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

[middy]

i think there were more Gnome Fans at Ubuntu than Unity so Gnome got more love than Unity ever did

it was really financial. system76 does bring in money from the physical hardware sells. i just hope they are profitable enough to fund an entire desktop environment project. they can't expect the community to come in and do most of the work. they are going to need a core team that gets paid to work on it for a living and do most of the work. gnome and kde are where they are today because they have a lot of core developers that get paid to work on those projects from mainstream backers.

my pet peeve is really on yet another toolkit we don't need. i really hope they don't add yet another toolkit.

[om26er]

What System76 has is their own hardware. So for them, building their own software makes all the sense. I assume they are seeing a good growth trajectory as a business, hence the move.

This also shows it can become difficult for companies to work with GNOME developers at times. Previously it was Canonical, now it's System76.

[mdedetrich]

Linus says 'Manjaro' and 'KDE' just after 44 minutes in this video, and he mentioned Manjaro and Kate in earlier pieces. I can't re-find the part where he mentions his DE getting uninstalled, but I'm certain I heard it, it may be in the following WAN show video. It's also possible he distro hopped or switched DEs, but I don't recall him saying so.

I actually remember Linus saying that he didn't distro hop when Luke brought it up that he did distro hopped himself in one of the WAN shows (can't remember precisely which one and where).

[mdedetrich]

what makes you think their de will be less mediocre? all indication is it will be more mediocre

If we are going to wildly speculate about indications, then this is FUD and its going to be the opposite. System76 has incredibly talented engineers that surprisingly puts effort into user experience.

[oleid]

Why the hell not? Lots of people would love that.

All three Devaun users?

[novhack]

I wonder if it will be related to OrbTK and Orbital from Redox OS that Jeremy develops. Probably not but it would be neat if System76's work was usable on both Linux and Redox OS.

[Ironmask]

I wonder if it will be related to OrbTK and Orbital from Redox OS that Jeremy develops. Probably not but it would be neat if System76's work was usable on both Linux and Redox OS.

The Rustup tool comes with a target package manager that has a Redox target, so I don't see why their TK/DE wouldn't work on both platforms.

[finalzone]

What System76 has is their own hardware. So for them, building their own software makes all the sense. I assume they are seeing a good growth trajectory as a business, hence the move.
This also shows it can become difficult for companies to work with GNOME developers at times. Previously it was Canonical, now it's System76.

ASUS and HP learned the hard way how difficult it is to maintain their own operating system (via desktop environment) before giving up. Honestly, it seems System76 is about to repeat the same mistake.

[Danielsan]

After Valve another company is leaving the sinking boat of Gnome3...

[Ironmask]

ASUS and HP learned the hard way how difficult it is to maintain their own operating system (via desktop environment) before giving up. Honestly, it seems System76 is about to repeat the same mistake.

Those aren't a matter of difficulty, it's a matter of business. It's more profitable to use an existing product than hire developers to maintain yours. But System76 isn't a typical business, they want to make a good product, not please investors. GNOME3 is not a good product. Neither is KDE (but at least they try).