Desktop environments Archive
Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time. Hidden, thin scrollbars are one of the many scourges of modern UI design. I’m glad more and more environments are at least giving users the option of enabling persistent scrollbars again, but more work is needed here to swing that pendulum back.
Budgie 10.8.1 is the first minor release in the 10.8 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release adds dark style preference support, squashes some bugs around our new StatusNotifierItem implementation, adds keyword support for search, and more! The Budgie Desktop renaissance continues.
COSMIC, the Rust-based desktop environment System76, makers of Pop!_OS are working on, has seen another month of work, and it turns out that it’s already being used daily by the COSMIC team, which is always an important milestone. For instance, COSMIC continues its focus on keyboard users: Pop!_OS and COSMIC DE are built to stay out of your way so you can focus on getting things done. With Auto-tiling, new windows arrange themselves automatically on your screen to reduce the hassle. It’s important, then, that rearranging tiled windows manually feels as seamless as possible. COSMIC’s new window-swapping mode helps facilitate this seamlessness with, as the name suggests, an easy way to swap windows with your keyboard. They’re also added dynamic settings – meaning, changing a setting applies it right away, instead of having to hit apply – as well as gesture support for touchpads. Furthermore, settings for panels have been implemented, so you can arrange and change your panels to your heart’s content. Of course, there’s more, so be sure to read their monthly update.
The Regolith Desktop 3.0 has been released for Ubuntu Focal, Jammy, Lunar, and Debian Bullseye and Bookworm. A new Wayland-based session is available (for Jammy, Lunar, and Bookworm) as well as the existing X11 session. Regolith Desktop is a keyboard-focused, tiling desktop environment, and this new release comes with tons of new features even aside from the Wayland work. There’s now fractional scaling for resolutions higher than 1920×1080, as well as a whole boatload of fixes and changes.
Budgie 10.8 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, featuring improvements to Budgie Menu, adoption of StatusNotifier support in System Tray, Magpie v0.x support, and more! I’m quite happy Budgie is back on track after a few leaner years. Development has picked up, there’s a clear roadmap, and it’s fun to follow along with the changes and improvements.
It’s Back to School season, so grab yourself a brand new discounted computer and let’s get back to COSMIC class! Our new, not yet released Rust-based desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros is filling out with some essential systems that cater the DE to both users and developers alike. Customization is one of our main focuses for COSMIC, and was a huge focus for us in August, too. There’s a lot of cool stuff in this update about COSMIC. First and foremost, customisation is important, so they’ve effectively implemented something similar to Android’s Material You theming engine, where the desktop environment will automatically determine derived colours that match the colour you’ve chosen as to maintain readability, contrast, and so on. You can also set the density of the interface, and how ’rounded’ everything looks. Sadly, there’s no word on actual theming in there, but they do mention that “nothing in the components of the design system is meant to be hard-coded”, so hopefully this means custom themes that radically alter the look of the UI are possible. There’s also a new API for application developers. We added an application API to the libcosmic widget library to provide a framework for developing applications and applets in COSMIC DE. It automates integration with COSMIC theme support, along with Wayland protocols, COSMIC’s configuration back-end, and common application elements like header bars and navigation. For application developers, this means convenient development without having to worry about managing the low-level desktop and window manager integrations. For us, this ensures consistency across COSMIC applications and applets. COSMIC is shaping up nicely, and I can’t wait to try it out.
After three years, there’s a new Window Maker release – version 0.96.0 – and it’s got some useful new features. First, the NeXTSTEP-inspired window manager now supports hot corners, so you can send your mouse to a corner of your display and have it execute a command. Second, you can now set keyboard shortcuts for various functions related to taking screenshots, which is a very welcome addition. On top of these, there’s a few smaller new features as well.
Speaking of fun little tools: Paginator is a desktop pager for EWMH-compliant X11 window managers. Paginator provides a graphical interface displaying the current configuration of all desktops, allowing the user to change the current desktop or the current active window with the mouse. Exactly what it says on the tin, and adds some usability to the desktop pager concept to something like Window Maker.
Beyond the dazzling sea of licensed fireworks and thunderclouds lies a cosmic array of ancient stars. It’s within our gaze upon these stars where we find the inspiration for COSMIC DE, our new desktop environment created for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros. Let’s get into the updates! COSMIC DE is System76’s in-progress Rust-based desktop environment. System76 has done some neat tricks while resizing windows in tiled mode, they’re splitting up the notifications subsystems into separate threads, they added fractional scaling, and more.
IceWM 3.4.0 might as well be called the Keybinding Update, since virtually all changes are related to them in some way. This release adds support for keybindings to literal Latin-1 characters, all UTF-8 code points in keybindings, and more.
LXQt, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment, has been updated today to version 1.3, a release that brings various improvements to the file manager, panel, terminal, and image viewer. For those of us who want a Qt desktop that isn’t KDE.
Budgie 10.7 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, featuring major re-architectures, new APIs for extensibility, and polish to the user experience. For a point release, there’s a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in here, as the release notes detail. The changes are all over the place – from a brand new application indexer to replace libgnome-menus, to dual-GPU support, notification improvements, general UX improvements, and much more.
LXQt 1.2 is here about seven months after LXQt 1.1 and it’s a major update to the lightweight desktop environment that introduces initial support for the Wayland display server in an attempt to keep up with the times and the new technologies most GNU/Linux distributions are adopting these days. Still based on the long-term supported Qt 5.15 LTS open-source application framework, LXQt 1.2 also improves its file manager component with a new search history feature that offers separate lists for name and content searches. Users can search the maximum number of history items in Preferences > Advanced > Search. I’m glad Wayland support is spreading out to smaller, less popular desktop environments too. Once you go Wayland, you stay Wayland.
IceWM was released only a short while ago, and now we’ve got 3.1. IceWM 3.1 introduces a new window option “frame” to automatically group application windows with the same “frame” value as tabs within a single frame. IceWM 3.1 also now shows indicators for the presence of tabs on the title bar, clicking on the title bar tab indicators can change tabs, tray hints are now preserved across restarts, improved Alt + Tab handling, improvements to the CMake build system integration, and a variety of other changes. I’m glad to see development has truly picked up again.
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. This makes more sense than some might think. One of the engineers over at System76 is also the creator and lead developer of Redox OS, and GTK itself has become more and more insularly focused on GNOME than any of the other GTK-based desktop environments on Linux, BSD, and similar platforms. This is a big bet for what is essentially still a small company, but it sure does show some gusto. My major concerns would be consistency, both visually and behaviourally, since the vast majority of popular applications on Linux are either GTK or at least somewhat trying to integrate with GTK, so there’s a lot of work to do to make everything feels are least somewhat coherent. Still, I’m definitely curious to see what this will look like, what it will feel like, and how it will perform.
There’s a new release of the venerable IceWM window manager, version 3.0.0. The major new feature here is tabbed windowing, in which you can drag titlebar over another to combine them into one unit. There are, of course, also the usual bug fixes and translation updates.
CDE 2.5.0 is now available on SourceForge. This is a significant release compared to the previous one with, among many other things, a replacement of the build system from ancient Imake to somewhat less ancient Autotools. There’s also a ton of bug fixes, as well as new features and other changes.
NsCDE is a retro but powerful UNIX desktop environment which resembles CDE look (and partially feel) but with a more powerful and flexible framework beneath-the-surface, more suited for 21st century unix-like and Linux systems and user requirements than original CDE. NsCDE can be considered as a heavyweight FVWM theme on steroids, but combined with a couple other free software components and custom FVWM applications and a lot of configuration, NsCDE can be considered a lightweight hybrid desktop environment. It also contains themes for Qt, Gtk, and more, to ensure a consistent CDE look and feel. NsCDE 2.2 has just been released, and it contains a ton of improvements. This is such a cool and fascinating project.
Joshua Strobl, the lead developer of Budgie, the (currently) Gtk+-based desktop, posted a lengthy article about the state of the project and the future it’s embarking on. Budgie had been in a feature-freeze and maintenance mode for a long time, but now that Strobl is no longer involved with the Linux distribution Solus, Budgie has become truly independent, and development can pick up again. The article touches upon a lot – such as the way the Budgie developers intend to lead the project, how they want to involve the community as much as they can, and similar things. They don’t want to mandate defaults or force distributions into “stock” Budgie. They intend to take this pretty far. We have made technical decisions for Budgie 11 and beyond that focuses on a clear separation between the “data layer” that enables complex Budgie functionality, and the visual / “presentation layer”. This reduces our reliance on any one given upstream for a toolkit or related libraries, allowing us to potentially explore different models for achieving the presentation layer, and even enabling other developers to build on top of Budgie’s data layer with their own presentations. As for actual plans for future versions – they intend to first nip and tuck Budgie 10.x, the current version, before diving fully into Budgie 11. The idea is that they want Budgie 10.x to be a solid base for distributions to work with while Budgie 11 is being developed. When I created Buddies of Budgie, my first priority was “unlocking” Budgie 10.x so everyone from Ubuntu Budgie to GeckoLinux, myself and other independent contributors – could get it into a state we were all happy with, and that users would be even happier with. I was not happy with the state it was in and there was a lot of catching up for us to do on fixing a thousand papercuts. Some of the major points that need to be addressed is adding full Wayland support to Budgie, since Budgie 11 is intended to be Wayland first. They also intend to remove a whole bunch of GNOME technologies they’re currently relying on. Budgie 11, meanwhile, will be a big change. Budgie 11 will take this much further. All data-related logic, collating, and reformatting possible will be in daemon, allowing the presentation layer (panel, applets, Raven, and more) to be much simpler. We will likely be leveraging protobuf to create more structured messages that is supported in more programming languages.. Not only that but this actually minimizes the impact that the toolkit choice will actually have and will even pave the way for other developers, should they choose, to leverage the data layer of Budgie and build their own “presentations” on top of that and in the toolkit of their choice! Budgie / its libraries / window manager will be written in a mix of Rust and C – with Rust being the choice for aspects of Budgie that are more mission critical (like the window manager, which may leverage smithay). Budgie Desktop itself will always be designed for the “desktop” metaphor. I’m getting mild KDE vibes from this. There’s definitely room in the market for a Gtk+ desktop that embraces more of the user choice first mentality of KDE, especially now that GNOME has forced that ship to sail. It’s fascinating to read all of these musings, and it provides a great insight into a project trying to reinvigorate itself.
The Trinity Desktop Environment, a fork of the KDE 3.x codebase, has released its latest version. This release comes with a new D-Bus based polkit authentication agent, new markdown document viewer, support for HTML5 in Quanta, support for Let’s Encrypt certificates, some improvements to GUI options, better cooperation between tdm and plymouth, fix for ICEAuthority ownership stealing when using sudo, various other bug fixes and improvements. It also adds support for Ubuntu Jammy while it drops support for Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Trusty. C++11 is now allowed in the code base. I doubt the audience for a KDE 3.x desktop is massive, but thanks to the wonders of open source – the people that want it, can have it.
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