From the «cool, we were lacking desktop environments» department:
Feed: Slashdot
Title: System76 Engineer Confirms Work on New Rust-Written Desktop, Not Based on
GNOME
Author: EditorDavid
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2021 21:34:00 -0500
Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/8SMd0U9vkUo/system76-engineer-confirms-work-on-new-rust-written-desktop-not-based-on-gnome

Phoronix reports: System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution already has their own
"COSMIC" desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on
their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing
desktop environment. Stemming from a Reddit discussion over the possibility of
seeing a KDE flavor of Pop!_OS, it was brought up by one of their own engineers
they are working on their "own desktop". System76 engineer and Pop!_OS
maintainer Michael Murphy "mmstick" commented that System76 will be its own
desktop. When further poked about that whether that means a fork from GNOME, the
response was "No it is its own thing written in Rust." Word of System76 making
their "own" desktop not based on GNOME does follow some recent friction between
Pop!_OS and GNOME developers over their approach to theming and customizations.
Or, as Murphy wrote (in response to a later comment): What are you expecting us
to do? We have a desktop environment that is a collection of GNOME Shell
extensions which break every GNOME Shell release. Either we move towards
maintaining tens of thousands of lines of monkey patches, or we do it the right
way and make the next step a fully fledged desktop environment equal to GNOME
Shell. In other comments Murphy clarified that essentially the gist of it would
be an independent/distro-agnostic desktop environment, and that they'd be "using
tooling that already exists (mutter, kwin, wlroots), but implementing the
surrounding shell in Rust from scratch..." And he added later that "We already
do our best to follow freedesktop specifications with our software. So there's
no reason to think we'd do otherwise." One of the most interesting exchanges
happened when one long-time Reddit user questioned the need for another desktop.
That user had posted, "Linux is great, choices are great, but our biggest
problem is that in the pursuit of choices for the sake of choices we have a ton
of projects that are 95% of the way to prime time readiness, but none that are
fully there, because instead of fixing problems, everyone decides they just want
to start over." Murphy responded: "You have it backwards. Choice is the best
part about open source. None of us would be here today if people weren't brave
enough to take the next step with a new solution to an existing problem..."

[image 2][2][image 4][4]

Read more of this story[5] at Slashdot.
[image 6]

Links:
[1]: http://twitter.com/home?status=System76+Engineer+Confirms+Work+on+New+Rust-Written+Desktop%2C+Not+Based+on+GNOME%3A+https%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F3kAgxLp (link)
[2]: https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png (image)
[3]: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F21%2F11%2F08%2F0154240%2Fsystem76-engineer-confirms-work-on-new-rust-written-desktop-not-based-on-gnome%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook (link)
[4]: https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png (image)
[5]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/11/08/0154240/system76-engineer-confirms-work-on-new-rust-written-desktop-not-based-on-gnome?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed (link)
[6]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/8SMd0U9vkUo (image)

--
Port 80 is overrated.

On 11/8/21 1:34 PM, RS Wood wrote:

[.....]

Why would they use a unmaintainable and highly-complex language like
Rust? They are guaranteeing lots of security holes and cruft.

C, Pascal, Ada have many decades of hardening and compiler optimizations
compared to Rust. This novel language stuff is for the birds.