Papyros is a new Linux distribution in the making that will use the Material Design style from Google. There is nothing to test so far, but the progress made by the developers is impressive and it's very likely that this will become one of the most interesting distros available.

We wrote a while ago about a Linux distribution called Quantum OS that aimed to follow the Material Design guidelines from Google. This is the same one, but it's now called Papyros. The name change was necessary, but it looks like it certainly didn’t slow down the developers. Even if they don't have an OS to show for it just yet, they have published some images and details about the new distro.

In case you didn't know, these Material Design guidelines have been adopted and implemented in the latest Android 5 Lollipop operating system, which is already available for Nexus devices. It's not exactly a secret and it's easy to see where the Linux distro is going with the design. The difference is that it looks a little bit different on the desktop, and, I dare say, much more intuitive and clear than on the mobile platform.

When is Papyros landing?

That is probably the one question that we can't answer, but judging from the amount of work that's already been put into the project and the progress that has been shared with the community, it's quite possible that we'll get something testable in the next few months.

Papyros is actually based on Arch Linux and the devs say that they are not actually building a new desktop environment. They are instead building a Wayland compositor using the QtCompositor APIs. They are also using SSDM as the login manager, they have implemented a calendar, system indicators, desktop notifications, and a few other features.

It's also worth noting that the bottom bar that you can see in some of the screenshots won't be present by default in the final version.

You can see more details about this release on their Google+ page.