Good news everyone! Version 1.3 of iBuntu Catalinux will be released this week! And we decided to integrate the Big Sur-Theme as well. Yes you heard right, we listened to your demands and decided ok, even if “Catalinux” still will be shipped with the macOS Catalina Design Theme by default, we will implement the option for users to switch to the “Big Sur” Design-Themes we picked for our gnome version.
Of course as usual you can do this with our Deskmode-Switcher app which for this purpose we recoded completely new in Python and you find there now a little Checkbox which asks you, if you want to get the Big Sur Design or not – so you can switch between Bright Mode and Dark Mode in both variants, Catalina Desing or Big Sur Design.
And I think it looks quit neat:
But just as a reminder: This isn’t Version 2 of iBuntu – this is still our Version 1, “Catalinux” just with Big Sur Design Themes – new clothes in the wardrobe but still the same wardrobe you could say 🙂
Another new Gimmick we implemented in our current Beta-Testing-Phase is that we took the switchboard from elementaryOS which looks very similar to the macOS Settings-Tool. After a quick check everything looked fine so far so we decided to integrate it in our Beta-Version which is out for testing this week- thanks to Gaurav for the suggestion to implement something more macOS-like for the System-Settings. Like this we would again be “as close as possible to macOS” 😉
macOS Catalina Settings 
iBuntu Catalnux Settings
Than again for the never ending topic of global menu available in Catalinux: Sadly, with Gnome this is almost impossible.
Yes, there is an old, discontinued extension for gnome shell 3.22 which we use in Catalinux and yes with a few hacks, cobined with the Unity-Extension it looks like this:
But this is just a momentum-screenshot. The problems start right after. Because after we implemented this, our whole master-session freezed and hang itself up all the time. So we needed to go one Snapshot back and undo this experiment with the conclusion that Gnome and Global Menus just won’t work. So please everybody stop asking for it – Version 2 will be KDE based and there you will get your beloved global menu, I promise 🙂
Speakin of version 2, since we were busy with building Version 1.3 the last week no news on the KDE-Version so far but after the release of 1.3 we will focus again on getting Version 2 on it’s way. The only thing we have there so far is the question of naming – I thought of “Lix Nur” as you might know but since the last days I thought maybe “Lix Sur” would be better. What do you think?
So long 🙂