14 DAY TRIAL // Papyros is a new Linux distribution built from scratch that uses the Material Design guidelines. Developers chose to build an entirely new desktop shell that perfectly simulates the use of Material Design, and the team is really close to releasing the first testing version for the public.
Papyros has been in the making for a long time. Now its developers are finally closing into a working version that can be tested by everyone, and the shell that has been built specifically for this Linux distribution is looking like it's getting into shape.
It would have been easier just to fork an existing shell or to cleverly build some themes that could have done the job, but it would have been just an approximation of the Material Design principles from Google. Building a dedicated shell gives developers much better control of what's happening, but it takes longer to finish. The first mention of Papyros was from January, and they're just about to hit version 0.1 for the shell.
Papyros will be something very different
The operating system that started all of this is Google's Android Lollipop, which uses Material Design. It was originally conceived for mobile devices, like tablets and phones, but there's no reason it shouldn't work on desktop as well, at least from a design point of view.
"This isn't quite done, but it's too awesome not to share - fully working Material Design window decorations! The color even animates perfectly in sync with the toolbar if it changes color. It's awesome! This will be landing in the nightly builds very soon, once I get the style tweaked a bit and resizing fixed, and an upstream bug in Green Island gets fixed. This is the last major feature targeted at v0.1 of the shell, so after this is done, there are only a few bugs and enhancements before releasing the first version of Papyros Shell," wrote the devs on Google+.
A launch date for the first public version of Papyros hasn't been made available, but it's going to happen very soon.