Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://en.cutefishos.com/ or https://cutefish-ubuntu.github.io/
Blurb: “Cutefish OS is an elegant, beautiful and easy-to-use Linux desktop operating system. It runs Cutefish Desktop based on Debian 11 bullseye and has a modern style design. Our goal is to provide users with a comfortable interface design, better user experience, and a better choice.“
This is a confusing project, it seems to be based on Kubuntu, the Github page saying it is based on Ubuntu, but the official page saying, Debian 11.
Cutefish took a while to boot, mainly because it had issues with my WiFi card, saying firmware was not found. Once in, I left it to settle down, and opened htop, which sort of wasn’t installed. OK, top it is. Top informed me that Cutefish was using 29% of my CPU. To put it into perspective, budgie uses 1.3% - 2%. I would not suggest installing this on anything below an i-series CPU. There are no minimum system requirements at the moment, but a core2duo and 2GB of memory will just frustrate your experience. That aside, it’s a stunner. It looks good from the get go. I want to remind our readers that this OS is in BETA and NOT ready for daily use.
Let’s start with the obvious, there is no menu button. Cutefish does not ship with a menu. Instead, you have a rocket icon on your dock that brings up a fullscreen icon page of everything installed, ala Gnome. (Exposé?). Everything is very smooth and looks like polish was applied first (we’ll get back to why I say that). The top menu bar and integrated global menu seem okay, but we all know this does not work in Linux as there are too many applications that do not support it. I’d say 70-30 in favour of no support, so unless the developers plan on doing a lot of work, maybe this needs to go back to the drawing board. This does free up screen real-estate in your file manager, not having a window header, but where does a new user grab the window to move it? The views are currently only icon and list, with no way to customize it a bit, as copy/cut and paste in list mode is sort of, out of the question with a mouse.
While we are on this subject, the logout/shutdown button is nowhere to be seen, until you click on the battery percentage in the menu. Again, it all looks fantastic, but it is non-intuitive. The first time I used the file manager, I had to explicitly click the back button to go back, as backspace did not work. Only after the second boot, did this functionality seem to come online. The file manager has a very crisp look and feel, thanks to the uniform and sharp icons in the navigation pane. However, one cannot enlarge the navigation pane to see long volume names.
By default, there are not a lot of applications installed. However, there are two music players, two video players, two media players, and two text editors! Software is handled by the Muon package manager, which just feels waaaay too busy for a minimalist OS such as this. There is an application called ”shelf”, that does not respond to mouse clicks other than close. As I said, beta software, though that feels more like pre-alpha. Whilst things in the application side seem a bit wonky, things like wallpapers seem to have been deliberated over for months, as they enhance and show off the cutefish desktop to an excellent degree.
Again, here is polish applied; in the settings, you can apply “system enhancements” that will round the corners of windows, add transparency to the built-in terminal emulator, and add semi-transparency to the top bar and top panel and dock. This all happens instantly. Changing fonts, not so much. We all know how important fonts are, especially if you are mimicking OSX, as it was Steve Jobs who insisted that Apple invest in good fonts to make their product nice. Which brings me to another point, there is no font manager for removing fonts. System enhancements also include a “dimming” feature for dark mode. The “dimming” of the bright wallpaper is a really nice feature and I must point out that there is only 1 dark wallpaper shipped with the OS (a fish on a black background). Since they are imitating OSX, would it not have made sense to have a dark/light switcher based on the time of day, having a dark and a light version of the wallpaper, and keep the “dimming” for custom wallpapers that do not meet the light/dark requirement? Just putting it out there like this is considered BETA, I am not knocking it in any way, I am just pointing to things and spouting ideas.
Though the OS ships with Kate on the dock, there is also an interesting notepad called Nota. Playing around with it, I tried the theme option, changing it to a few dark themes like Dracula or Solarize Dark, just to find the background stays white. You can change it, to a few buttons listed, but already the OS is starting to feel a bit claustrophobic to me. This is one of the reasons I like Linux, the freedom of choice; I don’t like being told ‘well your choices are green, brown, and sharky, and that is the way it is written. (The project does tout ‘better choice’, but that remains to be seen.) Hell, if I want pimplepuss yellow, that should be an option. I understand the OS is based around pastel colors, but sometimes I need high contrast. (Well, not me, but someone visually impaired, like my friend). Speaking of OSX, the default icon set, though pretty, needs to go. As I said, I can see these guys want their own identity, and using OSX-ripoff icons is not the way. They put so much effort into the other polish for the bling, that they can just as well make the icons their own.
The “settings”, “control panel”, or whatever you want to call it, is sparse at the moment with only like ten settings. Even though it is based on Ubuntu, there is no hardware inventory or driver manager. The display settings work nicely, but flipping the screen also flipped my mouse. Now if that is a good thing or a bad thing, I am not sure, as on one side, I may have a portrait screen that I do not want to view in landscape mode. The display scaling also requires a log out (and log in again) to take effect, but the accents or highlight colors take effect immediately. There are some animations here - for instance, the battery indicator has bubbles?? running left to right when viewing it under battery. I am sure they are copying some android phones here. The power setting has two buttons, power saving and performance, but no settings. I am not sure what is going to happen here, but I will definitely watch this space. User settings, date and time settings, and language settings, all seem intuitive and what you would expect. The dock settings seem to be sorted with the usual suspects like placing and size and visibility options. Keyboard shortcuts are also missing at this stage, and things like CTRL and + does not increase the terminal size. (Yes it has a slider in a submenu of another menu, but sometimes one needs to be efficient.)
I wanted to write this article on the installation, but since it does not ship with any office applications at the moment, and the WiFi does not work for me to install some, it’s a bit ‘broken down on the side of the road’ for me.
I think the developers have set themselves a hectic goal. This is too ambitious to be where they say it is. I am sorry, but the OS should be in ALPHA, not BETA. Things like search functions, etc, are still missing too, but I don’t want to harp on about what is missing, as it may be construed that I am negative about this release, when in fact, I am not. This needs a lot of work, but bravo to the developers for making it this far. This is balanced on a knife edge for me, it can go either way very easily.