CutefishOS is Back With a Vibe-Coded Desktop That Doesn't Use Qt or GTK

Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 AI models have been used to write the new Cutefish Desktop for CutefishOS, a distro that was in the news a few years ago.

Reion Wong, the creator and developer of CutefishOS, who also runs the project's X account, announced the desktop, showing it off with a demo video and a set of screenshots.

He describes his current workflow as mostly prompting an AI agent, then seeing what it produces.

Is it really built from scratch?

In the video demo above, you can see that the overall look and feel of the interface mimics macOS', with a top bar that houses a Control Center panel, a Notification Center, and standard status widgets.

Control Center holds toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, dark mode, Do Not Disturb, camera, and microphone, along with media controls and sliders for tweaking the display brightness and sound.

There’s also a configurable Dock that can sit on the left, bottom, or right of the screen, with sliders for its size and glass effect, plus modes like Always show, Always hide, and Smart hide.

And similar to GNOME, Cutefish Desktop's Overview mode spreads the open windows out on a grid, allowing users to add new workspaces, or "Desks" as the project calls them, from a handy button at the top.

The bundled apps include a file manager, terminal, calendar, system monitor, text editor, video player, screenshot tool, and image viewer that appear to be purpose-built for the new CutefishOS desktop experience.

Chromium, Firefox, KeePassXC, Ghostty, and LibreOffice also show up in the launcher as apps that run on the desktop.

The project says that the whole desktop was rewritten from scratch, including the system apps, and that app launches are very quick. Going further to claim that the compositor and the graphics library are its own.

When someone asked whether the desktop was built on GTK, the project, or rather, Reion, clarified that it doesn't base itself on Qt or GTK.

A look back at CutefishOS

CutefishOS arrived in 2021 as a beta distro based on Debian 11, built around a macOS-inspired desktop called CutefishDE. Back then, it already featured a global app menu in the status bar and a handful of bundled apps.

In 2022, the project’s website stopped loading, and repository activity slowed to almost nothing. A Redditor then started recruiting people for a community fork. The fork plan was dropped after the project’s GitHub said it was back and that a new website was coming.

If you were looking to test the new desktop today, know that no release date has been given. When an X user said they could not wait to try the demo, the project replied that it would take some time before they could test.

Go digging through the project’s GitHub page, and you will find that no dedicated repository for the new desktop is listed. Going by where Reion has been developing CutefishOS so far, that is the place to keep an eye out for the new code.

Suggested Read 📖: This is not the only vibe-coded desktop around; Starling is another implementation that might interest you.

And Folks, We Have a Vibe-Coded Linux Desktop!

Don't get your hopes high; there are many rough edges and incomplete features.

It's FOSSSourav Rudra