Desktop environments Archive

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.

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”.

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.

The Trinity Desktop Environment, a fork of the last release in the KDE 3.x series, has just released their latest version, R14.1.3. Despite its rather small version number change, it contains some very welcome new features. TDE started the process of integrating the XDG Desktop Portal API, which will bring a lot of welcome integration with applications from the wider ecosystem. There’s also a brand new touchpad settings module, which was something I was sorely missing when I tried out TDE a few months ago. Furthermore, there’s of course a ton of bugfixes and improvements, but also things like support for tiling windows, some new theme and colour scheme options, and a lot more. Not too long ago, when KDE’s Akademy 2024 took place, a really fun impromptu event happened. A number of KDE developers got together – I think in a restaurant or coffee place – and ended up organising an unplanned TDE installation party. Several photos floated around Mastodon of KDE developers using TDE, and after a few fun interactions between KDE and TDE developers on Mastodon, TDE developers ended up being invited to next year’s Akademy. We’ll have to wait and see if the schedules line up, but if any of this can lead to both projects benefiting from some jolly cooperation, it can only be seen as a good thing. Regardless, TDE is an excellent project with a very clear goal, and they’re making steady progress all the time. It’s not a fast-paced environment chasing the latest and greatest technologies, but instead builds upon a solid foundation, bringing it into modern world where it makes sense. If you like KDE 3.x, TDE is going to be perfect for you.

System76, the premiere Linux computer manufacturer and creator of the COSMIC desktop environment, has updated COSMIC’s Alpha release to Alpha 2. The latest release includes more Settings pages, the bulk of functionality for COSMIC Files, highly requested window management features, and considerable infrastructure work for screen reader support, as well as some notable bug fixes. ↫ system76’s blog The pace of development for COSMIC remains solid, even after the first alpha release. This second alpha keeps adding a lot of things considered basic for any desktop environment, such as settings panels for power and battery, sounds, displays, and many more. It also brings window management support for focus follows cursor and cursor follows focus, which will surely please the very specific, small slice of people who swear by those. Also, you can now disable the super key. A major new feature that I’m personally very happy about is the “adjust density” feature. COSMIC will allow you to adjust the spacing between the various user interface elements so you can choose to squeeze more information on your screen, which is one of the major complaints I have about modern UI design in macOS, Windows, and GNOME. Being able to adjust this to your liking is incredibly welcome, especially combined with COSMIC’s ability to change from ’rounded’ UI elements to ‘square’ UI elements. The file manager has also been vastly, vastly improved, tons of bugs were fixed, and much, much more. It seems COSMIC is on the right path, and I can’t wait to try out the first final result once it lands.

As its first alpha release is closing in, we have another monthly update about COSMIC, System76’s new Linux desktop environment written in Rust. This month, they’ve further polished and shored up their application store, imaginatively named COSMIC App Store, and it’s supposedly incredibly fast – something I can’t say for its GNOME and KDE counterparts, which tend to be so slow I’ve always just defaulted to updating through the command line, mostly. The file manager now has support for GVfs (GNOME Virtual file system) for making external storage like USB drives work properly, and Greeter login screen, Edit text editor, drag and drop, and copy/paste have been improved in various ways as well. Theming has seen a lot of work this month, with support for icon themes added to the App Library, fixed applet sizes, and more tweaks, while light themes have been disabled for now to fix a number of issues with colour selection being too dark. There’s also display mirroring now, which even works when the individual displays have different resolutions, orientations, and refresh rates. Pop!_OS is now also being built for ARM64, which makes sense because System76 is now also selling ARM servers. There’s also a bunch of work being done by the community as the alpha release nears.

COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) is a new project by System76, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Pop!_OS. In this tutorial, we will give you an overview about COSMIC DE and its features, and then we will walk you through the steps to install COSMIC Desktop Environment in the latest Fedora 40 Linux system. ↫ Senthilkumar Palani at OSTechNix A very easy way to try out the current pre-alpha state of COSMIC. I’ll definitely be waiting on a more official release later this year, but man, does COSMIC ever seem way more polished and complete than it has any right to be at this point in time.

LXQt, the lightweight Qt desktop environment, has released a major new version, which brings with it a whole slew of very important changes and upgrades, with two main focal point. First and foremost, the desktop environment is now using Qt 6 across the board, meaning the transition from Qt 5 to Qt 6 is now complete. To support themes and the LXQt File Dialog for Qt5-based apps you can install libqtxdg-3.12.0, lxqt-qtplugin-1.4.1, and libfm-qt-1.4.0 alongside the new Qt 6 variants for backwards compatibility. One exception here is QTerminal, whose Qt 6 port ran into some issues, so a separate Qt 6 release will come later. The second major upgrade that’s still in progress is support for Wayland. LXQt 2.0.0 brings Wayland support for PCManFM-Qt, LXQt Runner, and LXQt Desktop Notifications, and for LXQt 2.1.0 they plan to make everything else available under Wayland as well. This means that more popular desktop environment like Cinnamon and Xfce are starting to feel a little out of step when it comes to Wayland. One of the major user-facing new features is a new default menu for the panel which supports favourites, a new and improved search feature, and more.

For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating. In this post I will be going through all the tools and scripts I have been creating to configure this amazing Window Manager to my liking. ↫ xd1.dev Like I mentioned in my MNT Reform review, I’m not a fan of these “build your own desktop environment” window managers and related tools, but there’s no denying they’re quite popular. This article is a good introduction to hyprland, one of the more popular window managers of this genre.

progman is a simple X11 window manager modeled after Program Manager from the Windows 3 era. ↫ progman’s GitHub page If that description doesn’t pique your interest, nothing will. What more do you people want from me?

It’s a minimalist (currently <1K lines) pure Ruby (including the X11 driver) X11 window manager. It is focused on tiling, but allows you to choose to assign a tiling layout to specific desktops or leave them floating. Currently whether or not you use tiling or floating layout there is no window decoration and windows are not draggable or resizable by pulling on borders (but you can do that with Windows key + left/right mouse button) Like bspwm, which was an inspiration, the wm supports no keyboard handling – all keyboard handling is deferred to separate tools like sxhkd. Unlike bspwm this WM has no dedicated IPC mechanism. Instead, so far, all communication happens via X11 ClientMessage events, which means any tool, like xdotool etc. that can produce those events can control the WM. ↫ Vidar Hokstad on RubyWM’s GitHub page In the blog post announcing RubyWM, the author makes it very clear that while he uses this WM full time, he is also willing to work around its bugs, and that certain tools will simply break if you use it. He considers it more of a tech demo, and that you really shouldn’t rely on this for any serious work.