elementary team looking to bring Pantheon desktop to Debian

As part of the Google Summer of Code 2014 event, Sergey “Shnatsel” Davidoff, a developer for elementary OS, expressed his interest on integrating elementary’s Pantheon shell, GUI framework, applications and GTK theme into the Debian codebase. This project expects to package elementary’s shell and apps and make it installable through Debian’s repository with near-complete functionality.

“That should help work out some kinks that may be related to targeting Ubuntu exclusively so far - although Pantheon was successfully ported to Gentoo and in to degree Arch already.” Davidoff wrote in a comment for the article “Interview with Slax’s author” on the Slax Linux website.

As much as the effort on bringing the Pantheon desktop environment to even more Linux users, unfortunately there are some caveats. As mentioned on the comment, the only thing that won’t be ported is Wingpanel, which has some required Ubuntu dependencies for it to work.

“We’ll most likely have to ditch them after the 14.04-based release but it’s not clear what we could replace them with…” Davidoff wrote.

To learn more about the project, head over to the project page on the Debian wiki, or read the full comment here.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)