Creating The Next Generation Desktop Environment
At Open Studios we use a couple of tools that only work in Windows and so that’s our default operating system. Using Windows 11 Pro for a while now, we are not happy with what’s going on. It’s come to a point where every workstation needs to have Open Shell installed just to have a productive Start Menu and search.
We are also on Office 365 and had to just ditch the included storage from OneDrive because it’s hard integration in Windows kept breaking, now paying additional fees to use Dropbox instead. Thankfully the spam filters from Microsoft are still working well, we’ve observed a noticeable reduction in email spam since switching from G Suite.
Linux desktop has been pretty solid for decades now, unfortunately it’s the vendor support that’s been lacking. There’s a history of major issues like poorly written drivers breaking systems. Major companies like Adobe continue to snub the platform despite major investment/adoption by other companies like Valve. But I wasn’t going to let that deter me — it was time to try Linux as a daily OS again. Being a huge fan of the Enlightenment project, I decided to try running that within the current Ubuntu LTS.
The results were incredibly promising in terms of visuals, speed and customisation options but a few things hampered the experience — I couldn’t get my Affinity programs to run at all, there were bugs like needing to re-install Firefox around the snap version because the snap version wouldn’t work in the Enlightenment DE.. just too many issues for a daily work and leisure system. The extensive amount of customisation made me also worry about reproducing this if I had to reinstall or set it up on another machine.
Thinking about X Windows and its inherent client/server nature I realised there was a possibility for a new type of operating system. Imagine a desktop that combined your Windows desktop applications, Linux desktop applications, alongside cloud and private infrastructure applications. Something similar to what perhaps Chrome OS was going for, but with a more ubiquitous approach that favours interoperability over selling Google.
Excited to try a mixed local and remote approach, I tried streaming the Enlightenment taskbar to my Windows environment. Unfortunately that was the only one I couldn’t seem to transmit. It didn’t matter if I used an old school XMing/X11 forwarding approach or the more modern X2Go, Enlightenment’s desktop environment was just too custom and it’s taskbar too tightly bound to that setup to work the way I wanted it to. I had some success with DockbarX but it had issues with transparency and layering. When you use these remote solutions, you are sending an image of your remote program to your target and it often results in an awkward border around it as well — so even when it’s working it won’t look very good.
While testing Ubuntu with LTS out, I came up with a concept for Black Swan Linux. Named after the black swans native to our home of Western Australia, the idea was to create something new. Many in the IT community seems to have fallen into a ecosystem lock in mentality, even the open source community has fallen into it — looking at Canonical’s Ubuntu and RedHat. But there’s pushback too — the rise of the Fediverse and the self hosted movement to name a few. At the core of my new distribution is a focus on seamlessness, productivity and user experiences over marketing and selling products as part of an ecosystem for an external entity.
Building my own custom Linux is going to take a few years, and certainly the infrastructure ambition in play could push the development into the infinite so I thought about what could be done sooner.
Going back to the drawing board I thought maybe the more immediate answer lied in a custom shell for Windows instead. Custom shells like Open Shell and Cairo Shell have proven there’s a lot of potential to enhance what’s there in Windows. In fact my entire journey as a programmer began writing “programs” using batch scripts and DOS 6.1, before moving onto desktop applications with VB5 but still making a menu that let you select your favourite programs. Today we’d call these programs launchers.
I thought about what a next generation desktop taskbar, or launcher, concept might look like and came up with the screens you see below.
Check out the full sized Deskop R&D gallery on Artstation.
I’m definitely still going to make Black Swan Linux one day, but I think that starting out with a taskbar that solves my own immediate issue is a better approach. At the end of the day we just want to keep using the same programs without random browsers opening Bing search or some ridiculous upstream issue preventing us from doing work. The taskbar could in fact be the default desktop of that future Linux distributon.
The taskbar project is currently dubbed Cool Menu 2000, after my original Cool Menu program I wrote in VB5 in the year 2000. Currently figuring out tech stacks, I am testing out NodeGUI as it would allow Cool Menu 2000 to be cross platform. The abstractions do seem a bit hacky though, NodeGUI offers CSS but doesn’t have HTML components which is super strange. I wonder if it may be better to just build with a native IDE like QT Creator or even Microsoft Visual Studio, but that’s a question for another day.
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