Quartz OS brings Google’s Material Design to Linux desktops

Quartz OS aims to build a new operating system based on Linux, with a user interface built on Qt and designed according to Google’s Material Design guidelines. “We plan to develop the desktop shell and applications primarily using Qt 5 and QML, which will allow us to build highly polished and dynamic user interfaces and will work well for implementing Material Design. If possible, we will build the desktop shell in as much QML as possible built on top of the QtCompositor API, which provides a Qt framework for building a Wayland compositor.”

Google ushered in a new design language called Material Design as one of the biggest new elements of Android Lollipop, and an upcoming Linux distribution called Quartz OS aims to bring the clean and simplistic user interface to the desktop. Quartz OS is essentially the marriage of Material Design and Linux, aiming to harness the flexibility and power of the JavaScript-based markup language QML. Don’t get too excited just yet: Quartz OS, the creative brainchild of developer Michael Spencer, remains very much a work in progress. The source code for the custom operating system is available through GitHub, including the desktop shell and QML framework for Material Design. Initially, the operating system will likely leverage an existing Linux distribution such as Arch or Ubuntu. “Arch is a strong possibility because of the simple packaging manager, lightweight base system, and the rolling release concept,” wrote Spencer in a blog post on the Quartz OS website. “Our goal is to base our work on the latest upstream versions available, with no patches or modifications, so our work will run on any base Linux distro that supports Wayland.”