Are We Desktop Yet? Challenges and stories of writing a desktop environment in Rust

Rust has proven its uses in various applications and is no stranger in the linux ecosystem as well, being used for various cli-tools, daemons and recently even kernel development. But historically speaking Rust has had a set of challenges when it came to graphical user-interfaces.

So what happens when you attempt to write an entire new desktop environment in Rust? This is the story of the development of COSMIC, a new linux desktop environment developed by System76. About the particular challenges this effort faced from the state of the ecosystem at the time, over the development of their own rust-native toolkit to the heart of the desktop - the compositor.