Any plans for the Pantheon desktop?

The elementary OS has made a significant progress on distro-agnostic Pantheon. I like their clean and minimalist desktop, but their release cycle makes me impatient. I was planning on trying Pantheon on Arch Linux, but recently came to know about Garuda Linux. I found this work very impressive, especially the BTRFS+Timeshift feature. Since you guys are already maintaining a handful of desktop environment variations, I was wondering, do you plan to include Pantheon in your desktop portfolio anytime soon?

There are no maintainers for that atm, so no, we aren’t planning pantheon desktop yet.
But you are free to fork repository on Gitlab and create one yourself.

BTRFS

Welcome to the forums, btw.

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Thanks @Naman for the sensible reply, catching the typo (which I have fixed now), and the warm welcome. Whenever I get a chance to experiment with it, I will share my experience.

Their is a reason why non Ubuntu/Debian distros struggle with pantheon, it like unity only stays compatible for a matter of days, to much Ubuntu Specific

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This is true @mandog, but I am hoping going forward they will work towards making it distro-agnostic. In a recent live Q/A session, their founder mentioned that "Projects" listed on their GitHub org are a good way to know what direction we are going. It is worth noting that distro-agnostic Pantheon is one of the projects listed there that have gained a good amount of love lately, but slowed down a bit as they are in the process of releasing version 6 soon. That said, one way to make progress in this direction would be to install and run Pantheon on other distros and report any issues.

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Really but the fact is its just a dumbed and locked down Gnome, to me it does not add anything, as a Ubuntu desktop like mint it gives choice on Arch its a mess at least the hope can be it goes the way of mint, or better still dumps Ubuntu then it will not be locked down to the corporate ways any more.

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If they continue to only develop it to work with the latest Ubuntu release, it’s not going to stay compatible with fast rolling distros for long, as the latter will quickly run too far ahead of the package versions on Ubuntu.

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Why would they do that?

They are for profit enterprise that is completely focused on monetizing Linux. The Pantheon desktop and application suite is the only thing that makes their distro even remotely interesting.

If you could easily install it on any distro, they would be destroying their own value proposition.

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Why did RedHat maintain CentOS for so long (until recently) despite having a commercial offering of RHEL? Well, a poor analogy aside, I am not a spokesperson of elementary, so I cannot answer this. That said, I have not seen them trying to make their work intentionally incompatible with other distros, instead, they have limited resources which they focus to make their distro shine.

Which is neither wrong nor bad. While people have many different views about open-source, I personally think it is a good idea to experiment with different models of sustainability of open-source software, community, and individual contributors. On that ground, I actually find their pay-what-you-can model of app distribution an interesting take, which other distros may want to try, and there is no harm in using elementary’s AppCenter and making it distro-agnostic.

I do not find this trivialization of an OSS community by other very helpful. In my opinion, elementary has a lot to offer than just Pantheon and associated apps, but your opinion may be different. On the other hand, every distro is nothing but an opinionated set of apps, DE, configs, etc. that an individual or a group put together which they felt would be a good package together and many people found it sensible, interesting, or cool to use. Those who do not like anyone else making decisions for them go with building their own. The thoughts you expressed about elementary can equally be valid for Garuda, Ubuntu, and many other distros. Again, I am not here to defend elementary and I do not care about their success or failure, but I like a few things about that distro and do not like a few things, which will likely be the case if I were to choose any other distro that is not customized inside out by me. However, I do not like to trivialize efforts of any OSS community/org/individual whether or not they have any financial incentives associated.

Are you suggesting that publishers should not sell their books to public libraries which will make those books available to people for free, destroying the business of publishers? By the way, it has always been possible to install Pantheon on Ubuntu-based distros (that is a significant portion of desktop Linux) as a package and use it like any other DE. I think, if their desktop environment is used more broadly, they will get noticed more, and those who will like a more coherent experience will likely tend to try elementary out. This form of publicity, in my opinion, is a good value proposition in the OSS community.

It doesn't help to try to make the Garuda team more palatable in ever-lengthening tirades.

  1. if it does not fit into our concept.
  2. if no maintainer can be found for it.

IIRC, we are fully utilized with the 13 existing desktop environments.

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I didn’t imply that they were deliberately making their work incompatible. I feel like you are making my point for me. The investment it takes to make a DE compatible with other distros is substantial. Since that investment would take away from them making their own system, why would they do it?

To be clear, I didn’t say it was bad. But if your goal is be profitable, investing time in things that will make you less profitable is a bad business decision.

I don’t see how this trivializes a distro/community. Building a DE and an application ecosystem is a massive effort and more than many distros do.

For example?

Err…this analogy is just a bad as the first one. The publishers are selling their books to libraries so they still are making a profit. Also, legally speaking, it would be hard for them to stop that from happening.

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This is basically the same issue as we've seen in the past with the Deepin desktop. It was not developed with the Arch rolling model in mind, and it simply had too many problems on Garuda and was dropped for that reason.

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I came here as a new member, completely unaware of the goals of the community, just wanted to get a question [the title] answered. The answer could have been as simple as "No", "Not anytime soon", etc. However, some people (including you) took their time to give sensible reasons behind the answer, that is certainly appreciated. I did not come here to convince anyone or insist on its inclusion. :slight_smile:

Oh, it’s very easy to make it difficult for libraries to hold books: increase the purchase cost for libraries.

Even ebook “licenses” for libraries are horrifically expensive, and especially so for textbooks. The whole thing absolutely stinks, but libraries are entirely “held hostage” by the publishers.

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Makes sense!

The tone and wordings of the quote below sound trivializing to me. One may interpret it like, “there is nothing interesting in elementary, other than many be their desktop and apps, but even that is only REMOTELY interesting”.

It looks like I am not the only one who wants a rolling release backend to elementary. :smiley:

Ahh…every single one of the reasons in that video is directly related to Pantheon or the EOS specific applications…

You definitely are not the only one. I have seen this request many times on more than one Arch-based distro’s forum.

Of course, they all end the same way. With someone pointing out that it rarely works for long on Arch because of the library versions they target.

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Simply because they liked it.
We are maintaining Garuda Linux because we like it. Isn’t that a good enough reason?

And personally I am not a pantheon desktop fan.

I already made clear that nobody is willing to maintain pantheon desktop version of Garuda Linux at the moment.

If anybody is willing to make an iso with pantheon desktop environment, he/she is free to make and maintain it. It is further his/her choice to contribute under Garuda Linux branding, by contacting us, or to make a completely different independent project, and may fork our repository on gitlab.

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You are absolutely right, the video has failed miserably to list anything related to martian rover, global warming, cryptocurrencies, rise of right-wing politics, roaches in kitchens, people with bad breath, hydroponics, etc. :smiley: