It is no secret that Ubuntu is an operating system that is very popular with the Linux community. We like users, but also developers, and for example KDE neon and Linux Mint are based on the Canonical system. In addition, right now there are two projects that have also chosen it as a base, one that of the JingPad A1 tablet and its JingOS and another for the desktop, companions of the previous ones who are working on cutefishOS.
CDE, short for Cutefish Desktop Environment, was released some time ago, so it was not very clear what CutefishOS, the full operating system, would be based on. At first it was thought that you would use Arch Linux or Manjaro, since there are already CD images with CDE, but browsing the forum we can confirm that the project will base your operating system on Ubuntu.
CutefishOS 0.4.1 is based on Ubuntu 21.04
Navigating the forum is necessary to understand what is happening, because there they said a week ago that «our ISO is based on Ubuntu 21.04. A beta version will be released recently. We are planning to build our own package repo", but in la web It says "CutefishOS built on Ubuntu", so we might think that there would be more than one ISO and each one would be based on an operating system. It will not be the case.
The operating system itself is very immature. It has an interface very similar to that of JingOS, project with which they collaborate, which in turn has a design that appears to be based on iPadOS. Many of the applications are their own, but others are from KDE. Right now, what is available is v0.4.1, so we can take a look at it, but not use it as the main system; not going too well.
If you are interested, CutefisOS 0.4.1 Beta Developer Edition is available at this link.