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Operating Systems Open Source Linux

Can a Fork Save Cutefish OS (or Its Desktop)? (debugpoint.com) 109

In April ZDNet called its beta "the cutest Linux distro you'll ever use," praising the polished "incredible elegance" of Debian-based Cutefish OS, with its uncluttered, MacOS-like "Cutefish DE" desktop.

But now CutefishOS.com times out, with at least one Reddit user complaining "their email is not responding" and seeking contributors for a fork.

But meanwhile, the technology site DebugPoint.com shares another update: It looks like the OpenMandriva project is already continuing with the development of the Cutefish DE (not the OS) for its own OS. For more details, visit the Matrix discussion page.

Besides, it's worth mentioning that Arch Linux already have the Cutefish desktop packages in the community repo. You can even install it as a standalone desktop environment in Arch Linux with easy steps. As you can see, it is easier to maintain the desktop environment to continue its development because the structure is already out there.

I have tested and reviewed hundreds of distros for years, and Cutefish OS is the promising one with its stunning desktop environment. It was written from the ground up with QML and C++ and took advantage of KWin. It would have been an attractive desktop as a separate component and could have been another great option besides KDE Plasma or GNOME.

Many open-source projects are born and die every year, and it's unfortunate to see the situation of Cutefish OS. I hope an official fork comes up soon, and we all can contribute to it.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Can a Fork Save Cutefish OS (or Its Desktop)?

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  • by nagora ( 177841 ) on Sunday July 17, 2022 @10:43AM (#62709746)

    I don't. Happy WindowMaker user for 20 years.

    • by nbvb ( 32836 )

      Heh. I use a Mac as my daily desktop, and if/when I have to use a Unix workstation, I also prefer WindowMaker. Both are pleasing to me, in different ways.

      I’ve also been toying around with nsCDE because CDE.

  • Eh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday July 17, 2022 @10:45AM (#62709752) Journal

    praising the polished "incredible elegance" of Debian-based Cutefish OS, with its uncluttered, MacOS-like "Cutefish DE" desktop.

    Am I the only person who doesn't like the MacOS desktop? I have a MBP for work and... I just don't like it. It's clunky and inelegant if you have several different programs you want to use at the same time for the same task. You know unix style, terminal + stuff.

    It's notion of fullscreen is nasty.

    It's virtual desktops are a poor imitation of the real thing.

    The handling of sound with external speakers makes me long for pulseaudio.

    And it doesn't have focus follows mouse.

    • Longing for "pulseaudio" while working is the best example of being suffering with the worst ever...

      I'd stick with ESD or even try PipeWire even before longing for pulseaudio...

      • Longing for "pulseaudio" while working is the best example of being suffering with the worst ever...

        You do realise I'm not exactly praising macs, here, right?

        I'd stick with ESD or even try PipeWire even before longing for pulseaudio...

        Pulseaudio has had most of the more egregious bugs hammered out of it through sheer weight of use. God knows why it became popular in the first place when it was so bad. These days, it's... fine. Like, it very rarely crashes now or fucks up the audio. At least I can choose whi

        • God knows why it became popular in the first place when it was so bad.

          Timing. Pulseaudio came out at a time when Linux's audio system was frankly completely unusable for a modern desktop / laptop. You want to change audio output without pulse audio, and you're not an experts? hahaha fuck you. You expect your bluetooth headset to automatically take over from your mic and speakers mid conference call? Hahahha fuck you even if you are an expert.

          If you ever need to ask why something is popular instead ask: what were people missing that drove them towards using a buggy audio stack

          • True though there was also: You want your audio to not regularly blast full volume, massively distorted sound at you? Hahaha fuck you. Thanks, pulse!

            If you ever need to ask why something is popular instead ask: what were people missing that drove them towards using a buggy audio stack like that in the first place.

            Yeah, sounds wasn't great, but pulseaudio had a disease worse than the cure. It was so horrendously buggy at the time, and ESD was generally OK. There's also the question of who they is, users, dis

            • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

              by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday July 17, 2022 @02:16PM (#62710194)
              Comment removed based on user account deletion
              • The lead programmer of systemd is the same lead programmer of pulseaudio (originally). Wonder why they both kinda suck?
                • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

                  by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

                  I wonder why all you got to go by is hate for a person. I see someone who has provided two solutions that people have clamored for. What have you done other than shit on it on Slashdot? Is your worthy contribution to the problem just being butthurt that someone else did something?

                  Grow up kid.

              • It didn't just work: it was buggy as all hell in the beginning.

                I don't know about the internals of ESD, but that did just work, at least back then.

                The easy path was to use the inexplicable dominance of one desktop system to push an incredibly buggy piece of software. Sure we needed something like that, but it was sodding awful at the time. That's pretty shabby, TBH. It's the kind of thing crappy companies do.

            • True though there was also: You want your audio to not regularly blast full volume, massively distorted sound at you? Hahaha fuck you. Thanks, pulse!

              False. A bug that hasn't been present for many years. Literally the opposite of hahahah fuck you, and more "thanks for reporting this, here's an attempt to patch"... well multiple attempts. The issue persisted for a while.

              Yeah, sounds wasn't great, but pulseaudio had a disease worse than the cure.

              No. Pulseaudio had bugs. Bugs were rapidly patched (like the one you mentioned). That isn't a disease. You could happily not use it while people who wanted the functionality could decide whether or not they wanted to live with the *temporary* bugs.

              Please get some perspective.

              • I forget that people rage out and don't read the context setting posts earlier in the thread.

                That audio bug persisted for ages, after the point where firefox dropped everything else. I use pulse these days because as I said through sheer weight of use it for debugged. It was pretty shabby how hard incredibly buggy software was pushed.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I'd stick with ESD [...]

        ESD? Now that's one three-letter sequence I've not seen in a FOSS post in a long long while. ESD's like the GWB of sound systems. It belongs in another era.

        If you want something that's supported and not systemd-infected, you still have a bunch of choices from the Linux kernel standard ALSA, the now (I believe) out-of-tree OSS (Open Sound System), and even OpenBSD's sndio [sndio.org] (which has been ported for use with GNU/Linux systems, along with the usual BSD variants).

        • by nbvb ( 32836 )

          Hey, I remember when you had to pay 4Front for an OSS license. I had one for my Solaris 8 SPARC box a gazillion years ago ...

          ESD is the hot new thing compared to that mess.

          • Wow. My GNU/Linux experience doesn't go that far back, although I remember ALSA being still newish and inferior to OSS.
      • by caseih ( 160668 )

        PulseAudio has always worked well for me for me since not too long after it was released. We all encountered some issues when RedHat rushed it out. By now it's fairly flawless at what it does, although limited in scope, which PipeWire is addressing. PulseAudio absolutely brought Linux audio out of the stone age. And it still does things that you can't do on any other OS without third-party software. Certainly I can't imagine using Linux audio without PulseAudio or now PipeWire.

        • When I started using a Mac for my work computer instead of a Linux machine, the first thing that really fucking bugged me was how limited the audio system was compared to what Pulse provided.
    • by pz ( 113803 )

      And it doesn't have focus follows mouse.

      Plasma hasn't done focus follows mouse correctly for many, many years, if ever. It has a gob of options, almost none of which make sense, and none of which are what I want: alt-tab control of window focus along with focus follows mouse, and pop-up windows that do not immediately expect keyboard input do not steal focus.

      But maybe I'm expecting too much. Then again, the window manager I was using in the late 90s had all of these mouse and focus features figured out as the default. It also kept popup window

      • by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

        Plasma hasn't done focus follows mouse correctly for many, many years, if ever. It has a gob of options, almost none of which make sense, and none of which are what I want: alt-tab control of window focus along with focus follows mouse, and pop-up windows that do not immediately expect keyboard input do not steal focus.

        Not sure if it's the localization for your language, but in English, it's quite comprehensible, and works As Expected-- I suggest you use "Focus Follows Mouse", and decide if you want "mouse precedence" or not (Your description suggests you might). Turn on focus stealing prevention (low is fine for me), and I use a small delay (300ms) to keep the windows from leaping up as I move the cursor around.

        Just about every combination of option is available, so if it's not working right, chances are, you're not set

        • by pz ( 113803 )

          Thanks for the tips, but I have tried every possible combination. I don't want my windows popping up when my mouse gives them focus. I'm not sure under what circumstances that behavior is useful, but different strokes and all that. Note that in my world at least, a window having focus does not mean that window is necessarily the top window.

          I also want absolute focus follows mouse. As in, when my mouse is over a window, that is the window that has focus. When you do that in Plasma, you lose alt-tab, whic

          • by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

            Sorry, but this is BS.

            * use "focus follows mouse", not "focus under mouse" (which explicitly tells you it will disable alt-tab)
            * Select "Click to raise window"
            * Disable auto-raise
            * pick a level for focus stealing prevention. If it's not sufficient consider "Focus follows mouse (mouse precedence)".

            Or, failing that, create a window rule that explicitly blocks matlab from stealing focus.

            Plasma is customizable enough that pretty much any combination o

            • by pz ( 113803 )

              Tried all that, and it doesn't work.

              Unfortunately, the per-window custom rules aren't documented with easy examples right in the tool, and when I try to find examples on the net, it quickly gets too difficult to be worth my time chasing down. Shame on the programmer for thinking their code was so amazing that they didn't need to write instructions on how to use it.

              And then, there's still the annoying thing that new windows always go to the current desktop, not the desktop of the parent window. Maybe there'

              • by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

                And then, there's still the annoying thing that new windows always go to the current desktop, not the desktop of the parent window. Maybe there's a custom rule for that. I looked, but didn't find one. When things aren't documented for ease of use, I don't care how powerful they are, they might as well not exist.

                Now, that's a valid complaint. My other complaint is that opening a hyperlink, for instance, will open it in my "nearest" browser-- even if it happens to be in another activity.

                As for the rest, I believe you want "Focus follows mouse (mouse precedence)", because it behaves EXACTLY the way you describe, doesn't break alt-tab, and doesn't break focus stealing prevention. But you need to enable "click to raise", and disable "autoraise".

                I found a 40 page manual on window rules-- it's a little out of date, but

    • I would use multiple terminals in MacOS, and I liked it. I switched back to Windows and I find it a lot clunkier. For linux I'm not using UI for it.

      • The terminals are all one app. What sucks really hard is having different programs.

        And windows? What? This entire story is about desktop Linux, which I find greatly superior to windows too.

    • I'm sticking with Hannah Montana Linux. Come fight me, bro!
    • Am I the only person who doesn't like the MacOS desktop?

      No.

      It's notion of fullscreen is nasty.

      Yep. Makes me want to barf.

      I also hate the way you can click on an icon in the dock to bring back a minimized window but clicking it again doesn't make the window go away (I always seem to click the wrong one - there's usually no visual clue as to which one of several windows is the one I want).

      Microsoft Windows is WAY batter at managing windows than MacOS is.

      An honorable mention also goes to having a single menu bar at the top that changes with window focus. It's lunacy.

    • Am I the only person who doesn't like the MacOS desktop?

      No you aren't. MacOS' interface is not ugly by itself; but it is awful in a sense that EVERYBODY tries to mimic it. As a result of that, we have a great choice of quite similar, cargocult-inspired GUIs.

    • For all the faults I could pick with MacOS, Audio is not one of them. CoreAudio is a thing of beauty, and it's ridiculously versatile compared to windows. Recently had to move to a windows machine for my studio and was appalled there's no native system for combining devices into a single virtual device (RMI 16 channel rig and a time code input from a separate unit for synch from a multitrack tape unit. ) Found some third party software that could sort of do it, but the first sign of time code jitter and it

      • For all the faults I could pick with MacOS, Audio is not one of them. CoreAudio is a thing of beauty, and it's ridiculously versatile compared to windows.

        What is this "windows" of which you speak?

        I've tried with Linux but the lack of ProTools and Cubase is a professional showstopper.

        Yeah cool, but that's like 0.001% of users. I'm talking about when you plug in an HDMI monitor with sound, the volume buttons no longer function. Basic shit.

        • What? That works fine on a mac

          Maybe your monitor doesn't support CEC? Its the HDMI standard for volume control, if the playback device wont permit it, the sender is supposed to defer to the playback device and let the playback device control it, so a well configured sender will disable its volume control to avoid confusing the user.

          Is there a CEC control option in the monitor's menus? (Sometimes called weird proprietry names like "Vieralink" on panasonic devices etc)

    • If you want to do terminal stuff, then install iTerm. How is that clunky?
      • How on earth does a different terminal emulator help with the OS being terrible at dealing with you wanting to use two different programs at the same time? That's still only one program.

  • No, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday July 17, 2022 @10:54AM (#62709772) Homepage Journal

    Anyone who wants this look can install GNOME or KDE, configure it with a top panel using text menus, and use one of the many many docks available to provide the OSX-like dock. But why would they? The Mac style Dock threw away everything that made sense about the NeXTStep dock it was based upon. It sits at the bottom of the screen despite the vertical resolution already being limited by the prevalence of widescreen displays. Everything on it moves around on the screen as apps are launched or terminated, so you cannot use muscle memory to bring the mouse pointer to dock elements — you have to think your way through it every time. This design also makes the primary dock button not only move around, but also not be located in a corner where you can mouse there immediately.

    Furthermore, I had all of the best of Windows and OSX on my Linux desktop years ago, and then most of the functionality was broken. GNOME went from 2 to 3 and began to be crap, so there went that. avant-window-navigator, compiz, and the very attractive emerald window decorator were all essentially abandoned. (All of them have come back to some degree since.) If people really wanted their Linux system to look and act like OSX, none of that software would have gone out of maintenance to begin with.

    Instead of that crap, what actually makes sense is to use the latest KDE Plasma, and stick a panel over on the right that does the job of both panel and dock. Or install one of the old NeXT-style window managers.

    • Furthermore, I had all of the best of Windows and OSX on my Linux desktop years ago, and then most of the functionality was broken. GNOME went from 2 to 3 and began to be crap

      If you like GNOME 2, then you can use MATE.

      • If you like GNOME 2, then you can use MATE.

        And it's almost as good, if a bit more bloaty and less performant because of GTK3. But it's still not quite as good, and anyway KDE is finally good now, so g'bye GNOME.

        • by caseih ( 160668 )

          My problem with KDE is that some parts of KDE are done in Qt with conventional widgets (which look great and I can theme them to look the way I want), and the other parts are using QtQuick which doesn't look quite right. Theming doesn't really work, things are too big, spaced out, and lacking in contrast. It's a bit like Windows 10 really, where it's a jarring combination of Win32 and UWP (or whatever they call it this day), and I don't like the look of UWP apps at all for all the same reasons as I don't

    • GNOME went from 2 to 3 and began to be crap,

      Does anyone actually like GNOME?

      The weird thing is it is some sort of "default" and massively dominant but I've never met a single person who actually positively likes it. Linux users are generally customisers or defaulters. I'm the former and I have my repo of settings I clone on to a new machine to pull in X session, bashrc, fvwm2rc and a bunch of others. I like my machine being just so. I know plenty of customisers, none use GNOME.

      The defaulters just use what

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        It's dominant because it's pushed by RedHat. Also it's got a large number of useful libraries. (But I'm still not convinced that Gtk3 is better than Gtk2, or even as good. It probably isn't aimed at any of my use cases.)

        • It's dominant because it's pushed by Redhat and Debian, because GNOME is Free Software and KDE is only Free Software compatible. Back when it was good, that is in the 2.x days, it also supplanted the Motif-based CDE on both HP-UX and SunOS 5 systems. It covered all of the necessary functionality with minimum resource consumption, and without trying to change the interface paradigm laid out in IBM CUA (which was also implemented by Motif, as well as Windows.)

          • But why now?

            Gnome 2 had its fans and lives on. I have never encountered a single person online or in person who likes GNOME 3. It's running on momentum sms a weird desire to turn Linux into something it isn't. There are nice alternatives that are Free these days like KDE and XFCE.

            • Yeah, I didn't realize that all of KDE went fully Free, I thought it was just Qt. I installed it regardless :)

              I hope there is more coming-to-senses in the future, and GNOME can go away.

              What's extra sad is that GNOME was one of the biggest reasons cited for switching Debian to systemd

          • by mabinogi ( 74033 )

            KDE is only Free Software compatible

            Stuck in 1999, I see...

            • Sorry, was. But it's undeniable that they screwed themselves for a long time with their bullshit licensing.

      • Does anyone actually like GNOME?

        I liked Gnome 2 because the way it worked made sense to me and I could make it look the way I wanted. When I learned what Gnome 3 was going to be, I was horrified. Not only did it change the look and feel (and make it hard to customize without third-party extensions that might stop working at any moment) but it was an intense resourse hog at a time that I couldn't afford to upgrade my hardware. After a bit of research, I migrated to Xfce and never looked back. It's muc
        • I use and love XFCE, but it is probably not going to get ported to Wayland, so, when X11 goes away, most likely, so does XFCE. :(

          I'm not against Wayland per se. But I do NOT want to be forced into a choice between KDE and GNOME. Neither of these lets me do what I've been doing for decades: just let me work, help me launch stuff, but otherwise stay out of my way, and don't consume more resources than does my actual work.

          • It looks like Wayland is on their roadmap as of 2021.

            https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/w... [xfce.org]

          • I'm not against Wayland per se. But I do NOT want to be forced into a choice between KDE and GNOME.

            My thoughts exactly. However, I don't expect X11 to go away in the near future because most of the DEs in use don't support it yet. Right now, there are only three DEs that support it, with Enlightenment being the third and the people maintaining the various distros aren't about to force everybody to switch to one of those three or switch distros, because they know what would happen: people desert in drov
      • I find it surprising that people actually like GNOME 2. I tried several versions from the start every once in a while and always experienced bugs and found it generally slow and bloated. For me it never "just worked". I guess being used to fluxbox everything seems that way, although already 20 years ago I found KDE more appealing than GNOME. Anyhow I stopped trying a few years ago, I believe it was version 3 already, first thing I tried was opening a terminal, I was instantly put off. I cannot imagine anyon

    • by jeremyp ( 130771 )

      It sits at the bottom of the screen despite the vertical resolution

      Falsehood number one. You can put the Mac doc on any edge of the screen you like.

      Everything on it moves around on the screen as apps are launched or terminated

      Falsehood number two.

      I think I'll stop there. You clearly do not know what you are talking about.

      • Yeah, my Dock has been on the left side of the screen for coming up on 20 years now. It's one of the first changes I made - right after turning off all dock animations.

      • Falsehood number one. You can put the Mac doc on any edge of the screen you like.

        You can move it, but by default it's at the bottom, and that's what people are used to. Further, I didn't claim it couldn't be changed, so there was no falsehood. Typically wrong Mac fanboy. APPL/DUMB.

        Everything on it moves around on the screen as apps are launched or terminated

        Falsehood number two.

        Every time an app which is not pinned is launched, the dock grows. Every time one of those apps is closed, it shrinks. Consequently, everything on the dock is continually moving around to different on-screen locations. NeXT pinned the dock to the top right and grew it downwards, so this doesn't happen. I belie

    • I just auto-hide the dock. You rarely use it that much except to open a few commonly used applications. It works better for auto-hiding than the Windows start bar because that has useful info that goes away. On OSX the useful info is on the menu bar instead.

      Maybe people can at least agree that OSX is light years ahead of Windows which seems to ignore consistency and usability?

      • Maybe people can at least agree that OSX is light years ahead of Windows which seems to ignore consistency and usability?

        In what way?

        I find the complete opposite. OSX is a constant fight to do basic things like file management and much more difficult to deal with multiple open windows at once.

        Also: Laptops with no PgUp/PgDown/Del keys? Are you serious?

        • Ah, I don't use a laptop's keyboard that often, they all kind of suck. Del key is there, maybe I remapped to Backspace... PgUp/Dn I never noticed a problem with, maybe because the scroll pad actually works quite nicely (though with patents it means other UIs can't copy some of it, the Windows scroll pads in particular suck badly).

          File management? I use the command line mostly, but from the UI I don't recall any troubles, not as many troubles as using Window's Explorer. And I always had multiple windows

        • I recently switched to macOS (it's not called OSX anymore), after about 1.5 decades of exclusively using Linux.
          It was a struggle, but one I committed to doing so that I could transition to an M1 MacBook which was so objectively better than anything else I could get in the PC space, that I couldn't let the OS get in my way.

          Ultimately, I worked through all of the annoying fucking differences, found things that it's excellent at. As for differences in keys, there are shortcuts for all equivalent functions.
    • by Budenny ( 888916 )

      Mate is basically Gnome 2, and works very well for people who are looking for that kind of thing. Minimalist, simple, everything about it pretty obvious. Somewhat like Xfce the last time I looked at that.

      The really nice thing about the Mate guys is that (unlike Gnome) for many years now they have refrained from fixing something that works!

  • It's important to remember that Cutefish OS isn't ready for the masses. I experienced plenty of issues during my testing, but nothing distracted me from the brilliance of this desktop. I did have it locked up (and require a hard reset) after opening the Video Player app (while ONLYOFFICE was busy installing).

    Forking it isn't going to help if you aren't also fixing it. The desktop seems to be built almost completely using Qt Quick so it will need a rewrite before it's of any use.

  • "Cutefish OS is the promising one with its stunning desktop environment"

    What makes a DE the key reason to choose a distro, let alone a tiny niche playtoy distro? Why is such an unimportant distro "news" on what used to be a site by and for clueful Linux and other OS users?

    If I want a Mac I'll buy one.

  • I f I wanted something that looks just like MacOS I'd run Windows 11. Meanwhile Debian+Xfce seems fine to me.

  • I tested Cutefish a few times due to it being featured on Distrowatch. It looked interesting.
    And it was, ok. I suppose. Kind of unremarkable really which is probably a good thing. I couldn't see an actual use case for it though and went back to Gnome.
    I hope someone can keep it going however, as choice is a good thing.
  • >"with its uncluttered, MacOS-like "Cutefish DE" desktop. "

    So sick of "uncluttered" crap.

    Translation of "uncluttered": Hide everything, especially stuff users want to use, including controls, scroll bars, menus, etc and prevent user from exposing anything. Pack everything in 200 levels of menus behind a single button. Remove all important settings, since "users don't need them.

  • 99.99% of world won't use Linux or ever try it. You can bitch about the MacOS all you want, don't use it. All the Linux issues, problems and multiple distros that have been discussed on slashdot over the years have made up my mind to NEVER try Linux. All your complaining on here about Linux keeps confirming it !
  • Yes, CutefishOS Linux seems to be dead. I hope that a few folks make forks of the Cutefish Desktop Environment and/or Cutefish OS. The (Debian 11) 0.8 Beta of CutefishOS was already quite good.

    I liked it a lot better than the other main MacOS-style distros (Elementary and Deepin).It was suggested that any fork should make the DE name different from the prototype distro name (similar to "KDE" Neon). I like the idea of a Cutefish distro fork based on MX 21.1 Linux and calling it "Kwinner" (from kwin window

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