System76 Reportedly Developing Their Own Rust-Written Desktop, Not Based On GNOME

[Myownfriend]

Which is a terrible experience for distros like PopOS since they want to provide their own theme/custom user experience out of the box, thats the whole issue.

Again, they're asking. They haven't actually done anything to prevent PopOs from doing exactly what they're already doing.

That's clearly not the only problem because I doubt users care all that much that distro devs are being asked not to make their own themes. The problem is that a lot of the people talking about this have seemingly been convinced that Gnome devs have or will remove theming which they haven't.

Personally, although I like some of the themes that some distros provide, Yaru especially looks good, I feel like the Gnome devs have a very valid concern. And if there is a distro out there that feels like not having their custom theme completely robs them of their uniqueness then that says more of the distro than anything.

[zparihar]

I don't think this is a good idea.
I think a better idea would be to base it on KDE and modify it to their hearts content, make it solid, and support it.

KDE community is generally easier to get along with and they don't make as dramatic bones and controversial choices at GNOME.

APP portability between the different toolkits that it's developed on is so important. That's such a big undertaking. KDE has got a grip on it already.

Redoing everything in a Rust is a massive undertaking and will not get as much support from the community.

I'm a fan of everything pop has done, but I don't agree with this move.

Either way, I wish them good luck.

[BesiegedAce]

snip

I heard about the directive to hire lower level devs, but I've heard absolutely nothing about some kind of "culling" of existing devs. On top of that, Red Hat added a ton of developers (over 2000) this year alone. Also lol @ the systemd conspiracy stuff.

[F.Ultra]

system76 ain't the first to reinvent the wheel, Ubuntu is doing just that, they want there own FWUPD Program

AFAIK Ubuntu is just writing a GUI wrapper on top of fwupd

[Charlie68]

Well finally a new DE, I'm glad the Linux world is fragmenting further!
I mean ... you may not like Gnome, but it's not the only DE in Linux, stick to other existing projects, personalize it even heavily and keep it ... but no, let's start from scratch with yet another DE that will have a small core of fans boy but that won't add anything to the GNU / Linux world.

[emblemparade]

Building a new DE and a widget toolkit from scratch is extremely ambitious.

It's all good in itself, as long as the various devs can come together and agree on certain shared interfaces so that we can guarantee that a single DE can run software written in any toolkit and respect system configurations for things like locale, language, fonts, etc. That's what freedesktop.org is supposed to be about.

Do your own thing, just don't pretend you're working in a vacuum. Work with the greater community and all good things will happen.

[Templar82]

System76 are one of the most interesting companies in the Linux space currently, very excited to see what they come up with.
Even as a KDE user I found the changes the made to Gnome very nice, When they have total freedom I can only imagine good things will happen.

[bug77]

Again, they're asking. They haven't actually done anything to prevent PopOs from doing exactly what they're already doing.

That's clearly not the only problem because I doubt users care all that much that distro devs are being asked not to make their own themes. The problem is that a lot of the people talking about this have seemingly been convinced that Gnome devs have or will remove theming which they haven't.

Why do you think they are asking now? So that when nobody customizes Gnome anymore, they will maintain a theming engine nobody uses?
Sure, nothing has been done yet, but you can look at the direction they're taking, look at their past history and see the dots are connected pretty well

[Mario Junior]

lol what?

Good luck system76, they're about to find out how much effort is required to mantain a desktop, I'm sure the GNOME dev team won't miss their constant toxicity.

Excuse me WHAT? (Trying to install Steam after last Kernel upgrade): pop_os (reddit.com)

Linus (the Youtuber) went through the same experience, where when installing steam using the terminal, popos uninstalled Gnome completely. When restarting the system, there was no more graphical interface.

[Teggs]

Excuse me WHAT? (Trying to install Steam after last Kernel upgrade): pop_os (reddit.com)

Linus (the Youtuber) went through the same experience, where when installing steam using the terminal, popos uninstalled Gnome completely. When restarting the system, there was no more graphical interface.

Linus did say something like that, but he also said he is using Manjaro, not Pop. It's a bit disturbing if that happened on not one, but two distros. :/