Desktop environments Archive

In short, Wio is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots which has a similar look and feel to Plan 9’s Rio desktop. It works by running each application in its own nested Wayland compositor, based on Cage – yet another wlroots-based Wayland compositor. I used Cage in last week’s RDP article, but here’s another cool use-case for it. The behavior this allows for (each window taking over its parent’s window, rather than spawning a new window) has been something I wanted to demonstrate on Wayland for a very long time. This is a good demonstration of how Wayland’s fundamentally different and conservative design allows for some interesting use-cases which aren’t possible at all on X11. It’s a very different approach to windowing than most of us are used to, but I find it strangely appealing.

Window Maker 0.95.8 has been released. It contains a number of changes related to window snapping and quite a number of other changes for what is supposedly a point release.

This is exactly what I've been wanting in this department: a straightforward, no-nonsense Qt desktop environment that doesn't shove touch nonsense in my face and, doesn't try to impose upon me a very specific way of working, and doesn't try to be everything to all people at all times.

ROSALabs has released 'Desktop Fresh', the latest version of its Linux desktop environment. Mandriva collaborated with ROSALabs in early 2012, but this desktop isn't Mandriva-specific. The new version boasts improved boot time, a social media app called TimeFrame, and an original launcher app called SimpleWelcome, all somewhat modified to accommodate tablet/phone interfaces.

In the final years of my high school career, more concerned with going out and drinking three times a week than with actually doing anything meaningful at my supposedly posh gymnasium, I rediscovered my love for computing - a love lost during the onset of aforementioned going out and drinking. Realising I would hit university soon, I saved up 2000 guilders, ordered the parts for a brand-new computer, and thanks to this then state-of-the-art computer, old flames were rekindled. Since this pun is burning a hole in my pocket - it was an enlightening experience.

"The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.5.13.1 of the Trinity Desktop Environment. The Trinity Desktop Environment is a complete software desktop environment designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software." Not the first time we mention TDE, but it's basically the continuation of KDE 3.x. There's a market for this.

EDE is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply put, a desktop should not get in your way. This is the final 2.0 release, a major rework. Summarizing previous alpha and beta releases, 2.0 is now fully FLTK powered (eFLTK is deprecated) and freedesktop.org friendly. Specificaly, this release adds a new notification daemon, replaces the old edewm with the pekwm window manager, fixes a lot of issues and memory leaks, and more. Grab the release and try it. You can also try ede netinstall, a single command that will download and compile EDE for you.

Gtk+ has GNOME on the one hand, and Xfce on the other. Qt, on the other hand, only has KDE - there's no lightweight, less encompassing alternative if KDE doesn't float your boat, but you'd still want a Qt desktop. Luckily for you, there's now Razor-qt, a small, lightweight and simple Qt desktop environment.

Calm window manager (mainly known for its shorthand name cwm) is a member of a once-powerful and now-declining family of minimalist X11 window managers. It is relatively unknown outside the OpenBSD community, but it deserves more notice.

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.

FVWM 2.6 has been released. "It's been almost five years since the last stable release of FVWM (2006) and almost ten years since the development version of FVWM (2.5.X) which became this latest stable release was started! A lot of hard work from many talented individuals has made this release possible."

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.

An effort to turn a normal windows installation into a chrome OS like operating system has come to fruition with its first release. The complete shell replacement that is available here stops the default desktop loading at boot time and instead replaces it with Google's Chrome browser (allowing the user to load the normal desktop later). Standby to browser times of 3 seconds have been reported.