After the Chinese Linux distribution CutefishOS and its in-house Cutefish desktop, the so-called Cutefish Desktop Environment (“CutefishDE”), have not yet progressed beyond beta status, the ambitious project is now complete now on ice for the time being. A fork is already being discussed on Reddit.
CutefishOS disappears from the scene
As the website linuxnews.de first reported, the Chinese operating system CutefishOS, which was launched with great ambitions and its own desktop environment, has been put on hold for the time being. It is currently more than uncertain whether the distribution, which is clearly based on macOS, and the desktop written in C++ and the declarative programming language QML, which belongs to the free GUI toolkit Qt, will be developed further at all.
CutefishOS v0.8 running Cutefish Desktop Environment
The distribution and the desktop were originally supposed to appear towards the end of the year and use KWin, known from the modular desktop KDE Plasma, as the window manager and Wayland compositor.
The official website of the Project and all channels on social media have been taken offline without prior notice after last sending a sign of life with Cutefish OS 0.8 Beta in April.
- Base: Debian 11 (“Bullseye”)
- Operating system kernel: Linux 5.10.46 LTS
- Desktop: Cutefish Desktop Environment (“CutefishDE”)
- Toolkits: Qt, C++, QML, KWin, KDE Frameworks
- Release: Expected end of 2022*
*) not yet officially confirmed.
The final release of the free operating system should not be based on Debian or Ubuntu, but should be a completely independent Linux distribution “From the Scratch”, such as AryaLinux (test). Now, completion is a long way off.
First forks are being discussed
That The release of CutefishOS is not particularly good, as numerous articles in the sub-Reddit r/Linux suggest.
A successor to CutefishOS in the form of a fork is already being discussed on the platform. In addition, the makers behind OpenMandriva are considering a continuation of the CutefishDE desktop.
So far, none of the projects mentioned have been finalized and CutefishOS and CutefishDE have disappeared from the scene for the time being.
Other projects affected
As with the JingPad A1, a Linux tablet with CutefishOS, is also still uncertain. However, a migration to the Ubuntu Touch developed by UBports is obvious and is also already being discussed on Reddit.
The CutefishOS 0.8 Beta (ISO), which is already being developed by the Linux-specialized The “MichlFranken” website has been tried out extensively, as well as the still extremely experimental Manjaro Linux Cutefish Edition can still be downloaded and tested.