Manjaro Cutefish | A New Community Edition

A little while ago I checked out a new Arch based distribution called CyberOS. Since then some core members of the team have moved on and are now working on CutefishOS. CutefishOS will be a new distribution featuring the Cutefish desktop and a suite of unified applications based on Ubuntu. 

The popular Arch based distribution have adopted Cutefish to bring us a new community edition. It’s currently very early days for Cutefish and this community edition but for those who would like to take it for a spin you can download a development ISO here. Or if you’re running an Arch based system you can grab it from Pacman with sudo pacman -S cutefish.

Cutefish is a beautiful desktop environment built with Qt Quick. Straight away you’ll be reminded of macOS which is where I think a lot of the inspiration for this desktop was born from. You get a nice floating dock at the bottom to pin your applications and a panel at the top where you can get to a control centre like area with quick toggles for things like WiFi and Bluetooth.

The application launcher sits in your dock at the bottom and opens up a full screen spread of all of your applications with a search bar at the top. As this is a minimal development ISO of Manjaro you won’t find a whole host of applications installed out of the box but you will find things like a web browser and some of Cutefish’s applications. One of these is there file manager which has a very simple interface and follows the unified look of Cutefish.

The settings application is where you’ll find options to tweak the Cutefish desktop and system. It comes with beautifully designed light and dark themes that can be changed in the settings application. Here you will also be able to change things like the size and position of your dock as well as other aspects of your desktops appearance.

All in all it’s still very early on in the development for Cutefish but I think this is a desktop definitely worth keep an eye on as it progresses. Manjaro have done an excellent job getting packaged into a community edition ISO and I’m sure we will be seeing plenty more about this desktop in the future.

What do you think of Cutefish? Let me know in the comments below!