14 DAY TRIAL // Papyros is getting closer to working release, and the developers are putting the final touches. We'll soon be able to play with the new distro, even if it's going to be just a development version.
The Papyros is a Linux distribution that follows the guidelines from Material Design, which have been implemented in the latest Android 5.x Lollipop from Google. There are already a number of themes out there that have been inspired by Material Design, but no one has gone through the trouble of building an entire distribution around this concept.
The Papyros team didn't just slap a theme and some icons together, which would have been much easier. They took the long route, and they have implemented the Material Design concept to a much deeper level, and they've done their own desktop environment. It's much more work, and they had also to build a framework, but in the end it will provide much better support and flexibility.
Papyros looks and feels like a unique OS
Despite the fact that Papyros integrates Material Design, it still feels like a unique operating system. We're not used to seeing this design on desktops and the developer did take some liberties, so it won't just be a simple copy of Android Lollipop.
"The desktop shell is getting closer and closer to being usable as a full desktop environment right from the login screen. We recently finished a session manager backend so you can launch the shell from GDM or another login manager (SDDM support for Wayland sessions will be available in the next release). We also just added a nice power dialog that pops up when you hit the hardware power key. What's left before v0.1? Mainly an upstream bug in Green Island causing apps to crash, fixing some issues with the icon theme and mouse speed, and finishing the window spread and Material Design window decorations," said the devs on Google+.
It's going to be interesting to follow this new operating system take shape, and it looks like 2015 promises to be a very interesting year. There are a couple more distros out there that should get released.