CutefishOS: Unix-y development model? Check. macOS aesthetic? Check (if you like that sort of thing)
- Reference: 1632477663
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/09/24/cutefishosreview/
- Source link:
This is a very different distribution model than the one Apple or Microsoft uses, and it confuses newcomers. Windows and macOS are easier to understand, they are single things made by single companies. Canonical and Red Hat notwithstanding, Linux is not packaged and presented this way at all. I've long believed that this difference is one of the key stumbling blocks to wider Linux adoption.
Apple has macOS, Microsoft has Windows, Linux has... hundreds of awkward, confusingly named options.
[1]
This is both Linux's greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. For those who already understand and use it the options are welcome. I've been a Linux user for over a decade and I've used several dozen distros, some of them so different from one another it's difficult to believe they're built from the same base. This wealth of options is great, but it's both confusing and overwhelming for new users.
[2]
[3]
Distributions like [4]elementary OS are popular with people switching from macOS and Windows because elementary OS offers that same highly polished, all-in-one package that makes the transition from proprietary operating systems smoother. But this is Linux, so you can't just have elementary OS.
The latest distro to catch my eye is [5]CutefishOS , which owes considerable design debt to both elementaryOS and the operating system made by that fruit company.
[6]
Cutefish desktop (click to enlarge)
CutefishOS seems to have started as a desktop environment (and it's still available as a desktop on Arch and Manjaro), and then progressed to a full distro built atop Ubuntu, or more specifically Kubuntu 21.04. When I first saw it I almost skipped right over it because do we really need yet another desktop distro? But CutefishOS turns out to have a couple of very cool tricks up its sleeve that make it a distro worth watching on even if you don't jump at this early stage of development.
CutefishOS doesn't yet have a 1.0 release, right now it's at a 0.4.2 beta that's labeled "developer edition." As such I would not suggest you rush out and install it, because it definitely still has some rough edges. That said, it's surprisingly polished for a developer beta and if it continues to develop at its current pace I think it has considerable potential.
The CuteFish desktop
Nearly every new desktop I've tried in the recent past has been GNOME-based. Not CutefishOS, which has embraced KDE and the Qt toolkit to develop its desktop and application base. When you install the Kubuntu-based version of CutefishOS you get all the Qt-based underpinnings of a KDE-based distro, but with CuteFish's own desktop environment and budding range of homegrown apps. Sound familiar? Yes, that's more or less the model elementaryOS has used, though elementaryOS does it using GNOME as a base.
I haven't been able to find out for sure, but I think the name CuteFish probably comes from the Qt-based underpinnings (Qt is usually pronounced "cute"). Whatever the case, it's nice to see developers working with KDE. And for a pre-1.0 release the CuteFish desktop is surprisingly usable. With Kubuntu 21.04 under the hood it's plenty stable, and I never had the desktop crash on me.
[7]
I also did some of my testing using the CuteFish desktop on top of Arch. That was slightly buggier, and more difficult though it may well have been my setup (I installed CuteFish alongside my existing Sway desktop, rather than doing a clean install as I did with the Kubuntu version). In both cases though, aside from some of the CuteFish apps crashing in Arch, I had no problem using it as my everyday driver for several weeks.
[8]
Click to enlarge
Aesthetically there's no getting around the fact that CutefishOS is what you might call "heavily inspired" by macOS. There's a dock along the bottom of the screen, and a status bar along the top. App menus show up in the top toolbar rather than in the app window, and the minimize, maximize, and other window controls are in the left upper corner (the wrong corner as it's also known). There's also a little "control center" drop down menu in the upper right corner that looks like it was pulled straight from iOS.
CutefishOS isn't a macOS ripoff by any means, there's plenty that's different — there's a fullscreen app launcher with a search box that's reminiscent of GNOME, for instance — but if you're the sort of person who spends hours downloading theme files to make your current favorite desktop look like macOS, then CutefishOS is definitely worth a look. It's also worth noting that the CutefishOS website lists JingOS among its "friends", and it does bear a certain design similarity to JingOS (which is itself inspired by iOS).
[9]
The launcher (click to enlarge)
However, even as someone who can't stand the macOS/iOS aesthetic, I still find CutefishOS worth trying because I think it's got a loosely coupled development and update model that strikes me as a step in the right direction. More on that in a minute.
But first, let me just say that when I say it's not quite ready for prime time I am mainly thinking of the homegrown apps that ship with CuteFish, not the desktop itself which is already quite solid and offers plenty of control over settings. While most apps you'd need in an operating system are there, many of them are very limited at this stage. That's to be expected in a 0.4 release.
[10]
Settings and files (click to enlarge)
Right now you get homegrown File Manager, Terminal, Settings Manager, Photo organizer, and couple of others (notably though, no mail client). Of these the most mature is the settings manager, which handles all the customizations and system tweaks from theme changes (there's a dark mode as well) to display resolution, touchpad controls, and more. Suffice to say that the tools you need to get connected and get work done are all there.
The included CutefishOS apps are all very basic, but functional — a good base the build on. Right now CutefishOS makes up what's missing by shipping a few KDE apps (Kate, Muon, Gwenview, etc), as well as a few third-party apps like Discord and Telegram.
Again, this has a certain familiarity to it. If you were to go back and read through early reviews of elementaryOS, you'd see the same criticism — nice start, but we're going to have to wait for the apps to get built out. The big question is, will CutefishOS eventually get to where elementaryOS has? I'm hoping it will because I like CutefishOS's development model.
Embrace the chaos?
Once I got past the aesthetic differences between me and the CutefishOS devs, I was intrigued by the decision to include two package managers. When you want to update the underlying system, you run Apt, just as you would on any Debian or Ubuntu derived distro. If you want to update the CuteFish desktop, though, you run Tap, a homegrown package manager that will update the CuteFish desktop on a rolling basis.
[11]Kali Linux 2021.3 released with new tools
[12]Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye
[13]Happy 4.20: Latest version of Tails bakes connection wizard into pro-privacy Linux distro
[14]Huh, it's as if something happened that made people not like CentOS so much
On the surface that sounds like a pain, especially if you throw in a few Flatpak apps — now you have three package managers to keep track of and run updates from.
In fact it is a pain, but only because those things have not been unified by a good GUI. Let's assume though that at some point CutefishOS provides a GUI app that integrates all of those into a single interface that isn't a pain.
I don't mean to handwave the problem away, because that is not a trivial thing to develop, but assuming the developers can pull that off you'd have a Linux distro with a solid base that gets updates at the pace of Ubuntu releases (twice a year), but a desktop environment that gets updates on a rolling release cycle. That's the best of both worlds in many ways, especially for distros that sit downstream of Ubuntu or Debian and want to iterate more quickly than the parent distro.
[15]
What makes it even more Unix-y is that it's embracing the chaos of choices in the Linux world and using it to build something that's well-designed and user-friendly.
The big question is, will CutefishOS manage to get there or will it fizzle out after an initial sprint. We won't know that for a considerable amount of time, but I do think it's one worth keeping an eye on. ®
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/20/elementary_os_6/
[5] https://cutefish-ubuntu.github.io/download/
[6] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/09/22/cutefishos-desktop.jpg
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[8] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/09/22/cutefishos-appstore.jpg
[9] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/09/22/cutefishos-launcher.jpg
[10] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/09/22/cutefishos-settings-files.jpg
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/20/kali_linux_20213/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/16/debian_11_bullseye_released/
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What an odd comment.
All KDE settings are handled by the System Settings GUI. S/W installation from the distro is handled by Synaptic. Admittedly I usually handle upgrades from the command line because apt update;apt upgrade is simply slicker than fiddling with a GUI. Definitely better than messing with that registry thing.
And I've only seen one full screen launcher - that's on Ubuntu. I suppose there has to be one for those who like the app-centric smartphone approach to working but there are alternatives for those who have a document-centric approach to working, minimalists or pretty well any way you want. One size doesn't fit all and, in the Unix/Linux world, it doesn't have to.
You should give it a try instead of relying on random internet posts you might have read.
I have to use Linux for work sometimes, and the version I have to use is... Ubuntu.
It may be the only garbage Linux out there (though I seriously doubt that), but it's the one I am stuck with.
Windows might be the fat kid, but in my experience Linux is the slow kid who needs everything explained to them three times over. Five times if printers are involved.
When was the last time you saw a Linux desktop? This century?
If you're asking me, yesterday. (And if you're not asking me, still yesterday.)
I'm using it right now, and the OP is correct, its still not there yet, well not enough for the normie at least.
It's the little things which should have a good UI like the screen resolution and multiple display layout, trying to layout multiple screens is a lesson glitching frustration, there's still no driver configuration for display drivers that's reliable.
If you want to play a DVD/Bluray or MP3's you'd better have gone through the 8 week correspondence course (Fedora does at least have the necessaries for MP3 playback, but most don't). These are the sorts of things which prevent Linux adoption, I still can't work out how the hell to play a bluray in Fedora I have to keep a Windows VM and a USB adaptor for my Bluray player on hand.
HelloSystem
It will be interesting to compare this with HelloSystem: https://github.com/helloSystem/
Which do you choose a hard or soft option?
> embracing the chaos of choices in the Linux world and using it to build something that's well-designed and user-friendly.
When I can simply plug in a printer and it just works, then I will know that Linux is getting there.
When I can install any new package with just one click and maybe the occasional "OK", it will have arrived.
I've been using Linux almost daily since the beginning and to be blunt it started off as a test of hacking¹ skills and hasn't progressed much past that.
[1] when being a hacker was a good thing (at least, within the hacker community)
Re: Which do you choose a hard or soft option?
Installing software is a prime example of how piss poor the Linux user experience can be. Linux still doesn't have a unified way to install software downloaded from a website. I downloaded an rpm file the other day for something (it might have been the latest VSCode - I don't remember).
Double clicking it opened some config file in a text editor. I mean, seriously?
Re: Which do you choose a hard or soft option?
Downloading an installer from some random web site is (a) a Windows relic, and (b) an excellent way of introducing malware.
Your distribution has a package manager. Use it.
-A.
Re: Which do you choose a hard or soft option?
The other great thing about Linux is that you can be sure that, if some developer had just run afoul of Apple or Google's App Store rules, there'd be a post praising the lack of a Walled Garden and the benefits of your absolute freedom to install the software of your choice.
So many distributions, so many opinions, so many rough edges...
Having said that, the Linux desktop has come a long way and Windows seems to be regressing at ever-increasing speed and, even for the casual user, there's probably not a lot to choose between them on an actual desktop. The Linux laptop experience is still rather vendor-dependent - I put up with tearing video and a lack of support for the inbuilt microphone array and finger-print reader on mine. And the fact that the workarounds for the buggy WiFi hardware aren't quite as slick as the Windows workarounds. I can imagine others might not be as accommodating.
Re: Which do you choose a hard or soft option?
Your distribution has a package manager. Use it.
Do you equally advocate developers only use the Windows Store for distribution? Or how about the Apple Store for macOS applications?
Re: Which do you choose a hard or soft option?
You don't think that have been something to do with whoever put together the RPM file?
Re: Which do you choose a hard or soft option?
If it's possible for someone creating an installer to screw it up so fundamentally that the only thing it does is open a text file, then that's a problem with the underlying system, not the person making the installer.
And I know this because I eventually figured out the "correct" way to install an rpm, which is to open a console and start typing commands. See my original point about how user unfriendly Linux is.
Re: Which do you choose a hard or soft option?
If it's part of the distro the correct way is to open the distro's S/W installer (Synaotic in my case), search and click. You only run the install as admin, unlike some of the S/W on my old Windows VM (I occasionally look to remind myself on what I'm missing).
I am still not quite convinced by this trend to clone macOS. If people want to use something that looks like macOS, they just use macOS.
Personally I can't help but feel that something like the following, looks infinitely more useful and productive: https://distrowatch.com/images/screenshots/fedora-7-desktop.png
Simple. The object is to bluff people into thinking they're running a Mac. In those terms the objective is met (or maybe not). Productivity is for peons.
We need a Windows simlation plugin
To make people more comfortable with switching to Linux, add a script that randomly loads up the network with TB-sized downloads, and then suspends the ability to get anything done for anything between a minute and half an hour, with the odd reboot on top (the TB downloads can be discarded).
Add to that a process that randomly freezes and/or reboots the system and some serious usage telemetrics sent to Microsoft, and migrating users will be hard pressed to tell the difference.
And yes, that's sarcasm. It's Friday.
Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin
a process that randomly freezes and/or reboots the system
no no, not randomly: preferably when you are launching a presentation in full-screen, that's an appropriate moment.
Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin
Also, when you have to leave in a hurry or risk missing your flight, refuse to shut down for several minutes while non-negotiable updates are installed.
-A.
Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin
Not quite a windows update, but Zoom flashed up a update needed dialog during a conference today... Since I was the only IT guy in the meeting the joke was lost on everybody else!
Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin
You forgot random control panels to control random things and the occasional need to hack the registry. Without those you're fooling nobody.
Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin
which control panel? Settings or the hidden (real) one... or msinfo? so many panels so little control!
Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin
I forgot the progress dialog that jumps randomly between 99%, 2%, 110% and 84%. This isn't and ordinary progress bar, it's an MS progress bar.
Re: We need a Windows simlation plugin
You forgot rebooting while in a video conference.
Could this be the year of Linux on the desktop?
(Asking for a friend.)
Of course it is . Has been for years.
Irrespective of whether the base desktop environment is Gnome or KDE it provides things like file management which are available across all the distros that use it. I simply don't grok the idea of reinventing these wheels.
Try getting Gnome developers to agree with anyone about how a good file manager should behave, as Gnome's (Nautilus) is a great example of how not to do it, but will the Gnome dev's make it more useful? will they hell. The KDE devs simply throw UI panels and options all over the shop with reckless abandon.
This is why every desktop environment has their own.
The reason "Linux" never caught on as a desktop, consumer level OS is it's still nigh on impossible to configure the most basic of things without falling back into typing complicated commands into a console. It might be a million times better today than it was in the past, but it's still a far cry from Windows when it comes to ease of use for the average user. Even MacOS since transitioning to FreeBSD underneath has succumb to that issue. The old System X OSes from Apple were a lot more user friendly when it came to configuring things.
Also, how many people around here were complaining about the full screen start menu in Windows 8 but then happily look the other way when pretty much every Linux desktop out there today has exactly that: A full screen launcher.