver, that's absurdly low. You'd expect $150k at the low end. Feels ripe for something half baked from a new grad who doesn't know better.
Wonder how much relation between
this and Orbital from Redox [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.redox-os.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.redox-os.org/</a>
ElementaryOS did this with their Pantheon and it's the reason I moved from them to Pop_OS. Their apps were generally useless or broken, critical basic settings (fractional DPI, per monitor dpi, etc) were missing and weird bugs abound. I had to install the dconf editor just to get the damn screen readable on my XPS.<p>Pop_OS at the moment is just about perfect since it's just a well tuned gnome theme basically. So far I've only hit one bug and one odd default setting.
I remember how Unity fell apart back in the day. But while Canonical still felt they had the resources to back it, it was pretty good, imo.<p>Maybe a few dedicated people can produce something good.<p>From an end user perspective, I don't see any reason not to welcome this. If I don't like it, I can just keep using Plasma.<p>Best of luck to System76 with this effort!
Link to relevant comment: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/qnvrou/will_pop_os_ever_do_an_officially_kde_flavor_or/hjji8hh/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/qnvrou/will_pop_os_...</a>
Yet another DE for Linux, which is another thing they desperately need to solve the fundamental fragmentation and inconsistent UI / UX in many Linux distros.<p>Rust solves many things, but in this case, there is little that it solves other than being ‘Written in Rust™’ and will still interface with the same buggy C libraries used in other DEs.<p>Unless it is all in Pure Rust, What is the point of this?
I say if they want to do it I welcome it. Yes, distro specific desktop environments can and do suck often. And this one might not be an exception.<p>Worst case is the their distro starts sucking and you'll need to look for another one. But isn't that what we're all used to now?
oh no. this is the same mistake that Ubuntu made with unity. Their current additions to gnome are perfectly usable and stable, I don't understand why they would change.
Could you consider replicating the Mac Classic desktop, including, menubar across the top, spatial finder, quickdraw gx, colorsync<p>From a fan of the Classic MacOS
Oh man, I just did a thesis on using a memory safe language like Rust for the kernel.<p>The consensus in research was that Rust is extremely promising for designing a next gen memory safe OS. Some data structures are troubling to implement (paging table, etc.) but the benefits are significant.<p>This is just a DE but if it's a sign of more things to come potentially over the next decade I am very excited.<p>Linux is always going to be fragmented, and other OS (ex. Android) are either already integrating some Rust or are strongly considering it (ex. Microsoft).
I will uninstall that environment and install gnome. If you want gnome to be better, then contribute to it. If you can't, detail why. Rust does not magically solve compatibility with the various daemons and make your UI function smoothly. We do not need Linux divide, we need Linux vision.