Quantum OS - OS based on Linux which conforms to Material Design guidelines

http://quantum-os.github.io/

by turrini • 12 years ago

391 163 12 years ago

quantum-os.github.io

jarcane2• 12 years ago

But ... why?

What does Material even offer to a Desktop OS?

And why a whole custom distribution, instead of a desktop environment?

ofcapl_• 12 years ago

Good question. It could be even just a custom theme (with additional plugins) or something

nautical• 12 years ago

A simple theme will do ... !! Why such a waste of effort ?

DCKing4• 12 years ago

(These answers are guesses)

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).

ricardobeat• 12 years ago

Your first reason is a bit condescending. KDE Plasma, Unity, Elementary, etc. all have clear design guidelines, and are all made by professional designers. They are not any less professional because you disagree with their choices / reasoning, and it's not clear that what makes Material Design work on mobile will translate well to the desktop at all.

slantyyz2• 12 years ago

> What does Material even offer to a Desktop OS?

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.

graublau2• 12 years ago

What does Material even offer to a Desktop OS?

A unified design language for a desktop OS is desperately needed in the Linux community.

jarcane2• 12 years ago

This strikes me as the "there are too many standards"[1] approach.

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.

[1] http://xkcd.com/927/

killercup• 12 years ago

I generally like the look and feel of Material, but I'm not sure how well it works with mouse and keyboard.

andybak3• 12 years ago

From everything I've read it wasn't intended to be specifically for touch and Google's use of it for the new Inbox interface would seem to bear this out.

shetter• 12 years ago

From what I've seen of Material it's also a lot about classifying information visually and that's definitely something where desktop OS interfaces can be improved. Nobody likes looking at a jumbled mess of information spread on a flat plane without any general cue as to where you're supposed to look first.

jon-wood• 12 years ago

I use it regularly on a desktop in the context of Google Play Music, and it works great there. I'm looking forward to see where this goes.

scotu• 12 years ago

I really want not to be snarky and downplay anyone efforts, but I just wanted to point out that such an operative system already exists and is open source. You may have heard about it, it's called android... I can't even think of a valid reason to "reproduce" (aka making something that kind of looks like it but in the end is annoyingly different). For fun, maybe is the only valid one...

Seriously though if you pulled a nice installer for really up to date android on my desktop the thousands of apps in the play store and I would be really grateful...

Can someone think of any solid reason for why I should be interested?

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Because you still get all the benefits of a regular GNU/Linux system underneath, I'd presume.

userbinator• 12 years ago

People like to skin OSs in general because they want to change the appearance to something they like, while preserving the other familiar parts of the OS; I've seen Windows made to look like Mac OS, for example. Linux systems can be made to look (and behave) like any other OS, with enough customisation. It's understandable that people like the look of Android, but they don't want to deal with the rest of the Android ecosystem.

ecspike• 12 years ago

I love Android but I'm also a developer. It's not productive to try and write code on Android. I have in the past skinned my Gnome Shell to look like Android Holo (I just applied styles someone else created).

Much like bumper stickers or giving your hatchback racing stripes, it's a way that people can personalize their experience.

Also for the people who are designing the skin, it gives them practice interpreting/adapting the spec and some of that knowledge may trickle back to the source.

riyadparvez• 12 years ago

Link is broken!

foz• 12 years ago

Maybe it was taken down due to negativity. But here's an article about it, with screenshots: http://9to5google.com/2014/11/21/quartz-os-linux-material-de...

realityking• 12 years ago

It was there a minute ago and it suddenly disappeared, including the GitHub repository. Weird.

Edit: It seems like it just got renmaned. It's now available under https://github.com/quantum-os but the blog is not yet up.

jesse_m• 12 years ago

The Google+ page says they need to come up with a new name because it conflicted with the Quartz graphics stack name used by OS X. This might be why everything is taken down.

zorbo• 12 years ago

Pointless cached version without the pretty pictures: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ypB2BA-...

lnanek2• 12 years ago

That turned out handy since it is returning a 404 now: "There isn't a GitHub Page here"

Danieru• 12 years ago

Here's one of the missing photos: https://github.com/quantum-os/quantum-os.github.io/blob/mast...

mattd9• 12 years ago

The new version can be found here: https://github.com/quantum-os You can read the reasons here: https://plus.google.com/113262712329378697012/posts/M1muF1f7...

nsmartt• 12 years ago

Can now be found here: http://quantum-os.github.io/blog/2014/11/introduction-and-in...

_xnmw• 12 years ago

Am I the only one who doesn't get this Material Design everywhere thing? Maybe it's why I'm not a designer, but do we really want all our UI experiences everywhere to look exactly the same (with perhaps color variance only)? I mean I'm all for having design principles, like the timeless principles of typography, which have near-infinite variance, but with a powerful yet subtle underlying set of guidelines which make it beautiful and legible. Material Design seems to me like Google branding forced all over the place. Boring.

sampl• 12 years ago

I'm a designer, big MD fan, and I'm dying to see some decent design in OS desktop land. But I don't get it either.

Design is all about understanding a problem/context and creating a solution to match it. MD is a great answer to a completely different problem than this project is solving.

calinet6• 12 years ago

UX designer here. It's way overhyped. The concepts behind it are great (using good motion design, giving proper feedback, showing clear affordances for actions, and lots of other good stuff), but that does not mean that everything has to look like Google's material template to work.

For everyone: take the UX cues from Material, sure, but please make it your own. The clone army is getting very, very old.

orbifold2• 12 years ago

The sad truth is in particular in the free software space there are only a few gems of truly inspiring consumer software, the rest are mindless rip-offs with terrible UI. Especially the chrome and rendering techniques used on a modern linux desktop compared to both Windows / Mac OS X are hacks. Compare for example the graphical foundation libraries of Mac OS X with the X11 + compositing wm + gtk / qt stack. So for example Yosemite style translucency might be implementable, but not in the presumably nice way OS X is able to do it, because OpenGL is not integrated as tightly in the graphics stack in Linux.

yathern• 12 years ago

I'm working on a desktop application at the moment, and taking great detail into making a good UI/UX. This is something I've never really paid much attention to in the past - and the Google's spec is one of the few comprehensive guidelines on UI/UX. I'm following it, and using for inspiration, but taking liberties as to not make something that looks solely Google-y or Lollypop-ish.

jasonthevillain2• 12 years ago

You're not. And "make all the apps look the same except for some color" is a misinterpretation, but it's how a lot of the early practitioners seem to be interpreting it.

The idea, as I understand it, is material is a base metaphor that's basically flat goo paper. It can be arranged, layered, and has some intrinsic animation behavior.

But the designer should think of material in the same way print designers think of text columns, or pullquotes, or the page. These are all things someone invented. They're useful, but they're not compelling. You still need to do something else on top of it.

The biggest problem I see with the flat goo paper is it's being treated like its intrinsically playful. But that's not appropriate for all UI's. Some apps should be stark and clean. Some should be dark. To me, if you're going to create a base UI language, it needs to be flexible enough to adapt to less playful brands. The next question is whether that's a problem with "material design" or just a matter of nobody has made a stark app with material as a metaphor yet. And if that's not possible then it's just a passing fad.

laumars5• 12 years ago

All design is just a passing fad. I bet in a decade or so, we'll look back at Material Design and think of it as being gaudy and blocky.

saurik• 12 years ago

(Can you define "goo paper"? I searched for that term and did not find anything useful: almost all of the hits were "false positives", with "goo" and "paper" as part of different phrases separated by punctuation. I ask, because you seem to have a really short intuitive summary of the design concept, and I'd like to understand it, but you seem to be using a term that no one else has ever used.)

danellis• 12 years ago

do we really want all our UI experiences everywhere to look exactly the same (with perhaps color variance only)?

For the most part, yes. We want them to behave exactly the same way, too, and use the same metaphors.

Material Design seems to me like Google branding forced all over the place.

There is no Google branding in material design. They've been quite explicit about that.

unknownian• 12 years ago

seems to me like Google branding forced all over the place

I'd argue that this has been the case since Holo.

sz4kerto2• 12 years ago

Please no. Material design might work well for mobile devices, where you don't spend too much time in front of a single screen (by screen I mean app screen, not the physical screen). The screenshots show exactly what the problem is:

- really bright colors in the top bars: that's exactly what we _don't_ want in desktop apps, as the focus is on the (changing) content, not the title bars. Grab this http://quantum-os.github.io/images/desktop_layout_1.png, resize it to full screen, and you'll see what I mean.

- large empty spaces: for me it's too much even on touch-based devices, but on the desktop it's just utter waste of real estate.

I want the desktop to get less and less popular, so then the OS and app makers can start optimizing for people who create stuff (e.g. me), and it could look like http://i.imgur.com/7Tu2i6W.png or http://yxbenj.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/vs2012_colortheme_...

afro88• 12 years ago

Totally disagree on the only mobile point. I've been using Google Inbox as my main mail client for about 2 weeks now and it's great. Doesn't get sore on the eyes and my workflow with it is really quick (as in, it doesn't rely on touch to work). Yes I know it's a web app, but it may as well be a standalone application.

I do agree on not using material colours for app title bars. But that's my only real issue. I personally think material design looks great, and this example screenshot looks much cleaner and aesthetically pleasing already than the current linux offerings

Brakenshire• 12 years ago

Also, given that touchscreens on laptops and even desktops seem to be a thing now, this could well be a starting point for a Linux operating system which can scale seamlessly from smartphone to tablet to laptop. Obviously it's not for everyone, but it could be good as a kind of 'tablet plus', for watching videos, checking emails/facebook etc.

Although Sailfish OS and Ubuntu seem to be much more serious in that respect.

dkersten2• 12 years ago

I personally love Inbox on my phone, but hate it on my laptop. I don't like how everything is so spaced out and personally don't find it easy on the eyes or matching my workflow at all. In fact, I've been trying to do as much of my email-related tasks as possible on my phone these past three weeks because of it, because Inbox itself is fantastic.

slantyyz2• 12 years ago

> Please no.

Well, to me, this is what I love about Linux - there are different flavors for different sensibilities.

This particular flavor isn't for you, but it clearly scratched an itch for someone.

thinkmoore• 12 years ago

What window manager/etc is http://i.imgur.com/7Tu2i6W.png?

gnoway• 12 years ago

Openbox, probably running w/ CrunchBang Linux. Looks like the primary application in use is a terminal emulator with tmux.

breuleux2• 12 years ago

really bright colors in the top bars: that's exactly what we _don't_ want in desktop apps, as the focus is on the (changing) content, not the title bars

Bright colors serve as good visual anchors. If you have a lot of windows open, they can help you find the one you want to focus on, although in this case it'd be better if the user set the colors rather than the applications.

Grab this http://quantum-os.github.io/images/desktop_layout_1.png, resize it to full screen, and you'll see what I mean.

You'll have to spell it out for me, because I don't :(

large empty spaces: for me it's too much even on touch-based devices, but on the desktop it's just utter waste of real estate.

I agree that the information density is too poor. As long as there's a compact mode I'm good, but few app makers bother, even though it would be trivial to offer.

I want the desktop to get less and less popular, so then the OS and app makers can start optimizing for people who create stuff (e.g. me), and it could look like http://i.imgur.com/7Tu2i6W.png or http://yxbenj.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/vs2012_colortheme_....

You know, if the desktop gets less and less popular, OS and app makers won't start optimizing for people like you. They will pack up and leave. These two screenshots show the current extent of the effort deployed to cater to power users, and I'm afraid they show their future extent as well.

vmarsy2• 12 years ago

The really bright color should only be on the app who has focus I think, the other one could be dimmed when not on focus.

On Mobile you see only one app at a time so it's fine, but it would be tiring quick to have all these bright colors everywhere, plus when you get back to your desktop you would have no idea on which app you are.

dharma14• 12 years ago

I guess the holy grail of Qt is to have one codebase for all devices. Perhaps different GUI (to a degree), but most logic can stay.

The thing is, you CAN creat the kind of app layouts like you linked - QML makes it incredibly easy to roll out your own UI.

But it could be argued that for many types of applications that is not the kind of GUI that works best, and a responsive, modern, touch friendly widget library is the way to go. It really depends on the application.

DCKing4• 12 years ago

I'm just going to leave a comment to contrast the usual negativity.

What I like about this is:

- The developers are not attempting to reinvent the wheel.

- Material Design is well-regarded on mobile devices, and it's interesting to see what you can do with its ideas on the desktop.

- They clearly pick technologies that are the way forward on the Linux desktop: Wayland and Qt+QML. It's great that these things are maturing to the point that we can start leaving behind X and that it's clear that Qt has won the toolkit war.

- Focused approach of not (yet) supporting different distros, but (like Elementary OS) an attempt to focus on getting it to work well for one system configuration.

I hope these guys can put in the time and effort to make something out of this. It seems they are making a couple of good decisions already.

sz4kerto2• 12 years ago

it's interesting to see what you can do with its ideas on the desktop.

I am one of the negative voices but you're right here: it's certainly worth a try.

lkesteloot• 12 years ago

to contrast the usual negativity

Thank you.

nly• 12 years ago

Material Design is well-regarded on mobile devices

Says who? Isn't Lollypop all MD based? I've heard quite a bit of 'meh boring' reactions to it

PaulHoule2• 12 years ago

I just got Lollipop on my 2nd generation Nexus 7 and overall it seems like a downgrade instead of an upgrade.

hackmiester• 12 years ago

I primarily have heard reactions to how buggy the OS is. I haven't heard many complaints about the design concepts.

andrewflnr2• 12 years ago

'meh boring' is a lot better than 'oh god help me'. A lot.

alrs• 12 years ago

Android 5.0 breaks the Nook app and Twidere outright, and damages F-Droid. It's also crazy-slow.

Avoid, for now.

laumars5• 12 years ago

Has Qt one the toolkit war? I thought most applications and desktop environments were still GTK based (though I can't comment how widespread the adoption of GTK3 has been).

I mean, I hope you're right because I really do prefer Qt over GTK (both as a developer and as a user). But my experiences as a user would also suggest that GTK is anything but an underdog.

not_with_retard• 12 years ago

Qt most definitely won the toolkit war. Multiple applications are switching to it from GTK.

est• 12 years ago

If you use homebrewon Mac. you'll find yourself using --with-qt more and more often. Because fuck X11

Animats• 12 years ago

Material Design is well-regarded on mobile devices

It is? Wasn't it shipped just last week?

SwellJoe4• 12 years ago

I've enjoyed it for almost a week on my tablet. I find it well-regardable.

On a more serious note, it is well-regarded by at least a large number of well-regarded designers and UI people. Material design has kinda swept the blogosphere in designer/UI circles. And, Google don't play when it comes to usable UIs; they put serious resources into figuring out how people interact with their software, so if they say, "This is good enough to be our UI standard for the next several years in every product we ship." then the odds are, it really is pretty good.

wooger• 12 years ago

I can't dispute Qt becoming more popular for apps, and even DEs, but I still find that Qt apps AND all the Qt DEs on linux and BSD are horrifically ugly by default. That is harming adoption of Qt more than anything.

It's likely just bad taste and poor theming, but nevertheless, I find that 99% of the apps I use are GTK, and I'd always pick a GTK based DE (Gnome Shell, maybe mate) over KDE or Lumina.

zenciadam• 12 years ago

What's its ultimate tensile strength of the OS?

Spearchucker2• 12 years ago

I like this. I don't like it because I like Material or even Linux. I like it because I want to build a compelling user interface for my own app. The two best reference UI's I've seen (and yes, this is subjective) are Office and Visual Studio. Nothing else out there that's even vaguely mainstream and on a desktop pushes boundaries like those two. And yet I like neither of them. My own design (https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=bc4a9a14-cdd5-4c0...) reflects the best I can do. I'm not creative, nor am I an expert at UI or UX, so its really useful seeing what others come up with.

And that is why I appreciate both the effort it took to put this together, and a new perspective that someone was generous enough to share.

hollerith• 12 years ago

I would download and explore Interact if you were to publish it under an open-source license.

Spearchucker2• 12 years ago

It will be open sourced. Just as soon as I have a working beta (core functions must work).

kagia4• 12 years ago

I for one think it's time we saw bold and ambitious attempts at changing the desktop.

Most desktops today are arguably variations of the desktops we were introduced to in windows95 and OSX (v10). The colours, placement and names change but rarely does anything new show up (save for metro desktop).

With wayland and mutter/qt+ this is a great time to try out wild and out-there concepts. It's the only way to break out and really change the desktop.

I can understand peoples frustration; the desktop, after all, wraps up everything we experience when we use our machines. However I will approach this with an open mind, and I certainly hope others will do the same.

fmoralesc• 12 years ago

The shell in Gnome 3 is arguably also a departure from win9x/osx desktop paradigm (it took some ideas from the latter, but it went in a direction different enough that I consider it its own different thing). It received quite a bit of backlash.

I love it.

laumars5• 12 years ago

In my personal opinion, Windows 95 was pretty much the benchmark for how to build an intuitive and productive desktop environment.

There's obviously a few things that have come since that have improved upon it (eg quick search in the start menu / launcher, and the way how Linux better groups applications in it's launchers than Windows does in it's start menu) as well as mistakes made since (Windows quick launch start menu tool bar being one prime example). But for me, Microsoft really did create the design concept of optimal working environment.

Obviously this is just my preferences - many would disagree. But I think the reason why there are so many variations on the Windows 95 desktop is because many people feel like myself in that it's a paradigm that works extremely well for them too.

wvenable• 12 years ago

I agree and many attempts to push away from the Windows 95 design in order to be different have been usability nightmares

nawitus• 12 years ago

I for one think it's time we saw bold and ambitious attempts at changing the desktop.

I'd ask what problem we're trying to solve. I think desktops should be out of the way. I don't really use "a desktop" for anything. I just need a way to launch and switch between applications, and that's a solved problem in my opinion.

kagia4• 12 years ago

Totally agree with you!

The problem though is getting rid of the desktop would not go down well with the majority. you'd need a way of proving that you can still make multi tasking painless. Currently a desktop environment means I can resize and arrange windows to allow me to work with multiple apps.

One idea is have some sort intelligent system for deciding how much screen real estate is needed for each app and how they can be grouped and arranged into sensible workspaces.

aroman3• 12 years ago

You say this as if nobody else out there is attempting to really radically change the desktop, which isn't true. Lots and lots of distributions and platforms are — you're provably just not familiar with them (not a swipe at you at all, by the way, but it goes to show that these things don't always catch on like wildfire). Also, re:desktop metaphor dating back to OSX/95, try 1984 and the original Mac and shortly thereafter windows 1.0 :p. (or really, Doug Engelbart some years before all of that!)

kagia4• 12 years ago

not a swipe at you at all

no problem! :)

10098• 12 years ago

Most desktops today are arguably variations of the desktops we were introduced to in windows95

That's simply because win95 was really that good. I, for one, think that there's no need to change what already works quite well.

overgard• 12 years ago

I hope they package the desktop environment in a way that it can also be used on other distros. Going to an entirely new OS seems a bit much to me, but I'd be way more willing to try it out if I could just install it next to KDE or whatnot.

mikkom2• 12 years ago

Going to an entirely new OS seems a bit much to me

To be brutally honest it sounds like they don't know what they are doing - at all.

dharma14• 12 years ago

I did think that too - why not just release this as a Qt widget library? Why a new distro?

imsofuture• 12 years ago

Are we still confused about OS vs window manager?

Hario• 12 years ago

Exactly.

Is Gnome an Operating System? Is Unity? Then why is "Quantum OS" one?

Rapzid2• 12 years ago

I'm getting the impression that they are wanting to start their own distro using the UI to pull in users.

tormeh3• 12 years ago

Is it based on Unity? It looks really good.

sandGorgon• 12 years ago

For people wondering about GTK,this was posted on Reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2mzqy5/xpost_from_r...

Evolve OS reached out to them, we started with a chrome OS esque environment, and we started a material gtk theme. This uses qt, which is good for new apps, but not existing. Evolve is implementing a new lib for animations, that'll work with gtk, and existing apps. We've got dreams for it, check out the live stream on YouTube!

gcb0• 12 years ago

You know what would be a great idea? get a Window Manager that everyone is hating because the usability and customization that took years to achieve is being throw out of the window by the new maintainers just to copy Apple's UI, and let's use that and add Google's latest UI mumble jumble, and instead of just releasing as a window manager, let's call it a new distro.

Vecrios• 12 years ago

So much negativity in these comments. Instead of saying "why?" or "MD is for mobile screens," present your opinions in a factual matter to support your arguments.

I personally don't prefer the MD/Metro look design philosophy. This stems from the fact that I believe in designs that help accomplish a task, not prettify it for the sole of prettifying it.

jshevek2• 12 years ago

I agree regarding the negativity. They come to "hacker news" but don't think like hackers.

augustk• 12 years ago

If the special effects can be turned of and it will be as efficient as the Blackbox Window Manager I may give it a try.

coleifer• 12 years ago

Is this in any way related to this project?

http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/2mka7r/update_mate...

It's based on Evolve OS.

kolbe• 12 years ago

Material Design aside, the development community should have somehow reserved the name "Quantum OS" for the first operating system to run on the first quantum computing devise. I'm almost offended that some port of Linux is trying to bogart it.

livebeef• 12 years ago

They should just write a gnome/metacity theme and call it a day. There is no point in having a new OS/distribution just to feature a new UI.

marknadal• 12 years ago

I've been asking a lot of people if they know of any "fresh start OSs that have modern minimalist UX" lately - and haven't gotten any good responses. So much that I've been planning on maybe building my own soon. But THIS, this looks like a great beginning! I'm super excited to watch this make progress! Congrats, great job, and keep it up.

ai_ja_nai• 12 years ago

I'm not getting why someone has to declare "we are creating a new OS", instead of just settling on "we are creating a better UI". OS is a very serious thing that has nothing to do with usability as it is perceived by grandma

josteink• 12 years ago

To be fair a "OS" is a compilation of lots of components: kernel, user-land utilities, a user-facing graphical environment and associated tools. You know, the source behind the whole "GNU/Linux" affair.

This means that somewhere you have to draw the line.

Android has a Linux-kernel, but (from a user's point of view) shares near nothing with a "regular" GNU/Linux OS, so it's considered an OS of its own. Which I think most people will be fine with.

That Debian is a GNU/Linux OS should be beyond any debate.

Ubuntu is a plain Debian-derivate. Is it its own OS? It's "merely" added a prettier installer, pre-bundled some common firmware and added a new (different) login-manager and GUI shell (Unity) and tried to add some consistent themes on top of that?

Elementary OS is (as far as I know) based on Ubuntu. It's the same story, except this time they're not just changing the shell (Pantheon instead of Unity), they're also creating lots og new user-facing GUI applications consistent with their own design-guidelines to compliment it.

A user using elementary OS and just the pre-provided GUI-apps a no terminal, will only see components provided by elementary OS. A new OS or just a new GUI? If we accept the principles behind Android being its own OS, this should be too: A user sees nothing of the traditional Linux apps or Linux DEs.

If we don't accept elementary OS as its own OS, why don't we? And if so why do we accept Android as such? You have to draw the line somewhere, and I agree this is hard. But if we accept elementary OS as its own OS, how is this (once built) not?

sysk• 12 years ago

UI/UX is a very serious thing of its own given that the most popular consumer OSes today are arguably not the most technically superior.

2lphacod• 12 years ago

Firstly, really great initiative. Looking forward to this. However, arent these two objectives contradictory

"The focus will be on creating a "stable" and easy-to-use operating system"

and

"Our goal is to base our work on the latest upstream versions available"

instead of using more tested and reviewed versions. Unstable drivers are a very common issue making the linux experience hard.

kchoudhu• 12 years ago

"Google, will you hire me? Pretty please?"

knappador• 12 years ago

Bells should be going off in a head somewhere about using Android alongside a desktop Linux home-rolled to become an amalgamated ecosystem of both and "just work" on a PC form factor but with LTE. Developers are demanding it so much that we're building it.

Rapzid2• 12 years ago

I would be more interested in this as a desktop environment alternative, or a skin of an existing one. Not as a new distro though. The message is a bit mixed but I gather they want to control a new distro ecosystem and are starting with the UI as a way to draw in users.

rrggrr• 12 years ago

Reminds me of BEos. Not quite sure why. Great effort. Keep at it.

eklavya• 12 years ago

If nothing else, a material UI widget set comes out of it which I can use to write android and ios apps. Thanks for this :)

desireco42• 12 years ago

This is one of the best ideas I heard in years. To me this totally makes sense, plays on Linux strengths etc. I wish you best and intend to follow closely.

MrBra• 12 years ago

Why not having just as a theme for current Linux window managers? What is the reason for a whole O.S. behind that?

lwelly• 12 years ago

Where can I download it from?

Quantum OS - OS based on Linux which conforms to Material Design guidelines

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