Oh No! There Won’t Be A Pop OS 22.10 Release

Pop OS 22.10 release won’t be available in October 2022; the team plans to concentrate on developing the new Rust-based COSMIC desktop.

No Pop OS 22.10 release in October

In a recent Reddit conversation about the status of upcoming Pop OS 22.10, the team said that there wouldn’t be any Pop OS 22.10 release in October.

Pop OS, which is developed by System76, is based on Ubuntu Linux. And it follows the Ubuntu release cycle. The upcoming release of Ubuntu 22.10 has been under development since April. And it is due to be released on October 20, 2022.

By this time, all the Ubuntu flavours are already nearing the BETA, except Pop OS.

But why?

New Rust-based COSMIC Desktop

Last year, the Pop OS team announced they are creating a new desktop environment (DE) based on Rust. The new COSMIC desktop will be based on Rust instead of GTK/GNOME-based. It includes similar looking Shell, newly designed Panels, a quick menu, an application menu and a brand-new compositor for the DE.

The team is steering all the time and effort to develop this new Rust-based desktop. Hence, it is unwise to shell out another short-term release of Pop OS just to follow the Ubuntu cadence.

In addition, the Pop OS 22.04 (based on Jammy Jellyfish) is already stable, and users can use this version anytime. Being an LTS release, it continues to serve System 76’s own hardware lineup and commercial support, including the Pop OS general users.

Moreover, if the Pop team was to work on 22.10, they would need additional effort to incorporate the new GNOME 43’s quick settings change inside Pop Shell. That itself might require additional regression and testing.

It’s worth noting that there might be cost-related advantages from System 76 while moving away from the GNOME desktop. Building something ground up gives you more control over its direction and vision. Primarily you can steer its development based on your business priorities while launching hardware line-ups.

Also, there won’t be any additional time and effort spent cooperating with GNOME Devs, contributing to GNOME upstream and testing efforts for GNOME/GTK version upgrades every year.

Timelines

From what I found from several forums, an Alpha version for the new desktop was planned for late summer 2022. And a long-term goal of the first stable release by the end of 2023.

Since the entire focus is on the new RUST-based COSMIC, hopefully, we will get to test an early build soon.

You can read the conversation on Reddit.

Via Joey@OMG! Ubuntu!

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