CuteFishOS’s stated goal is to “make a better experience desktop OS”. To do that they’re building a new desktop environment (‘CuteFishDE’) using KDE Frameworks, Qt, and KDE Plasma 5. This desktop will sit at the heart of a new Linux distro called CuteFishOS.
The desktop experience caters to “beginners”, rather than power users. As such, the devs have no (current) plans to add complex, edge-case, or convoluted settings and features. Like Ubuntu, the aim is to provide a basic set of sane defaults that “just work” for most users.
There’s room for a polished, stripped-down Qt alternative to KDE, but I’m not sure if this one is going to be it.
It looks impressive in that it’s not just a hacked together session on top of Dolphin and other Plasma apps, and a quick peak at their public git repos shows they’re making some pretty rapid progress. In China there seems to be huge commercial interest in directly borrowing the UI design from Apple products (and Apple should have no recourse but to accept the mimicking of their own similar behavior), so I have to imagine with recent economic and trade trends regarding China internationally there’s a budding market to commercialize these things by forking and going their own way. No doubt the CutefishOS Team (https://beian.miit.gov.cn/#/Integrated/index) is getting some sweet, sweet government subsidies.
Whatever one’s stance on China as a country, I can acknowledge that it’s really cool the government is starting to invest in divesting itself from western steering control over critical software. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons. But I wish western countries would do the same because the people running contemporary Gnome, Windows, and macOS have thoroughly garbage tastes in UI design.
In China there is no real separation between the state and private enterprise. It is an absolute certainty that Western OSes will be banned from Chinese government use within a few years. The next step will be to progressively ban Western hardware once China has made sufficient progress.
Oh, another desktop environment with the menu separated from its window. Great
Ooh.. it looks good. I’ll have to try it out 🙂
China with more than 4 times the population of the USA, will, just by internal consumption, surpass the USA in every economic and lifestyle aspect, from creativity in all kinds of design, in medicine, hardware, software, education and more.
They may also, offer a more fair democracy than what exists in the USA. The USA stopped being a Democracy when the wealthy could contribute unlimited amounts to candidats of their choice. — buying their congressmen and senators.