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GDLauncher Carbon is out now!

I am so incredibly excited to announce that GDLauncher Carbon is now officially released, and it’s available for download! You can download it here.

What is GDLauncher Carbon

GDLauncher Carbon is a new version of GDLauncher, built with a modern tech stack and a fresh design. It’s a complete rewrite of the old version, with many new features and improvements, and it’s designed to be more user-friendly and efficient than the old version and address most of the architectural issues that were present in the old version.

It’s been a long journey, and we’ve worked incredibly hard to make this happen. We’ve rewritten the entire app from the ground up, using a new tech stack, and we’ve added a ton of new features, with many more on the way.

We’ve also fully redesigned the UI and UX to make it more user-friendly and modern, while still trying to keep the same look and feel as the old version.

For a more comprehensive list of differences between GDLauncher and GDLauncher Carbon, you can read this article.

Branding

Our goal is to keep the branding as consistent as possible, so we’ve decided to keep the name “GDLauncher”. However, we’ve added the “Carbon” suffix to differentiate it from the old version. We’ve also slightly updated the logo and the redesigned website to reflect the new version.

You can still refer to the app as “GDLauncher”, but if you want to be more specific, you can call it GDLauncher Carbon and the old version GDLauncher Legacy.

Development

We originally announced the development of GDLauncher Carbon in September 2022 and it’s been a little more than a year of hard work to get to this point.

Deciding the new tech stack was my first blocker. In the end, GDLauncher Carbon still uses Electron to power the UI, but with a small twist. The UI is now built with SolidJS, a modern and efficient UI library that I’ve grown to love. All the heavy lifting is done by a separate binary written in Rust, which we call “the Core Module”. This has allowed us to make the app more reliable and efficient, and it’s also made it easier to maintain and add new features.

If you’re interested in more detailed articles on technical challenges we faced and how we overcame them, let us know.

What’s next?

This official release is just the beginning, it marks a new chapter for GDLauncher and its team and means that the product is now stable enough to replace the old version.

Starting now, we will be focusing on polishing the experience and adding new features. We have a lot of exciting things planned, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

As always, GDLauncher is a community-driven project, and we are always open to feedbacks and suggestions. If you have any ideas or requests, feel free to join our Discord server and let us know.

Migration from legacy GDLauncher

If you are using the old version of GDLauncher, you can easily migrate to GDLauncher Carbon by following this guide.