Desktop environments Archive

Enlightenment 0.24 Alpha 1 is shipping with an improved screenshot module, support for external monitor backlight/brightness controls, an improved restart experience, a smoother start-up thanks to using an I/O pre-fetch thread, switching over to BlueZ 5 for Bluetooth, and various other changes. Enlightenment was never a massively popular piece of software, but it seems that it has really fallen by the wayside recently. I vividly remember how 15-20 years ago, Enlightement was what you loaded up if you wanted to show off what desktop Linux could do

The Trinity Desktop Environment, a fork of the KDE 3.x series, celebrates its tenth anniversary with a new maintenance release. R14.0.8 is the eighth maintenance release of the R14.0 series, and is built on and improves the previous R14.0.7 version.. Maintenance releases are intended to promptly bring bug fixes to users, while preserving overall stability through the avoidance of both major new features and major codebase re-factoring. Packages are available for Debian and Ubuntu.

NEXTSPACE is a desktop environment that brings a NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux. I try to keep the user experience as close as possible to the original NeXT’s OS. It is developed according to the “OpenStep User Interface Guidelines“. I want to create a fast, elegant, reliable, and easy to use desktop environment with maximum attention to user experience (usability) and visual maturity. In the future I would like to see it as a platform where applications will be running with a taste of NeXT’s OS. Core applications such as Login, Workspace, and Preferences are the base for future application development and examples of style and application integration methods. NEXTSPACE is not just a set of applications loosely integrated to each other. It is a core OS with frameworks, mouse cursors, fonts, colors, animations, and everything I think will help users to be effective and happy. KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and later MATE and Cinnamon have sucked up so much of the Linux desktop space that there’s very little room left for anything else. You’re either mainly a Qt desktop, or mainly a GTK+ desktop, and anything that isn’t based on either of those toolkits will either waste time recreating lots of wheels, or accept that half – or more – of your applications are Qt or GTK+-based, at which point the temptation to run one of the aforementioned desktop environments becomes quite strong. This project, while very welcome and having my full support and attention, will have a very hard time, but that’s not going to deter me from being hopeful against all odds. Reading through the documentation and descriptions, it does seem the developers have the right attitude. They’re not claiming to take on the other players – they just want to make something that appeals to and works for them.

After about a year of development, the MATE Desktop team have finally released MATE 1.24. A big thank you to all contributors who helped to make this happen. This release contains plenty of new features, bug-fixes, and general improvements. That’s an impressive list. I prefer Cinnamon and GNOME 3 (after lots of tweaking!) over MATE, but I’m glad MATE exists as a no-nonsense, relatively conservative continuation of GNOME 2.

In short, Wio is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots which has a similar look and feel to Plan 9’s Rio desktop. It works by running each application in its own nested Wayland compositor, based on Cage – yet another wlroots-based Wayland compositor. I used Cage in last week’s RDP article, but here’s another cool use-case for it. The behavior this allows for (each window taking over its parent’s window, rather than spawning a new window) has been something I wanted to demonstrate on Wayland for a very long time. This is a good demonstration of how Wayland’s fundamentally different and conservative design allows for some interesting use-cases which aren’t possible at all on X11. It’s a very different approach to windowing than most of us are used to, but I find it strangely appealing.

Window Maker 0.95.8 has been released. It contains a number of changes related to window snapping and quite a number of other changes for what is supposedly a point release.

This is exactly what I've been wanting in this department: a straightforward, no-nonsense Qt desktop environment that doesn't shove touch nonsense in my face and, doesn't try to impose upon me a very specific way of working, and doesn't try to be everything to all people at all times.

ROSALabs has released 'Desktop Fresh', the latest version of its Linux desktop environment. Mandriva collaborated with ROSALabs in early 2012, but this desktop isn't Mandriva-specific. The new version boasts improved boot time, a social media app called TimeFrame, and an original launcher app called SimpleWelcome, all somewhat modified to accommodate tablet/phone interfaces.

In the final years of my high school career, more concerned with going out and drinking three times a week than with actually doing anything meaningful at my supposedly posh gymnasium, I rediscovered my love for computing - a love lost during the onset of aforementioned going out and drinking. Realising I would hit university soon, I saved up 2000 guilders, ordered the parts for a brand-new computer, and thanks to this then state-of-the-art computer, old flames were rekindled. Since this pun is burning a hole in my pocket - it was an enlightening experience.

"The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.5.13.1 of the Trinity Desktop Environment. The Trinity Desktop Environment is a complete software desktop environment designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software." Not the first time we mention TDE, but it's basically the continuation of KDE 3.x. There's a market for this.

EDE is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply put, a desktop should not get in your way. This is the final 2.0 release, a major rework. Summarizing previous alpha and beta releases, 2.0 is now fully FLTK powered (eFLTK is deprecated) and freedesktop.org friendly. Specificaly, this release adds a new notification daemon, replaces the old edewm with the pekwm window manager, fixes a lot of issues and memory leaks, and more. Grab the release and try it. You can also try ede netinstall, a single command that will download and compile EDE for you.

Gtk+ has GNOME on the one hand, and Xfce on the other. Qt, on the other hand, only has KDE - there's no lightweight, less encompassing alternative if KDE doesn't float your boat, but you'd still want a Qt desktop. Luckily for you, there's now Razor-qt, a small, lightweight and simple Qt desktop environment.

Calm window manager (mainly known for its shorthand name cwm) is a member of a once-powerful and now-declining family of minimalist X11 window managers. It is relatively unknown outside the OpenBSD community, but it deserves more notice.