Monday, November 24, 2014: A new design language was introduced by Google, Material Design, along with its latest Android version, Android 5.0 Lollipop. It’s a colourful design, there is lot of white space and the animations are designed in a way that on-screen items look more realistic. An upcoming Linux distribution, called Quartz OS, is believed to bring the Material Design interface to the desktop. It means Quartz OS will marry off Material Design and Linux, which will boost flexibility of the JavaScript-based markup language QML.

Quartz OS is the brainchild of developer Michael Spencer and it’s under development, though the final stage has a long way to go. The source code for the custom operating system is available through GitHub. The source code on GitHub includes desktop shell and QML framework for Material Design. Initially the operating system will likely get ushered by an existing distribution only, like Arch or Ubuntu.

In his blog post on the Quartz OS website Spencer said, “Arch is a strong possibility because of the simple packaging manager, lightweight base system, and the rolling release concept. 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.” It means, though Android is designed for smartphones, tablets and TVs, developers are trying to borrow the Material Design concept for different other arenas too – the latest being Linux operating system.

Apart from Quartz OS, developers at Evolve OS have also started working on bringing this design to their Budgie desktop environment. On Evolve, Material Design will be integrated with the GTK user interface toolkit. Spencer has been in touch with the Evolve OS team too and they are working together to ensure that the apps run in a similar way across both the OSes. It’s quite interesting to see that two Linux teams are already working, and that too collaboratively, to bring Google’s ideas from Google’s new user interface for Android to desktop operating systems. Quartz OS team will now build a log-in manager and installer, which will de dependent on the selected operating system.

An official Google+ page has also been created for the Quartz OS project.