But ... why?
What does Material even offer to a Desktop OS?
And why a whole custom distribution, instead of a desktop environment?
What does Material even offer to a Desktop OS?
And why a whole custom distribution, instead of a desktop environment?
> What does Material even offer to a Desktop OS?
A sense of (generally well-regarded) design direction made by professional designers. Familiarity to Android users. Not reinventing the wheel and doing a worse job at it.
> And why a whole custom distribution, instead of a desktop environment?
It's easier to make an integrated desktop if it isn't distribution agnostic. This way you can easily depend on distribution-specific stuff like which version of Wayland it has, depend on systemd, PulseAudio, which package manager it uses, what font settings it has, which GPU drivers it uses. If you make this a desktop environment instead of distribution, then you need to make it work with a far more diverse set of variables, which I think is undesirable when you're starting out (or even in general).
If there was Photoshop or Sketch for Linux, and a lot of people could migrate. And no, GIMP or Inkscape don't cut it
I didn't get that at all. He made a statement about one project. In that statement he didn't compare it to other projects, nor even mention them.
A unified design language for a desktop OS is desperately needed in the Linux community.
You're not going to get that by adding yet another standard, and anything not written to that standard isn't going to look all pretty and Material Designed anyway.
I don't think we'll really know until these devs provide a working version of their OS.
I do think what this OS is trying to do makes for an interesting experiment -- even if it turns out to be a failure.