Do we need another desktop environment? There's already KDE Plasma, GNOME Shell, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon and the list goes on for a while. System76 at least seem to think another is needed, one they control.
from the mouth of a system76 developer: “If we can achieve a better COSMIC experience in Rust as opposed to having COSMIC bolted on top of GNOME as a JS extension, I think it makes sense to go the Rust route. There’s honestly a lot of flaws in Pop Shell’s tiling that I just can’t fix under the limitations of GNOME Shell’s design. And between extension API breakages and GNOME Shell making large core behavior changes that we have to work around, it’d honestly take more effort to maintain GNOME Shell extensions than it would be to make our own desktop.” [0]
as well as responding to a question of whether the new DE will be a fork of GNOME with: “No it is its own thing written in Rust.” [1]
from the mouth of a system76 developer: “If we can achieve a better COSMIC experience in Rust as opposed to having COSMIC bolted on top of GNOME as a JS extension, I think it makes sense to go the Rust route. There’s honestly a lot of flaws in Pop Shell’s tiling that I just can’t fix under the limitations of GNOME Shell’s design. And between extension API breakages and GNOME Shell making large core behavior changes that we have to work around, it’d honestly take more effort to maintain GNOME Shell extensions than it would be to make our own desktop.” [0]
as well as responding to a question of whether the new DE will be a fork of GNOME with: “No it is its own thing written in Rust.” [1]
sources: [0] https://teddit.net/r/rust/comments/qo6cy3/an_entire_desktop_environment_made_in_rust_is/ [1] https://teddit.net/r/pop_os/comments/qnvrou/comment/hjjlxso/?context=3
If it’s actually written in JavaScript, I don’t see how Rust could possibly perform worse.