Cutefish Desktop

English Open Chat
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1

Hi! I’m currently trying out Cutefish on Leap. There’s a repo by AndnoVember that hasn’t been maintained in a while, but he made a solid groundwork to continue packaging this desktop.
I spent a day working and fixing packages and I can now say that the whole desktop now compiles on Leap! I used a couple of forks to mostly address fixes that I didn’t have the energy or knowledge to do myself.
In any case, here it is!

2

If anyone wants to give it a try, here’s a list of issues you should know:

  • No keyboard switching, but you can use xkb as a workaround:
setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us,ua -option grp:win_space_toggle
  • The file manager lacks a lot of features, particularly:
    • No bottom bar where you can see file summary and free space
    • No reverse sorting option
    • The file manager does not remember view settings for individual folders
    • Every item in the trash is prefixed with a 0
    • This can mitigated by using kDFM or any other file manager of your choice
  • No volume/brightness/media control using keyboard shortcuts, but UI works
  • Clipboard is iffy (takes me back to i3 which also couldn’t really handle it)
  • Only Cutefish applications follow the accent color
  • Dock recognizes a limited number of applications and behaves more like MATE Dock rather than Plasma’s Icon-only Task List

If you wish to install it, choose all the packages from the repo including the pattern. The pattern alone does not include all packages necessary for installation yet.

3

Oh, and forgot to mention, you can’t set up keyboard shortcuts either. But it inherits them from KWin somehow, so there’s that

4

I suppose I should list some benefits too:

  • OOTB global menu
  • The file manager closely replicates Nautilus in style
  • Smooth animations (sometimes accompanied with minor graphical glitches)
  • An easy way to set up font sizes
  • Simple, minimal, and (ideally) gets out of your way, while retaining a modern aesthetic (which sets it apart from XFCE/MATE/LXQt), and not reinventing the desktop by removing tray icons/desktop icons/titlebar buttons (they come OOTB which sets it apart from GNOME)