The developers at System76 working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment catering to their in-house, Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux distribution have provided their latest monthly status update on the desktop effort.
Desktop News Archives
461 Desktop open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
System76 software engineers continue working heavily on their COSMIC desktop that is Rust-written and to debut with their Pop!_OS 24.04 release later this year.
LXQt 2.0 is now available for this lightweight desktop environment that has now been ported to the Qt 6.6+ toolkit. Additionally, much of the LXQt components are ready to be used under Wayland compositors.
System76 had been planning an initial alpha release of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to debut at the end of Q1 (March), but now they are delaying the first alpha to May for allowing time to wrap up feature work on their new desktop apps.
The lightweight LXQt desktop environment is fully ready to take on the Wayland world.
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.
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.
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.
Xfce developers have updated their Wayland roadmap this week to reflect their latest plans around the Xfce 4.20 release.
With a goal of delivering a Wayland-only Budgie 10 desktop release later in 2024, Budgie 10.9 debuted today with the early-stage porting work to Wayland.
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.
The System76 crew has put out a new blog post outlining the work ahead toward their upcoming alpha release of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment and in turn the Pop!_OS 24.04 release expected to happen "over the summer".
It's been two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.25 and now just ahead of Christmas there is Enlightenment 0.26 released by Carsten Haitzler.
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.
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.
The Linux Mint crew led by Clement Lefebvre released Cinnamon 6.0 today as the latest version of their customized desktop stack.
The crew at System76 published a US Thanksgiving themed status update to their work on the open-source, Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment that will soon be powering their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution.
LXQt 1.4 debuted today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Qt desktop environment that was formed years ago as the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects.
System76 engineers working on their COSMIC desktop environment for their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution continue to be quite busy working on this Rust-written desktop code.
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.
XDG-Desktop-Portal as the portal front-end for Flatpaks is out with a new development release that brings accent color support to sandboxed desktop apps as well as other new features.
Budgie 10.8 is out today as the newest feature release for this Linux desktop environment.
While KDE developers are busy working on Plasma 6, System76's software developers are busy working on their new Rust-based "COSMIC" desktop environment. System76 on Friday published a new blog post outlining their efforts in recent weeks.
For those that have fond memories of the NeXTSTEP days and in particular its graphical user interface during the pre-Apple times, Window Maker 0.96 was released this weekend for that X11 window manager inspired by the NeXTSTEP GUI.
System76 developers working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop have recently been improving a number of areas of this open-source desktop.
HarfBuzz 8.0 was released on Saturday as the newest feature release for this text shaping library used by many open-source software projects from GUI toolkits to desktop environments and other prominent applications.
SDDM as the QML-based X11 and Wayland display manager commonly used on KDE systems and elsewhere is finally out with a new release.
A new version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" is now available, a modern Linux desktop that continues to mimic the look and feel of the old CDE Unix desktop environment.
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.
For fans of the lightweight IceWM X11 window manager, released on Sunday was IceWM 3.4 as the newest feature release.
A status update was posted this week around xfwm4-wayland with the Xfce Wayland compositor code.
The folks at System76 have published a new blog post that summarizes their software progress over the course of April on further advancing their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment.
Last week System76 released System76-Scheduler 2.0 as their Rust-written Linux desktop scheduler that serves as a user-space daemon to dynamically manage process priorities to favor performance and responsiveness. That's now been succeeded by a v2.0.1 update with a few more features and improvements.
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.
A redesigned version of the Flathub website has launched for this weekend's Linux App Summit. Flathub remains the centralized website for exploring and finding new Flatpak sandboxed Linux apps.
LXQt 1.3 was just released as the newest version of this lightweight Qt-based desktop environment.
In addition to working on their in-house Linux laptop prototype and other hardware endeavors, System76 continues being quite busy working on their COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.
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.
Budgie 10.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source desktop environment that was originally developed as part of the Solus Linux distribution.
For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's, IceWM 3.3.1 was released today as the first (minor) release of 2023.
It's been a while since last having a fresh look at the Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome performance on the Linux desktop, but with a slow Linux/open-source news weekend, here are some fresh numbers with their latest browser releases.
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.
After nearly two years of development the Xfce 4.18 desktop environment was released today with a wide assortment of improvements.
The lightweight Xfce 4.18 desktop is planning to release in two weeks while out now is the Xfce 4.18 Pre2 development milestone.
LXQt 1.2 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this lightweight, open-source desktop environment that currently targets the Qt 5.15 LTS toolkit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NsCDE 2.2 has been released as the newest feature version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" that takes its inspiration from the CDE desktop once common with Unix workstations.
461 Desktop news articles published on Phoronix.