Desktop environments Archive
Budgie has fallen a bit by the wayside in recent years, but it’s still in development and making steady progress. The project’s just released Budgie 10.10, the final release in the 10.x series which also marks the end of the transition to Wayland. Budgie 10.10 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, marking our first release to migrate Budgie from X11 to Wayland. This release series brings to a close just over a decade of Budgie 10 development; we are formally putting Budgie 10 into maintenance mode to focus our efforts on Budgie 11. ↫ Joshua Strobl Budgie is taking a very interesting approach for its move to Wayland; instead of writing every single component of their desktop environment from scratch or porting their X11 tools, the project opted to reuse and implement a ton of established, well-tested, and popular Wayland tools like swaybg, swayidle, labwc, and so on. This obviously saves on development time, but also ensures the transition to Wayland is relatively smooth. Things like the panel, applets, the Budgie Control Center, and so on, have been updated or rewritten. There’s also some new features, as well as a ton of bug fixes and smaller improvements. As noted, this release marks the end of the road for the 10.x series, with development now shifting to Budgie 11. Upcoming releases of major distributions will have Budgie 10.10 in their repositories.
IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released a new version, bumping the version number to 4.0.0. This release brings a big update to the alt+tab feature. The Alt+Tab window switcher can now handle large numbers of application windows in both horizontal and in vertical mode. Type the first letter of an application class name in Alt+Tab, to select the next instance window of that application class. Select an application by pressing one of the number keys. Select an application by mouse in Alt+Tab in horizontal mode. Support navigating the quick switch with all navigation keys. Press the menu button on Alt+Tab to open the system menu. QuickSwitchPreview is a new mode to preview applications. These previews are updated while the quick switch is active. ↫ IceWM 4.0 release notes On top of this major set of improvements to alt+tab, there’s the usual list of bug fixes and small changes, as well as a bunch if updated translations.
For years, link building felt like a numbers game. Agencies poured effort into generating as many backlinks as possible, hoping the sheer volume would push rankings upward. But as search enters a fully AI-driven era, that mindset no longer holds up. The landscape is shifting fast, and the winners in 2025 are the agencies that understand authority has become a matter of quality, context, and credibility, not link counts. AI-powered search now prioritizes brands that show up consistently in trusted conversations across the web. Weak links from irrelevant blogs don’t move the needle—and in some cases, they undermine trust. This change has pushed agencies to move away from volume-based link campaigns and gravitate toward partners who can deliver a genuine quality backlink service that reinforces a brand’s identity across authoritative sources. AI Overviews Elevated the Importance of Context The evolution of AI Overviews, conversational answers, and knowledge-graph-driven evaluations dramatically changed how search engines measure trust. Today’s systems don’t reward random backlinks. They reward contextual relevance, consistent mentions, and credible editorial presence. Instead of scanning for keyword-heavy anchor text, AI systems scan for patterns in how a brand is positioned across the web. If a link sits on a site with no topical relevance or editorial depth, generative engines simply ignore it. But when a brand appears in a well-written article on a publication that already has authority in that niche, the impact is dramatically different. That placement contributes to the brand’s entity profile, strengthens its association with important topics, and increases the chance of being cited or surfaced in AI-generated summaries. This is exactly why agencies are walking away from quantity-first link providers and embracing curated placements backed by real editorial standards. Client Expectations Have Evolved—They Want Meaningful Mentions Today’s clients know what good off-page SEO looks like. They don’t ask for “more links”—they ask where those links appeared, who wrote them, and whether those sites carry real authority. When monthly reports show links from low-quality domains, clients push back harder than ever. But when reports include recognized publishers, niche-relevant sites, or thought-leadership-style contributions, clients feel that value instantly. This shift in expectations is the reason so many agencies now rely on specialized partners who focus exclusively on quality. Instead of delivering a bundle of generic links, they prioritize relevance, readership, and editorial credibility. This heightened demand for quality has given rise to a new standard—one where every placement must reinforce trust, not dilute it. Entity-First SEO Made Quality Non-Negotiable As generative search systems rely more heavily on entity understanding, agencies are rethinking their entire off-page strategy. Entity-first SEO demands consistency. A brand must be described similarly across multiple contexts so that AI systems can clearly identify what it does, who it serves, and why it matters. High-quality placements accomplish this effortlessly because well-written articles create natural opportunities to reinforce brand identity. Poor-quality backlinks from random sites do the opposite—they introduce noise. A handful of strong editorial placements can accelerate a brand’s entity development in a way dozens of weaker links never could. This is why agencies are investing their budgets in fewer, better links rather than spreading it thin across low-impact sources. Scaling Quality Internally Is Hard—Partners Make It Possible Most agencies would love to build everything in-house—outreach, writing, editing, and publisher relationships. But doing so at scale is nearly impossible without dramatically increasing headcount. Quality link building requires real prospecting, personalized outreach, credible content, editorial approvals, and continuous quality checks. It’s no surprise that agencies are increasingly turning to white label blogger outreach partners who specialize in handling this work reliably and consistently. These partners already have the systems, relationships, and processes needed to deliver placement-ready content for any niche. With a trusted white-label partner, agencies can scale output without sacrificing quality. They maintain the client relationship, the strategy, and the reporting—but outsource the labor-intensive part of link acquisition to experts who focus on it exclusively. Real Editorial Links Offer Long-Term Stability One of the biggest advantages of high-quality backlinks is stability. Every major algorithm update over the last few years has punished thin, irrelevant, or manipulative link patterns. Sites dependent on low-quality backlinks see massive volatility. Meanwhile, brands built on real editorial links remain steady—or even improve—after updates. This pattern continues as AI becomes more central to the ranking process. Quality links align naturally with what AI considers trustworthy. They tell search engines, “This brand belongs in the conversation,” which is something no volume-based link strategy can replicate. Agencies now recognize that quality links are an investment in long-term resilience—not just short-term ranking boosts. Compounding Authority Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage Quality backlinks don’t just help a brand rank—they build momentum. A presence on credible sites increases the likelihood of co-citations, unlinked mentions, and secondary references. This creates a compounding effect, where each placement strengthens the next. Over time, a brand that consistently earns editorial links becomes more influential across its niche. It appears more often in AI-driven summaries. It becomes more familiar to search engines. It becomes easier for Google to categorize, understand, and trust. This compounding authority is quickly becoming the main competitive edge agencies can offer clients—especially in markets where competitors rely on outdated link tactics. Link Quality Isn’t a Trend—It’s the New Standard The changes we’re seeing in 2025 aren’t temporary. They’re not a passing trend or a response to a single algorithm update. They’re a reflection of a fundamental shift in how search engines interpret trust and how brands build influence online. Agencies that once relied on high-volume link-building playbooks are now rethinking everything. They’re choosing partners who offer a true quality backlink service. They’re leaning on white label blogger outreach to scale without compromising standards. They’re aligning off-page SEO with entity-first strategies that prepare clients for an AI-driven future. Authority is no longer something you can fake or accelerate with shortcuts. It’s something you build consistently, patiently, and strategically through high-quality, relevant, editorially integrated backlinks. And in 2025, that’s the difference between agencies that merely keep up—and agencies that lead.
System76, creator of Pop!_OS and prominent Linux OEM, has just announced the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS – normally not something I particularly care about, but in this case, it comes with the first stable release of COSMIC Desktop. COSMIC is a brand new desktop environment by System76, written in Rust, and after quite some time in development, it’s now out in the wild as a stable release. Today is special not only in that it’s the culmination of over three years of work, but even more so in that System76 has built a complete desktop environment for the open source community. We’re proud of this contribution to the open source ecosystem. COSMIC is built on the ethos that the best open source projects enable people to not only use them, but to build with them. COSMIC is modular and composable. It’s the flagship experience for Pop!_OS in its own way, and can be adapted by anyone that wants to build their own unique user experience for Linux. ↫ Carl Richell You don’t need to run Pop!_OS to try out COSMIC, as it’s already available on a variety of other distributions (although it may take a bit for this stable version to land in the respective repositories).
So my love for the Common Desktop Environment isn’t exactly a secret, so let’s talk about the project’s latest release, CDE 2.5.3, released a few days ago. As the version number suggests, this first new version in two years is a rather minor release, containing only a few bug fixes. For instance, CDE’s window manager dtwm picked up support for more mouse buttons, its file manager dtfile now uses sh to find files instead of ksh, and a few more of these rather minor, but welcome, changes and bugfixes. Ever since CDE was released as open source over thirteen years ago, and while considerable work has been done to make it build, install, and run on modern platforms, that’s kind of where the steam ran out. CDE isn’t being actively developed to build upon its strengths and add new and welcome features and conveniences, but is instead kept in a sort of buildable stasis. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this – it keeps CDE accessible on modern platforms, and that’s a huge amount of work that deserves respect and gratitude – but it’d be nice if we lived in a world where there was enough interest (and time and money) to have people work on actually improving it. Of course, the reality is that there’d be very little interest in such an improved CDE, and that’s exactly why it isn’t happening. On top op the current work the CDE team is doing, you’d need to not only develop new features, but also improve the Motif toolkit to make such new features possible, and make sure such improvements don’t break anything else. With such an old codebase, that can’t possible be an easy task. Still, I will continue to daydream of a slightly more modernised CDE with some additional niceties we’ve come to expect over the past 30 years, even if I know full well it’s futile.
LXQt, the other Qt desktop environment, released version 2.3.0. This new version comes roughly six months after 2.2.0, and continues the project’s adoption of Wayland. The enhancement of Wayland support has been continued, especially in LXQt Panel, whose Desktop Switcher is now enabled for Labwc, Niri, …. It is also equipped with a backend specifically for Wayfire. In addition, the Custom Command plugin is made more flexible, regardless of Wayland and X11. ↫ LXQt 2.3.0 release announcement The screenshot utility has been improved as well, and lxqt-qdbus has been added to lxqt-wayland-session to make qdbus commands easier to use with all kinds of Wayland compositors.
Another small release for the IceWM window manager – one of the staples of the open source world. IceWM 3.9.0 seems focused mostly on cursor-related changes, as it adds libXcursor as an alternative to XPM cursors. This means IceWM is no longer dependent on libXpm, and gains the benefits that come with Xcursor. There’s the usual few bugfixes and translation updates as well.
It’s not every day you stumble upon an X11 desktop environment you’ve never hard of, but today’s one of those days. The Orbitiny Desktop Environment is a one-person project, consisting of an entirely custom desktop environment written in Qt. Version 1.0 Pilot 4 was just released. Built from the ground up using Qt and coded in C++, Orbitiny Desktop is a new, 100% portable, innovative and traditional but modern looking desktop environment for Linux. Innovative because it has features not seen in any other desktop environment before while keeping traditional aspects of computing alive (desktop icons, menus etc). Portable because you can run it on any distro and on any live CD and that’s because everything gets saved inside the directory that gets created when the archive is extracted (this can be changed so that the settings go to $HOME/.config/orbitiny). ↫ Orbitiny Desktop Environment Gitea page It’s got all the usual amenities like a desktop, panels, and so on, and a custom file manager. It’s also replete with a ton of small features that you don’t see very often, like full mouse gesture support on the desktop and a device manager that can enable/disable devices without blacklisting kernel modules. When you cut or copy a file, its icon will get a little emblem to indicate it’s on the clipboard, you can append and prepend files using simple drag-and-drop operations, you can set individual desktop directories for each virtual desktop, and much more. Now, it’s technically not a full desktop environment, because it doesn’t have things like a session manager, power manager, various hardware configuration panels, and so on, but it can be run on top of existing desktop environments. While it has basic Wayland support, not all components work there, so X11 is the main focus for now. Considering it’s a one-person project, you can’t expect a bug or issue-free experience, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less damn impressive. I honestly feel like there’s something valuable and interesting here, and I’d love for more people to get involved to see where this can go. There’s clearly a ton of love and dedication here, and the various unique features clearly set it apart from everything else. If you have the skills, consider helping out.
IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released version 3.8.0, with some small tweaks, bug fixes, and changes. The theme menu now loads faster, the processor and memory graphs use less processor cycles, among other small tidbits.
Wayland this, Liquid Glass that – but what if you just want a nice, comforting text-based environment? Sure, you can just boot straight into a terminal, or perhaps get fancy about it with Screen or whatever, but what if you want a text-based environment, but don’t want to give up windows, menus, your mouse? How about a graphical user interface made up entirely of text? It looks exactly like what you’d think this would look like, and I find it absolutely fascinating. I’m not entirely sure how usable it is or who or what use case it’s optimised for, but I adore the dedication to the cause. It works on both Linux and FreeBSD, and most likely other systems as well.
Fvwm3, the venerable, solid, configurable, no-nonsense window manager for X, has been updated: fvwm3 1.1.3 has been released. While the version number indicates that this is a minor release, there’s one reason why 1.1.3 is actually a much bigger deal than the version number suggests: it switches the build system from autotools to meson. Fvwm is very old, and has been using autotools since 1996 (before then it was using handcrafted makefiles), but the release of autotools 2.70, which came eight years after the previous release, the amount of changes in autotools proved to be a major headache for fvwm. Since the amount of work would be considerable, the project decided to look at alternatives to autotools, and after considering CMake and meson, the latter was chosen. This was chosen primary because X11 itself is transitioning its projects from autotools to meson. Additionally, there has been good help from the wider community around meson’s adoption. In terms of “speed”, the parallelised nature of not using make does mean compilation speeds are improved, even on lower-end systems. ↫ Thomas Adam To ensure you don’t need Python 3 just to build fvwm3, you can use muon starting with muon version 0.13. Muon is written in C, and only requires a C compiler to be built. Fvwm3’s transition from autotools to Meson started with version 1.1.1, and with 1.1.3 autotools has been completely deprecated. As for actual changes to fvwm3 itself, this point release is exactly what you’d expect – a few bug fixes, as well as some minor changes to FvwmRearrange.
plwm is a highly customizable X11 dynamic tiling window manager written in Prolog. Main goals of the project are: high code & documentation quality; powerful yet easy customization; covering most common needs of tiling WM users; and to stay small, easy to use and hack on. ↫ plwm GitHub page Tiling window managers are a dime-a-dozen, but the ones using a unique or uncommon programming language do tend to stand out.
Accessibility in the software world is a problem in general, but it’s an even bigger problem on open source desktops, as painfully highlighted by this excellent article detailing the utterly broken state of accessibility on Linux. Reading the article is soul-crushing as it starts to dawn on you just how bad the situation really is for those among us who require accessibility features, making it virtually impossible for them to switch to Linux. This obviously has to change, and it just so happens that both on the GTK/GNOME and KDE side, recent work on accessibility has delivered some valuable results. Starting with GTK and GNOME, the framework has recently merged the AccessKit backend with GTK 4.18, which enables accessibility features when running GTK applications on Windows and macOS. On Linux, GTK still defaults to at-spi, but I’m sure this will change eventually too. Another major improvement are the special keyboard shortcuts normally provided by the screen reader Orca. Support for these was in the works for a while but incomplete, but now this work has been completed, and the new shortcuts ship as part of GNOME 48. Accessibility support for GNOME Web has been greatly improved as well, and Elevado is a new tool that shows you what applications expose on the a11y bus. There’s a ton additional, smaller changes too. On the KDE side, a number of accessibility improvements have been implemented as part of the project’s goal to improving input handling. You can now use the numerical pad’s arrow keys to move the mouse cursor, there’s a new 3-finger gesture to invoke the desktop zoom accessibility feature, keyboard navigation in general has been improved in a wide variety of places in KDE, and a whole bunch more improvements. In addition, a number of financial grants have been given to developers working on accessibility in KDE, such as a project to make file management-related features – think open/save dialogs, Dolphin, and so on – fully accessibly, and projects to make touchpad and screen gestures fully customisable. Accessibility is never really “done” or “perfect”, but there’s definitely an increasing awareness among the two major open source desktops of just how important it is. A few confounding factors – like the switch to Wayland or the complicated history of audio on Linux – have actually hurt accessibility, and it’s only now that things are starting to look up again. However, as anyone with reduced vision or auditory problems can tell you, Linux and the open source desktop still has a very long way to go.
The Trinity Desktop Environment, the continuation of the final KDE 3.x release updated and maintained for modern times, consists of more than just the KDE bits you may think of. The project also maintains a fork of Qt 3 called TQt3, which it obviously needs to be able to work on and improve TDE itself, which is based on it. In the beginning, this fork consisted mainly of renaming things, but in recent years, more substantial changes meant that the code diverged considerably from the original Qt 3. As such, a small name change is in order. TQt3 was born as a fork of Qt3 and for many years it was little more than a mere renaming effort. Over the past few years, many changes were made and the code has significantly diverged from the original Qt3, although still sharing the same roots. With more changes planned ahead and with the intention of better highlighting such difference, the TDE team has decided to drop the ‘3’ from the repository name, which is now simply called ‘TQt‘. ↫ TDE on Mastodon The effect this has on users is rather minimal – users of the current 14.1.x release branch will still see 3s around in file paths and package names, but in future 14.2.x releases, all of these will have been removed, completing the transition. This seems like a small change, and that’s because it is, but it’s interesting simply because it highlights that a project that seems relatively straightforward on the outside – maintain and carefully modernise the final KDE 3.x release – encompasses a lot more than that. Maintaining an entire Qt 3 fork certainly isn’t a small feat, but it’s kind of required to keep a project like TDE going.
The Trinity Desktop Environment, the modern-day continuation of the KDE 3.x series, has released version R14.1.4. This maintenance release brings new vector wallpapers and colour schemes, support for Unicode surrogate characters and planes above zero (for emoji, among other things), tabs in kpdf, transparency and other new visual effects for Dekorator, and much more. TDE R14.1.4 is already available for a variety of Linux distributions, and can be installed straight from TDE’s own repositories if needed.
LXQt, the Qt-based alternative to KDE as Xfce is the GTK-based alternative to GNOME, has released version 2.2.0. LXQt is in the middle of its transition to Wayland, and as such, this release brings a number of fixes and improvements for Wayland, like improved multi-display support and updated compatibility with Wayland compositors. Beyond all the Wayland work, LXQt Power Management now supports power profiles, text rendering in QTerminal and QTermWidget has been improved, the file manager PCManFM-Qt has received a whole slew of new features, and there’s the usual smaller bug fixes and changes.
EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) is a full-featured tiling X window manager for Emacs built on top of XELB. ↫ exwm GitHub page It supports both tiling and stacking windows, dynamic workspaces, RandR, a system tray, and a lot more. XELB stands for X protocol Emacs Lisp Binding, and it’s a “pure Elisp implementation of X11 protocol based on the XML description files from XCB project”.
A few months after 0.27.0 was released, we’ve got a small update for Enlightenment today, version 0.27.1. It’s a short list of bugfixes, and one tiny new feature: you can now use the scroll wheel to change the volume when your cursor is hovering over the mixer controls. That’s it. That’s the release.
Enlightenment 0.27.0 has been released, and we’ve got some highly informative release notes. This is the latest release of Enlightenment. This has a lot of fixes mostly with some new features. ↫ Carsten Haitzler That’s it. That’s the release notes. Digging into the commit history between 0.26.0 and 0.27.0 gives some more information, and here we can see that a lot of work has been done on the CPU frequency applet (including hopefully making it work properly on FreeBSD), a lot of updated translations, some RandR work, and a ton of other small changes. Does any one of us use Enlightenment on a daily basis? I’m actually intrigued by this release, as it’s the first one in two years, and aside from historical usage decades ago – like many of us, I assume – I haven’t really spent any time with the current incarnation.
EMWM is a fork of the Motif Window Manager with fixes and enhancements. The idea behind this is to provide compatibility with current xorg extensions and applications, without changing the way the window manager looks and behaves. This includes support for multi-monitor setups through Xinerama/Xrandr, UFT-8 support with Xft fonts, and overall better compatibility with software that requires Extended Window Manager Hints. Additionally a couple of goodies are available in the separate utilities package: XmToolbox, a toolchest like application launcher, which reads it’s multi-level menu structure from a simple plain-text file ~/.toolboxrc, and XmSm, a simple session manager that provides session configuration, locking and shutdown/suspend options. ↫ EMWM homepage I had never heard of EMWM, but I immediately like it. This same developer, Alexander Pampuchin, also develops XFile, a file manager for X11 which presents the file system as it actually is, instead of using a bunch of “imaginary” locations to hide the truth, if you will. On top of that, they also develop XImaging, a comprehensive image viewer for X11. All of these use the Motif widget toolkit, focus on plain X11, and run on most Linux distributions and BSDs. They need to be compiled by the user, most likely. I am convinced that there is a small but sustainable audience for a modern, up-to-date Linux distribution (although a BSD would work just as well), that instead of offering GNOME, KDE, Xfce, or whatever, focuses instead of delivering a traditional, yet modernised and maintained, desktop environment and applications using not much more than X11 and Motif, eschewing more complex stuff like GTK, Qt, systemd, Wayland, and so on. I would use the hell out of a system that gives me a version of the Motif-based desktops like CDE from the ’90s, but with some modern amenities, current hardware support, support for high-resolution displays, and so on. You can certainly grab bits and bobs left and right from the web and build something like this from scratch, but not everyone has the skills and time to do so, yet I think there’s enough people out there who are craving for something like this. There’s tons of maintained X11/Motif software out there – it’s just all spread out, disorganised, and difficult to assemble because it almost always means compiling it all from scratch, and most people simply don’t have the time and energy for that. Package this up on a solid Debian, Fedora, or FreeBSD base, and I think you’ve got quite some users lining up.
