Michael Aaron Murphy, developer leader for the Pop!_OS distribution and contributor to the Redox operating system, confirmed that System76 is developing a new non-GNOME Shell based desktop environment written in Rust.
System76 specializes in the production of laptops, PCs and servers shipped with Linux. For preinstallation, its own edition of Ubuntu Linux is being developed - Pop!_OS. After Ubuntu switched to the Unity shell in 2011, the Pop!_OS distribution offered its own user environment based on a modified GNOME Shell and several extensions to the GNOME Shell. After Ubuntu returned to GNOME in 2017, Pop!_OS continued to ship their shell, which morphed into the COSMIC desktop in the summer release. COSMIC continues to use GNOME technologies, but introduces conceptual changes that go beyond the GNOME Shell add-ons.
Under the new plan, System76 intends to completely move away from building its user environment based on GNOME Shell and develop a new desktop using the Rust language during development. It should be noted that System76 has extensive experience in Rust development. The company employs Jeremy Soller, founder of the Redox operating system, the Orbital graphical shell, and the OrbTk toolkit written in Rust. Pop!_OS already comes with Rust-based components such as an update manager, a power management system, a firmware management toolkit, a program launcher, an installer, a configuration widget, and configurators. The developers of Pop!_OS have also experimented with creating a new cosmic-panel written in Rust in the past.
Maintenance issues have been cited as a motive for moving away from using the GNOME Shell - each new release of GNOME Shell breaks compatibility with the add-ons used by Pop!_OS, so it's considered more worthwhile to create your own full-fledged desktop environment than to continue to suffer with the maintenance of tens of thousands lines of code with changes. Also mentioned is the inability to implement all the intended functionality only through additions to GNOME Shell, without making changes to GNOME Shell itself and reworking some subsystems.
The new desktop is being developed as a universal project, not tied to a specific distribution, conforming to Freedesktop specifications and able to work on top of existing typical low-level components, such as mutter, kwin and wlroots composite servers (Pop!_OS intends to use mutter and has already prepared a binding for it on Rust).
The project is planned to be developed under the former name - COSMIC, but to use a custom shell rewritten from scratch. Applications will most likely continue to be developed using gtk-rs wrapping. Wayland is declared as the primary protocol, but the possibility of working on top of the X11 server is not excluded. Work on a new shell is still at the experimental stage and will be activated after the completion of the formation of the next release Pop!_OS 21.10, which is currently receiving the main attention.
Source: opennet.ru