From what I've been reading, System76 takes security seriously, they're already using gtk-rs that's a bridge between the Gnome libraries and rust, and this effort by System76 appears to be a natural direction for future development that further decouples their work from the Gnome ecosystem.

If they decide later to build their own "gnome-like" core libraries in Rust, it should be straightforward for them to switch to this code.

In 2021 I'd rather see investments in security-focused libraries, frameworks, tools and languages, and that's not going to happen with Gnome with its legacy C code base.

We use System76 desktops and laptops at work, they've been great, and the company remains very responsive to any issues. I'm pretty confident that whatever they come out with will be well designed. I'd bet on their desktop over Gnome any day.

As an aside, it's been a while... but the last time I had to build a cross-platform application with GTK+ was painful. There were so many API changes and things breaking across minor versions, we gave up after supporting our code for 2 years and switched to QT for new work.