Desktop environments Archive

JWM (Joe's Window Manager) was quietly update to Version 2.1.0 at the end of September, making it the first update in over 4 years. I honestly have no idea what's changed - do we have a JVM user in here? Don't fail me guys and girls!

Kim Woelders just announced the release of e16-1.0.9. As always with recent e16 releases, we're looking at a number of bug fixes and minor changes, which keeps Enlightenment DR16 chugging along just fine.

So, yeah, it's been ten years in the making, including a number of rewrites, but the day has finally come: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which, surprisingly enough, form the foundation of, among other things, Enlightenment, have reached beta status. This is a major step towards the final release of Enlightenment DR17, which should hit before year's end.

Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP user interface. It is fast, feature rich, easy to configure, and easy to use. It is also free software, with contributions being made by programmers from around the world.

Only last week Samsung pushed out a press release announcing its new mobile operating system, named Bada. Little is known about this new operating system beyond the name of the project, but thanks to Phoronix, we know a little detail that might indicate what, exactly, Bada will be like. As it turns out, Samsung is sponsoring the Enlightenment project.

EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and a familiar look and feel. This is the second test release for the upcoming major 2.0 version. Notable changes are a new panel and XDG Desktop Menu support, a new bug report tool, and improved existing code. Release notes, download link and installation instructions can be found on the EDE homepage.

We're all pretty much versed in the worlds of GNOME, KDE, and to a lesser degree, Xfce, and while there are lots of alternatives, none of the smaller ones really seem to gain much traction beyond their fans. An exception is LXDE, a small and resource efficient desktop environment.

"samurai-x is a highly modular and configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is written in pure python utilising ctypes. samurai-x is targeted at people wishing to experiment with desktop programming and people who want more control over their desktop (without having to code in C)." Version 0.2 has been released recently.

"Scrotwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast."

"Mainstream Linux distributions typically default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these environments provide users with an intuitive and attractive desktop, as well as offering a large raft of multimedia software, games, administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, artwork, web development tools and more. However, these two desktops focus more on providing users with a modern computing environment with all the bells and whistles featured in Windows Vista, rather than minimising the amount of system resources they need. For users and developers who want to run an attractive Linux desktop on older hardware, netbooks, or mobile internet devices, neither KDE or GNOME may be a viable option, as they run too slowly on low spec machines (such as less than 256MB RAM and a 1 GHz processor). This article seeks to identify the best lean desktops for Linux, for users that have old or even ancient hardware."

The new 0.4 version of Etoile had just been released. Etoile intends to be an innovative, GNUstep-based, user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components. It is created with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications) and Components. 0.4 is a developer-targeted release on its way towards this goal. As a developer-focussed release, this predominantly consists of frameworks. A few demonstration applications are also included.

After 6 months of development and more than 1000 change sets, the final version of awesome 3.0 has been released. 'awesome' is a frame-work window manager, which also supports tiling window management. This major release brings a lot of new features. The whole configuration file is now write in the Lua language and use a simple API. This allows to modify and control every corner of the window manager. This version is based on XCB, a new low level library which communicate with the X server. Pango usage also enhances text rendering.

A window manager in GNU/Linux is a piece of software which controls placement and appearance of windows in a graphical user interface in X. All the WMs listed here can easily be obtained through your distribution's respective repositories.

The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.