System76 . was created THEIR COSMIC DESKTOP Pop! _OS is the next evolution of Linux distributions built on the Ubuntu platform. With this large desktop company COSMIC written in the Rust programming language, they decided to move away from the GTK toolkit and use Iced-Rs as a multi-platform, multi-platform graphical toolkit.
The concerned System76 engineer commented reddit About COSMIC IceCut Toolkit:
The UX team has spent the past year carefully designing tools and apps. We are now at an important stage for the engineering team to decide on the COSMIC GUI toolkit. After much deliberation and testing over the past year, the engineering team decided to use the Iced instead of the GTK.
Iced is a native Rust GUI toolkit that has been recently improved enough to be usable in COSMIC. Various COSMIC implementations have been written in both GTK and Iced for comparison. The latest development versions of Iced have a more flexible, transparent and intuitive API compared to GTK. It feels very natural in Rust, and anyone familiar with Elm will appreciate his determination.
ice Cube A cross-platform GUI library written for the Rust programming language and “focuses on simplicity and type integrity.” Inspired by the Ice Elm language. Iced Toolkit works not only on Linux, macOS, and Windows, but also with web applications.
As shown in this example by Reddit user edfloreshz, System76 has started converting its COSMIC desktop software to use the original Iced toolkit from Rust.
It will be interesting to see what System 76 eventually brings to Pop! _OS for their COSMIC desktop.