Desktop News Archives

Added over a year ago to the mainline Linux kernel was the high resolution mouse wheel scrolling support. While the support landed on kernel-side for to provide "buttery smooth" wheel scrolling, the work has yet to be wrapped up on the user-space side for making this a reality on the Linux desktop.

Complementing the Firefox 73 vs. 74 vs. 75 Beta benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux from AMD Ryzen this week, here are those numbers side-by-side with the Google Chrome 80 web-browser for putting the performance into more perspective.

While GIMP 3.0 remains elusive as the long overdue GTK3 port of this leading open-source image manipulation program, the GIMP 2.10 stable series continues seeing a lot of decent improvements in their subsequent point releases. GIMP 2.10.18 is out today following a botched GIMP 2.10.16 release.

If the likes of GIMP and Krita aren't satisfying your digital drawing/painting needs, MyPaint 2.0 has finally been released as a big update to this simplicity-minded, cross-platform and open-source program.

Several months ago we learned of the Xfce 4.16 plans to drop GTK2 support and explore client-side decoration goals among other changes for this lightweight desktop environment release expected in late 2020.

It's 2020 and GIMP remains one of the last holdouts for a major software application still relying upon the GTK2 tool-kit even with GTK4 potentially coming around the end of the calendar year. Fortunately, at least, the GIMP 2.99.x development releases on the path to the GTK3-based GIMP 3.0 should be starting up soon.

Latte Dock, the dock designed for KDE Plasma desktops, is working on a v0.10 feature update due out next summer while out this weekend is the first development release.

On Friday I published two years worth of Mozilla Firefox benchmarks in re-testing every browser release from Firefox 57 through Firefox 71 stable as well as the latest beta/alpha releases. One of the questions that came out of that was seeing the current Chrome performance on Linux against Firefox, so here are some fresh numbers there.

The W3C put out an interesting status update this week on web games technologies and the various standardization efforts at play.

Over a decade ago all the Linux desktop rage was over the likes of Compiz, Beryl, Compiz Fusion, and the like... Ah the memories. But to much surprise, Compiz saw a new release today. Compiz 0.9.14.1 isn't the most exciting update, but the project is still alive.

The inaugural release of Glimpse is now available, the fork born out of calls for renaming The GIMP project to something not considered offensive.

While we long to finally see GIMP 3.0, GIMP 2.10.14 is out as the newest stable update for this leading open-source image manipulation program.

Cleaning up of the Pango layout engine library as some much needed housekeeping by GNOME developers resulted in shifting to the Harfbuzz library for font loading. That quietly meant dropping support for bitmap fonts from Pango, which is now reaching Linux desktop users when upgrading to the Pango 1.44 stable release.

Prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has shared more of the group's plans for the planned 2020 release of Xfce 4.16.

As a change for next year's Xfce 4.16, the xfce4-panel now exposes a preferences option for those preferring "dark modes" of GTK themes.

Following last month's release of Xfce 4.14 that transitioned from GTK2 to GTK3 as its tool-kit, old remnants of GTK2 support are now being nuked.

While PipeWire may be seeing a lot of investment by Red Hat for improving audio/video streams on Linux, PulseAudio isn't letting up yet as the de facto Linux desktop sound server. Quietly released last week was PulseAudio 13.0 as the newest feature update and their first big update in some fifteen months.

It has been almost two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.22 while surprising E23 has now surfaced.

With Xfce 4.14 having finally been released last week following a four year development cycle, prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has begun talking about the now-started Xfce 4.16 development cycle.

After more than four years in development there is finally the release of Xfce 4.14.

With this week's release of the Chrome 76 web browser, here are some fresh benchmarks of that latest Google web browser release compared to Firefox 68 on Ubuntu Linux.

The MATE desktop environment is becoming usable on Wayland thanks to its support being provided by the Mir display stack.

Xfce 4.12 was released in February 2015 while finally getting ready to succeed that is the long talked about Xfce 4.14 that is expected to ship this month.

Released last week was Deepin 15.11 with various desktop improvements for this popular third-party desktop option. This desktop option could be on its way to Fedora 31's package repository to replace the existing Deepin 5.9 packaging.

The second preview release of the long-awaited Xfce 4.14 is now available for testing ahead of its official debut later this summer.

While it doesn't appear to be an official part of Xfce at least at this time, Xfway is a Wayland compositor inspired by Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager.

The GTK3-ported Xfce 4.14 might see its long-awaited official release in the near future. In preparing for a hopeful August debut, the Xfce 4.14 pre-release is now available.

Xfce's Xfdesktop 4.13.4 was released on Friday as the newest stepping stone on the long and winding journey towards Xfce 4.14.

A few days ago I posted some Chrome vs. Firefox benchmarks using the latest Linux builds. Some readers suggested Firefox could be more competitive if forcing WebRender usage and/or moving to the latest nightly builds, so here are some complementary data sets looking at such combinations.

There still is no sign of Xfce 4.14, but this week marked the release of a big update to Xfce's screensaver component.

Given the recent releases of Chrome 73 and Firefox 66, here are some fresh tests of these latest browsers on Linux under a variety of popular browser benchmarks.

MATE 1.22 is now available as the latest feature update for this fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components.

Trinity Desktop R14.0.6 is being prepared as the latest update to this fork of the KDE 3 package set that continues providing bug fixes and maintenance for those still wanting to live on the KDE3 experience in 2019.

Raptor Computing Systems spent a lot of time last year working on Chrome's PPC64LE support to enable Google's web browser to run on the latest IBM POWER processors. Google was sitting on these patches without any action for months but finally they are beginning to be accepted upstream.

One of the latest feature additions for the Xfce desktop is support for the colord system service for managing/using color profiles for output devices (displays).

While Ubuntu may no longer be using Compiz by default as the compositing window manager, the Compiz project is still alive as marked by today's Compiz 0.9.14.0 release.

The Electron software framework that allows creating desktop GUI application interfaces using JavaScript and relies upon a bundled Chromium+Node.js run-time is notorious among most Linux desktop users for being resource heavy, not integrating well with most desktops, and generally being despised. For those that are fond of using web standards for creating desktop GUIs, now there is a way to create desktop application front-ends using HTML5 and Golang but with less baggage.

Over two years since the unveiling of the Awesome 4.0 window manager and one and a half years since the Awesome 4.2 release, out today is Awesome 4.3 for this X11 window manager.

There is a new version of the Catfish search utility, which is GTK3 based and part of the Xfce project, but works on other desktop systems as a Linux/Unix system search tool as well.

The LXQt team has announced version 0.14.0 of their lightweight Qt5-powered Linux desktop environment.

Inkscape on Thursday announced their 0.92.4 release that brought many stability and bug fixes but also some performance improvements and other enhancements. Most exciting though is the debut of Inkscape 1.0 alpha.

Entangle is the long-standing open-source software that allows you to control DSLR cameras from Linux. With various Nikon and Canon DSLRs, among others, it's possible to view a live preview, automatically download images, and snap pictures all over the USB connection to the camera.

At the end of 2018, Canonical's Alan Pope shared the most popular Snap packages for 2018. Now there's a similar list out of the folks maintaining Flathub for Flatpak packages. The list of popular applications is quite different between these app sandboxing/distribution means.

The Xfce 4.14 remains long overdue for release but with Xfce4-Panel 4.13.4 being released on New Year's Day gives us hope we could see this long-awaited desktop environment out in 2019.

Just in time for managing and enhancing any holiday photos, Darktable 2.6.0 was released this Christmas Eve as the latest feature release for this leading open-source RAW photography workflow software.

The latest feature on deck for the long overdue Xfce 4.14 desktop update is support for the RandR primary display/output functionality.

Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment derived from GNOME/GTK components has tagged its v4.0.0 release in source and is already beginning to appear in distribution repositories from the likes of Manjaro.

As a new alternative over XScreenSaver or using other desktop environments' screensaver functionality, xfce4-screensaver has out its first release albeit of alpha quality.

Linux developer Simon Peter who has spent years working on application standards like AppImage and Klik recently presented on what he believes are the 2018 Desktop Linux Platform Issues and the unfortunate continually moving target of "the year of the Linux desktop" that never materializes.

A new release of xfce4-settings is out as another component update in the long road to Xfce 4.14.