CuteFish, a new writing environment in true MacOS style

Without a doubt one of the features that I like the most about Linux is the ability to customize the system to your liking and in a quite impressive way, since we are offered a large number of desktop environments which are mostly quite aesthetic and that allow personalization to the point of being able to combine different elements and even be able to work with different window managers (Windows Managers).

And is that speaking of the subject, a few days ago the developers of Linux distribution "CuteFishOS" which is based on Debian (and according to its creators it will be ready by the end of the year) made it known that they were working on the development of a new custom desktop environment, which has the name "CuteFish" and has a style reminiscent of MacOS.

About CuteFish Desktop Environment

As mentioned CuteFishOS is not yet ready, but currently it is possible to test the CuteFish desktop environment in Arch Linux and any of its derivatives, since within the Arch Linux repositories there is already the environment and also a group of Manjaro community users have created a community version of the distribution with this environment, making it even easier to work with it.

Regarding the environment, we can realize that initially the graphical interface it uses is that of KDE Frameworks along with Qt and Plasma 5, so those who really like KDE work can feel very comfortable trying this desktop environment.

The goal of this graphical environment is to design it for "novice" users. For this reason they have created some special applications such as the file manager (cutefish-filemanager)

As for the the custom environment components, these are developed under the fishui library  which is used with the implementation of a plugin on a set of widgets Qt Quick Controls 2.

Although we can also notice that the graphical interface is quite similar to that of Deepin and Jing OS and that the latter has influenced the environment project.

In addition, we can find that light and dark themes are supported, windows without borders, shadows under the windows, blurring of the content of the background windows, menu styles and Qt Quick Control, all this is possible thanks to the KDE base and that to manage the windows, the composite manager is used KWin with a set of additional plugins.

It is also mentioned that the project is developing its own taskbar, a full screen interface to launch applications (launcher) and a top panel with a global menu, widgets and a system tray.

Among the applications developed by the project participants: file manager, calculator and configurator.

It also seems to adopt the macOS style as elementay OS for which there are not many charts to follow as a model. Most go with the Windows style standard, like Cinnamon, Plasma, etc.

It's definitely a project that's just started and still has a long way to go before it stabilizes as a graphic. So it is not recommended to have it in a production machine.

Try CuteFish

The install builds of the CuteFish OS distribution are not ready yet, but the environment can already be tested by installing the cutefish package group for Arch Linux or using an alternate build of Manjaro Сutefish.

For those who are interested in being able to test the environment on Arch Linux or any of its derivatives, just open a terminal and in it we are going to type the following command.

sudo pacman -Syu cutefish

Similarly for those interested in being able to try Manjaro with this environment desktop, they will be able to get the iso image from the following link

The developments of the project are written in C ++ using Qt and the KDE Frameworks libraries. The code is distributed under the GPLv3 license.


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  1.   Pirate said

    Downloading the ISO is laborious.