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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, this is the extent of what’s been discussed in public (mmstick is a System76 engineer)

> mmstick: It will be its own desktop.

> SevenSidedSube: Will the DE be forked from GNOME?

> mmstick: No it is its own thing written in Rust.

If nothing else, it’s encouraging to see a large GUI project in Rust as it will surely lift the (nascent) state of the art there in that area. In the best case, maybe this will get me back on Linux for the desktop.

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What end-user problems are they solving though? I only see some quibbles about customization/theming, which seems like an insane reason to drop the entire stack and write one from scratch. From the information given, this just seems like riding the Rust hype wave.

Well, for the record, the current Cosmic desktop is pretty limited. It's clear that Pop!OS has some really good ideas in the desktop space, but they're frankly held back by their reliance on GNOME as a starting point. Particularly these days, with how disastrous the release of GNOME 40 was, I can understand wanting to step away from that dev team. Maybe choosing Rust was hype-driven decision, but writing a new desktop was certainly not uncalled for.

> Maybe choosing Rust was hype-driven decision,

They've been using Rust internally for various tools already, so I think this decision has been motivated by their positive experience with Rust

GNOME keeps making absurdly bad decisions about pretty much everything, and wantonly removing features that even average desktop users expect.

For example, you need an extension to enable putting files/icons on the desktop (!?!?!). And the APIs for GNOME extensions are constantly changing, so the extensions are constantly breaking. Not to mention, the extensions are written in JavaScript and if they crash, the entire shell crashes. It's absolutely insane.

It seems like they want to lock down the UI to customization even more than MacOS and Windows do. I see GNOME as basically a dead end at this point.

>if they crash, the entire shell crashes

And the entire session if you're on Wayland

> For example, you need an extension to enable putting files/icons on the desktop (!?!?!).

Was so happy about the decision to remove desktop icons. You basically never get there anyways and its just cluttering up the background when you do.

Here's a funny thread about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/l8euqf/i_get_why_the...

Btw, there were some misconceptions about "disallowing theming". I recommend giving this a read: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a...

I totally understand your point about extensions though.

It will be interesting to see what GUI library they chose and on what concepts they'll focus. Rust is an amazing language that's maybe not particularly well suited for GUIs - any progress in that direction will

Would be kinda funny/sad if they chose gtk-rs.

I think that they choose gtk-rs because they have experience with it, if you take a look most stuff is written in Rust with gtk-rs. Also I think that they say they won't drop gtk.

Good to see it's not following gnome. V3/4 are a disaster.

... which GTK is a part of, regardless of what desktop (what does that even mean?) you use. on a mid range off the shelf laptop, practically any GTK based program is unusable because it's too slow, even in a minimal tiling WM.

i guess gnome advocates would consider GTK as a high end application, but i digress.

GTK3 is indeed slow. GTK2 is fast and Gnome2 was fast (MATE is fast).

I’m not exactly a fan of GTK but this surprises me. I toy with Linux on an old circa-2008 QX9300/Quadro FX770M laptop from time to time and can’t recall GTK3 apps being particularly slow on it. GNOME itself is a bit sluggish but that’s no surprise.

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