Desktop News Archives

Enlightenment E19 is advancing its support for Wayland as an alternative to X.Org and it also has a rewritten compositor.

It's been less than one month since the release of Enlightenment E18, but already there are exciting changes landed for its follow on release. Pushed on Tuesday were many more interesting changes to Enlightenment's Git repository. The most important change was a huge window management and compositor rewrite.

For those that may have extra time this holiday season to devote to open-source tasks, the GIMP graphics program still has many features they're after and aren't yet up to their v2.10 release.

Enlightenment 0.17 was released one year ago as of this weekend and now the developers behind this very compelling lightweight window manager have released Enlightenment DR 0.18, the next major release.

As some additional exciting news on Friday night besides the SteamOS beta being out is that the second release candidate to Enlightenment 0.18 is now available.

Coming last summer to the Enlightenment project was EPhysics, a physics module for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries to do interesting desktop games or effects, but it's now been nuked from the Enlightenment code-base.

Terminology, the terminal emulator for the Enlightenment desktop built atop their EFL libraries, is up to version 0.4 and it's landed heavy with new features.

The TeamViewer remote access/viewer software popular for VNC-like tasks as well as online meetings, is now officially up to version 9. With TeamViewer 9 comes new features as well as QuickSupport for Linux.

The EFL 1.8 release for the Enlightenment project should be out next week and there's already plans for releasing EFL 1.9 in February!

The Lightworks non-linear video editing application for Linux has picked up a great number of new features in the latest Linux beta that's available for Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu-based distributions.

Glx-Dock, a unique lightweight interface for the Linux desktop and inspired by OS X to complement Unity, GNOME, KDE, and other desktop environments, is now up to version 3.3. With Glx-Dock 3.3 the core has been rewritten to use objects, there's better Cinnamon Desktop integration, and plenty of other features and changes.

For those not satisfied with the open-source Pidgin or Empathy multi-protocol chat programs on Linux, Cerulean Studios is finally bringing Trillian to Linux. A beta was announced today of Trillian for Linux but right now it's limited.

The Xubuntu team, the derivative of Ubuntu Linux focused around shipping the Xfce desktop environment, has decided against using XMir for their 13.10 release after extensive testing.

Developers behind the lightweight Qt-based Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt desktops met up at KDE's Akademy 2013 conference. During the annual KDE developer conference, the two lightweight desktops decided to merge their efforts around LXDE-Qt.

Xfce 4.12 still hasn't been released yet and it's running months behind schedule. Xfce 4.12 will be a major update to the lightweight desktop that's becoming an increasingly used alternative to Unity and the GNOME Shell. Here's an update on some of the completed features.

Last week at the SUSE offices in Nürnberg there was a meeting between developers of the KDE, GNOME, Unity, and Razor-qt desktop environments.

Development of the LightDM display manager is now in an awkward state by Canonical's announcement of developing -- and ultimately switching to -- the Mir Display Server rather than Wayland.

While Xfce 4.12 was scheduled to be released on 10 March, the release didn't happen and it looks like the release won't be coming anytime soon.

Canonical has begun posting videos of Mir in action. While Mir itself doesn't do much yet, a video by one of the Mir developers shows Unity running on Mir. But it's running Unity through an X Server via the "XMir" project.

The Linux desktop choices of Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, tends to pique people's interest. Linus has now shared he's switched back to using the GNOME 3.x desktop.

Shared earlier today were OpenGL game benchmarks under different Linux desktops. Now to complement those earlier results are 2D performance tests under Unity, KDE, GNOME Shell, Xfce, LXDE, and Razor-qt.

Razor-qt is the lightweight Qt-based desktop environment that's come around in mostly the past two years as a much more slim desktop alternative to KDE. It's similar in nature to Xfce but written in Qt rather than GTK. This Qt desktop environment is on initial approach for its next release and further out they are getting excited over Qt 5 and Wayland.

While all of the talk recently in the Linux desktop world is about GNOME 3.8, KDE 4.10, or the desktop forks like Consort and Cinnamon, the Xfce desktop continues moving along vigorously. The next major release, Xfce 4.12, is due out in mid-March.

The world didn't end yesterday and Enlightenment E17 was officially released.

Everything is set for the long-awaited Enlightenment E17 v1.0 release to happen this Friday, 21 December.

The Enlightenment project is out today with a new release ahead of the official E17 1.0 release expected on 21 December. With one week to go, the new E17 release is being called the "Lucky Rubber Ducky" by its developers.

While publishing this morning was a large Ubuntu 13.04 OpenGL desktop performance comparison using six desktop environments and five different GPU/driver configurations, to result in 30 different data points for multiple Linux games, also announced today were forthcoming Compiz performance improvements. To land soon will be a number of performance enhancements for the Compiz compositing window manager.

While it took twelve years to see its first alpha release, the Enlightenment E17 window manager is now certainly living up to the "release early, release often" philosophy. Alpha releases are being tagged every few days -- we're now up to three E17 alphas in the past week.

The rapid releases of Enlightenment E17 Alpha continue. Just two days after E17 Alpha 6, there is now a seventh alpha release with less than one month to go until the official E17 1.0 release.

It was just a few days ago that Enlightenment E17 Alpha 2 was released but there's already a third alpha of this window manager expected to finally debut next month after more than one decade of development.

An alpha release of Enlightenment's E17 window manager was released today after one decade in development.

Integrated Computer Solutions released Motif 2.3.4 this week and with the point release comes the availability of the X toolkit under the LGPL v2.1 license.

A big Enlightenment E17 snapshot was released, days ahead of their big announcement during LinuxCon EU 2012 concerning an official release of the window manager.

There's another new development snapshot out of Enlightenment's forthcoming E17 release.

While most of the Linux desktop talk these days is about Unity, KDE, and GNOME, advancing in a quiet but steadfast manner is Xfce. The next major release of Xfce, version 4.12, is due out in March. It's undecided at this time though whether Xfce 4.12 will use GTK2 or GTK3.

While there hasn't been a new release since February, like the Trinity KDE 3.5 fork, the Razor-qt desktop environment continues to be actively developed. Razor-qt 0.5.0 will be released soon.

The OpenGL ES 2.0 support branch has been merged into mainline Compiz. This allows the once-thriving compositing window manager to run on the PandaBoard ES and various other mobile/embedded devices that only support GLES for rendering.

The Xfce project on Saturday afternoon released Xfce 4.10 as the first major Xfce desktop feature release in about sixteen months.

GLX-Dock / Cairo-Dock, the popular open-source OpenGL dock available for the Linux desktop, has reached its 3.0 milestone with some significant changes.

For those unsatisfied with the state of GNOME 3.x Shell, Ubuntu's Unity interface, and other Linux desktop options, Xfce 4.10 is approaching with an official release planned for later this month.

Razor-Qt is a new Qt-based desktop environment for Linux systems.

In late 2009 we figured out Samsung has been sponsoring the development of Enlightenment, the stacking window manager popular with some Linux enthusiasts. Since then the Enlightenment project has been more open about the gratuity provided by Samsung, and this major electronics vendor keeps paying them. Enlightenment is used on some of their mobile devices. Separately, Enlightenment has found its way onto refrigerators. There's more good news today out of the Samsung-sponsored Enlightenment camp.

OpenBox, the window manager originally derived from Blackbox and is used by the LXDE desktop environment and other niche configurations, has just reached its version 3.5 milestone release.

Sam Spilsbury has just tagged Compiz 0.9.5 for release as the latest development milestone for this compositing window manager.

After a pre-releases came in November and then another in December, Xfce 4.8 has been officially released today.

It was barely a month ago that the first development snapshot of Xfce 4.8 arrived, but being released this Sunday is the second preview release of the forthcoming Xfce 4.8 desktop, expected to go gold in January.

While the GNOME developers are busy at work on GNOME 3.0 and the KDE developers are busy working on KDE SC 4.6 and changes that may lead to KDE5, the Xfce desktop environment is still out there and being developed.

Sam Spilsbury has just announced the release of Compiz 0.9.2 as the successor to Compiz 0.9.0, which was released in July of this year. We knew that Compiz 0.9.2 was on the way and that it would offer many improvements from new animations to plug-ins that would make you feel as though you are drunk or tripping by simulating hallucinogenic effects. Yes, really, but at least there's also useful changes like plug-ins for loading GLSL shaders for windows and GLSL shaders to be applied to an entire screen through an OpenGL Frame Buffer-Object.

KDE's KWin developers haven't been the only ones busy, but those working on Compiz have been active too and are currently preparing for the Compiz 0.9.2 release, which will succeed the belated Compiz 0.9 release that occurred back in July.

Martin Gräßlin, one of the KDE developers that works on the KWin window manager, when not working towards OpenGL 3.0 support for KWin in KDE SC 4.7 has been writing a draft specification for what he proposes as a unified specification for compositing window managers. Martin hopes for this to become a FreeDesktop.org specification and that KWin/Plasma, Compiz, and other compositing window managers would implement this common specification.