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

[dankles]

Less Gnome is better Gnome. Those guys are evil. Sys76 has shown enough competence, that I'm in support of this.

[brucethemoose]

The issue I've had with DEs outside of KDE/GNOME is that they aren't as comprehensive, nor as well supported by other projects. I have to dig for some third party utility to get a feature that the mega DEs support natively, or work through some DE specific conflict.

I'm very interested in this project... but I have it wonder if it can hit the critical mass that KDE and GNOME have.

[You-]

It will be interesting to see.

A few folks predicted it when SYstem76 had a dig at gnome a month or so ago - it seemed to them to be deliberate provocation in order to justify moving away.

I personally thought it was more likely that the system76 lead developer was having a mental breakdown.

Now that we know, it will be interesting to see how they will fare - they couldnt keep up with gnome when they were using it. Now that they are competing and with fewer resources than canonical put in when they pushed Unity, we will see how it goes.

I suspect they will still mostly use gnome, add a few utilities (like a rust based compositor/middle layer on mutter) and then declare how they have slayed the big bad beast of Red Hat (without pointing out that they were defeated by the open contributions by purism and endless compared to their closed ecosystem mentality.)

[curfew]

They can still leverage existing libraries and apps, so it isn't an entirely impossible task. But as always, writing an app isn't the hardest part but supporting it in long-term is. Although, since they're targeting Rust, it makes me wonder how mature are the Rust bindings for e.g. Qt or GTK? The showcase for GTK/Rust had only a few smaller apps. Trying to build an entire ecosystem on top of them will surely hit a few hard blocks.

[Quackdoc]

I wonder just how much do they intend to re-invent the wheel?

Ill be down for them stopping when someone finally makes a round wheel instead of a square one.

[NateHubbard]

I wonder just how much do they intend to re-invent the wheel?

Honestly, I'm not a big fan of any of the wheels that are out there at the moment, so I'm fine with this.

[nazar-pc]

That is encouraging, if it has tiling mode that works well I might be able to finally switch to off-the-shelf DE from my current frankenstein.

[sophisticles]

Am I the only one that hopes they name their Rust coded DE "Trombone"?

On a related note, I've been very depressed lately, I tried to do the dishes but they said they only like me as a friend,

Thank you.

[skeevy420]

I wonder just how much do they intend to re-invent the wheel?

If Goodyear and Michelin are any indication.....

[tildearrow]

I wonder why has Phoronix not written an article on the GNOME theming dilemma.