Desktop News Archives


458 Desktop open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.

SDDM 0.21 Display Manager Released With Better Wayland Support, Qt6 Fixes
SDDM 0.21 Display Manager Released With Better Wayland Support, Qt6 Fixes

Released last June was the SDDM 0.20 display manager with experimental Wayland support and other enhancements after being in development for three years. Out this morning is SDDM 0.21 as another step toward SDDM 1.0 with improved Wayland support and other enhancements to this Qt-tooled display manager.

26 February 2024 - SDDM 0.21 Display Manager - 44 Comments
Iced Toolkit For Rust GUIs Reaches v0.12 With New Features
Iced Toolkit For Rust GUIs Reaches v0.12 With New Features

Iced is the Rust GUI library that's been gaining quite a lot of interest by Rust developers for creating cross-platform user interfaces. Iced is also what's being used by the Pop!_OS COSMIC desktop environment. Iced v0.12 released yesterday as the first new release for this GUI toolkit since last July.

16 February 2024 - Iced v0.12 - 23 Comments
System76's COSMIC Desktop Nearing Alpha Release
System76's COSMIC Desktop Nearing Alpha Release

In a Valentine's Day blog post, System76 has outlined how they are nearing the release of their alpha build of the COSMIC desktop environment that they have been developing as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

14 February 2024 - COSMIC Alpha - 67 Comments
The Budgie Desktop Hopes To Do A Wayland-Only Release This Year
The Budgie Desktop Hopes To Do A Wayland-Only Release This Year

The Budgie desktop that started off as the desktop project within the Solus Linux space has written a lengthy blog post outlining their highlights for 2023 as well as providing a glimpse ahead for 2024. The Budgie desktop is working eagerly on Wayland and XWayland support and hope to advance enough this year to deliver a Wayland-only release.

27 January 2024 - Budgie On Wayland - 14 Comments
Arcan Display Framework Receives Funding As Innovative Wayland Alternative
Arcan Display Framework Receives Funding As Innovative Wayland Alternative

While much of the focus by Linux desktops as we roll into 2024 is polishing off their Wayland support, there does exist a rather innovative display server out there that's been in the works for years: Arcan. Arcan is the open-source project built atop a game engine and provides a display server paired with a real-time multimedia framework for audio and video. Arcan can be used from embedded purposes through full desktop solutions and can also interact with Wayland and X11 as well as embracing VR. Arcan 0.6.3 was released today along with the announcement that they've taken on some funding.

19 December 2023 - Arcan 0.6.3 - 96 Comments
Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor & Multi-Window Support
Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor & Multi-Window Support

While the holidays are quickly approaching, the System76 developers working on their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution and new Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment haven't been losing focus. December has been another busy month so far as they continue crafting this new modern desktop environment.

15 December 2023 - COSMIC Enhancements - 38 Comments
System76's COSMIC Desktop Adds New Window-Swapping Mode, Dynamic Settings
System76's COSMIC Desktop Adds New Window-Swapping Mode, Dynamic Settings

In addition to KDE Plasma 6.0, another exciting desktop milestone we can look forward to in 2024 is the COSMIC desktop from System76 when they end up releasing the next Pop!_OS based upon Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The Pop!_OS / COSMIC developers continue making great progress on their Rust-written desktop environment.

28 September 2023 - COSMIC DE - 35 Comments
System76's COSMIC Desktop Enhancing Its Auto-Tiling
System76's COSMIC Desktop Enhancing Its Auto-Tiling

As part of Linux hardware vendor System76's ongoing work around their COSMIC desktop for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution, recently their development team has been working on enhancing the automatic window tiling capabilities.

15 June 2023 - Tiling Enhancements - 15 Comments
Red Hat's HDR Hackfest Sounds Like It Was A Success
Red Hat's HDR Hackfest Sounds Like It Was A Success

Red Hat organized an HDR hackfest to bring together all the Linux desktop stakeholders around the desktop, display drivers, and related infrastructure for helping to make progress on High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support. The event took place last week at Red Hat's Brno office in the Czech Republic and sounds like it was quite a success.

1 May 2023 - HDR Hackfest - 26 Comments
System76 Adding XWayland Support & Other Improvements To Its COSMIC DE
System76 Adding XWayland Support & Other Improvements To Its COSMIC DE

In addition to new hardware from Colorado-based Linux laptop/desktop retailer System76, this year we can look forward to more work on their COSMIC desktop environment being developed as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Already for kicking off 2023 they have made a number of strides in their COSMIC DE development.

31 January 2023 - System76 COSMIC DE - 64 Comments
Red Hat Planning A Hackfest To Further Advance HDR Support On The Linux Desktop
Red Hat Planning A Hackfest To Further Advance HDR Support On The Linux Desktop

Red Hat has been among the key Linux stakeholders working for years toward the ultimate goal of ensuring the Linux desktop will have suitable High Dynamic Range (HDR) support in place. They are working to organize a hackfest this year to further the progress being made on HDR application support on the GNOME desktop as well as associated open-source graphics driver infrastructure.

4 January 2023 - Linux HDR Desktop - 62 Comments
Arcan Project Announces The Modern & Radically Different Cat9 Shell
Arcan Project Announces The Modern & Radically Different Cat9 Shell

The Arcan project that started out as a display server built atop a game engine and with time has introduced many features and experimenting with original approaches to longstanding Linux desktop/display shortcomings, has announced their Cat9 shell. This modern terminal has been in development for nearly six years while now the developers are finally confident in announcing this initiative.

17 October 2022 - Cat9 Shell - 14 Comments
System76's Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop To Make Use Of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK
System76's Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop To Make Use Of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK

System76 has been developing their own COSMIC desktop as the next evolution for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu base. Interestingly with this big COSMIC desktop undertaking, which is being written in the Rust programming language, they have decided to shift away from using the GTK toolkit to instead make use of Iced-Rs as a Rust-native, multi-platform graphical toolkit.

1 October 2022 - Iced-Rs For COSMIC Desktop - 120 Comments
Linux's Display Brightness/Backlight Interface Is Finally Being Overhauled

Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been involved with many great Linux desktop/laptop hardware improvements over the years for work that would have otherwise likely gone unaddressed. One of the initiatives he has been focusing on recently that has long been a sore point for Linux laptops has been the user-space backlight/brightness interface. This week at Linux Plumbers Conference was a presentation on this effort that has long been ripe for improvement.

17 September 2022 - Backlight User-Space API - 36 Comments
Compiz 0.9.14.2 Released After Two Years
Compiz 0.9.14.2 Released After Two Years

While the Compiz compositing window manager isn't as popular as it was during its early days of adding animated "bling" to the Linux desktop or when it was in use by Ubuntu, there still are some users having fun with it and a handful of contributors making some maintenance and other progress to it.

24 August 2022 - Compiz 0.9.14.2 - 47 Comments

458 Desktop news articles published on Phoronix.