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Comment by M95D

9 months ago

Linux (kernel I mean) is good enough. There were some scheduling problems with audio, but it's mostly resolved. The problem is GNU style. We need another GUI and that doesn't mean just replacing X with/or Wayland protocol. It means replacing GTK and QT too.

The penguin kernel is indeed very nifty and boots nearly everywhere. Most importantly it is replete with battle-tested drivers.

Maybe the bold solution would be to port the Serenity userland + UI stack across to Linux and be very staunch about what gets into it. Essentially grafting the Linux kernel in place of the Serenity one, and using its UI Kit and WindowServer instead of GTK/QT/X/Wayland.

Maybe it might even be possible to preserve the logic and non-UI libraries of many applications, even if the UI required a complete rewrite.

A bit fantastical but just putting it out there.

ChromeOS seems very polished under the hood.

It is fast and open source. But very tightly integrated into google and so I doubt, this will ever become a solid base for a new linux desktop.

  • Chromeos under the hood is just Linux

    • And ... what is just linux?

      They use a custom kernel. A completely different display manager, process scheduling, startup etc.

      But yeah, rsync works the same.

That exactyly what PopOS is doing. Cosmic is a new Desktop Envoirment for Wayland written in Rust using a toolkit named Iced.

>There were some scheduling problems with audio, but it's mostly resolved.

It'll be, once the realtime patchset is completely merged.

Meanwhile, some distributions (including Arch) offer a pre-patched kernel.

Isn't that basically ElementaryOS? Or is that not a group up rewrite?

  • Not really. Pantheon, elementary's desktop environment, is forked from gnome. So in that sense, it's very much a traditional linux desktop distro (not to belittle it, as they have put in a lot of worthwhile work into pantheon & the assorted apps)

    • Ah, I thought it was it's own thing. Oh well. I do think we're due for a commercial desktop Linux distro. Yes I think it should be paid. Something needs to take the place of Windows that isn't tied to specific hardware (MacOS) because Windows is getting unusable.