Desktop environments Archive

i3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

  Submitted by Some guy from the internet Desktop environments 6 Comments
Today, the second version of i3 has been released. It supports floating windows now, which is convenient for many popups, toolbar windows, etc. i3 aims to be an improved tiling window manager, mainly inspired by wmii. Similarily to other tiling window managers, the goal is to increase productivity by not having overlapping windows. In contrast to wmii, i3 was designed to work well with Xinerama and particular attention has been given to producing clean, readable, and hackable code. See the website for goals, downloads and documentation or go directly to the userguide for a quick introduction.
Read More

Samurai-x 0.2 Released

  Submitted by Jochen Desktop environments 12 Comments
"samurai-x is a highly modular and configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is written in pure python utilising ctypes. samurai-x is targeted at people wishing to experiment with desktop programming and people who want more control over their desktop (without having to code in C)." Version 0.2 has been released recently.
Read More

EDE 2.0 Alpha Released

  Submitted by karijes Desktop environments 5 Comments
EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop environment for UNUX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. "This is the first major 2.0 release, after three years of working on it. It comes with a lot of the new stuff and code, but the most important are replacing eFLTK usage with FLTK, introducing brand new edelib library and syncing with the freedesktop.org standards."
Read More

6 of the Best Lean Linux Desktop Environments

  Submitted by linuxlinks Desktop environments 49 Comments
"Mainstream Linux distributions typically default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these environments provide users with an intuitive and attractive desktop, as well as offering a large raft of multimedia software, games, administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, artwork, web development tools and more. However, these two desktops focus more on providing users with a modern computing environment with all the bells and whistles featured in Windows Vista, rather than minimising the amount of system resources they need. For users and developers who want to run an attractive Linux desktop on older hardware, netbooks, or mobile internet devices, neither KDE or GNOME may be a viable option, as they run too slowly on low spec machines (such as less than 256MB RAM and a 1 GHz processor). This article seeks to identify the best lean desktops for Linux, for users that have old or even ancient hardware."
Read More

Etoile 0.4.0 Released

  Submitted by Ian Dumych Desktop environments 15 Comments
There are lots of interesting desktop environments for X, other than the big two three GNOME, KDE, and Xfce. One of those is Etoile, a highly modular and leightweight environment based on GNUstep. Etoile is entirely project and document based, which means that you focus on your documents, and not on applications. Earlier this month - and we missed it, my apologies - the project released version 0.4.0.
Read More

Etoile 0.4 Released

  Submitted by NicolasRoard Desktop environments 23 Comments
The new 0.4 version of Etoile had just been released. Etoile intends to be an innovative, GNUstep-based, user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components. It is created with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications) and Components. 0.4 is a developer-targeted release on its way towards this goal. As a developer-focussed release, this predominantly consists of frameworks. A few demonstration applications are also included.
Read More

awesome 3.0 Released

  Submitted by Julien Danjou Desktop environments 14 Comments
After 6 months of development and more than 1000 change sets, the final version of awesome 3.0 has been released. 'awesome' is a frame-work window manager, which also supports tiling window management. This major release brings a lot of new features. The whole configuration file is now write in the Lua language and use a simple API. This allows to modify and control every corner of the window manager. This version is based on XCB, a new low level library which communicate with the X server. Pango usage also enhances text rendering.
Read More

Fluxbox 1.1.0 Released

  Submitted by vermaden Desktop environments 13 Comments
Fluxbox 1.1.0 has been released. "Fluxbox is a windowmanager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy, and extremely fast, desktop experience. It is built using C++ and licensed under the MIT-License." There's no official release announcement yet, but the code is on Sourceforge, as well as the release notes.
Read More

Review: Equinox Desktop Environment 1.2

Desktop environments 9 Comments
The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.
Read More

Awesome 2.3 Released

  Submitted by Julien Danjou Desktop environments 15 Comments
"Awesome is a floating and tiling window manager. It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and awesome. Windows can be managed in several layouts: tiled, maximized, dwindle, spiral, floating... Each layout can be applied on the fly, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. Managing windows in tiled mode assures that no space will be wasted on your screen. No gaps, no overlap. Other layouts can be used for different purpose. If you do not want to use the tiling management, you can use the floating layout wich will let you organize your windows as you wish, like any other window manager." Version 2.3-final has been released today.
Read More

A Few Questions to Enlightenment’s Rasterman

Desktop environments 22 Comments
Enlightenment 0.17, the big, long awaited new release of the Enlightenment project, has been in the making for a long time now - since December 2000, to be precise. E17, as it became known, is a complete rewrite of Enlightenment, complete with a set of base libraries (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) turning it into a full-fledged desktop environment, complete with its own set of base libraries for building applications. Last November, main developer Carsten 'Rasterman' Haitzler stated that there were only two big to-do items left blocking the release of E17. We're now a few months ahead, so I contacted Rasterman to see what's what.
Read More

Awesome 2.2 Released

  Submitted by Julien Danjou Desktop environments 10 Comments
Awesome 2.2 has been released. "Awesome is a floating and tiling window manager initialy based on a dwm code rewriting. It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and awesome. Windows can be managed in several layouts: tiled, maximized, dwindle, spiral, floating... Each layout can be applied on the fly, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. Managing windows in tiled mode assures that no space will be wasted on your screen. No gaps, no overlap. Other layouts can be used for different purpose. If you do not want to use the tiling management, you can use the floating layout wich will let you organize your windows as you wish, like any other window manager."
Read More

E16 0.16.8.11 Released

Desktop environments 12 Comments
A new version of E16 has been released. "Fix rendering issues when using pseudo-transparency; fix translucent moves of non-shaped windows; fix border right click (winops menu) in many themes; fix incorrect tracking of pointer motion when dragging window; fix potential trouble while exiting/restarting; various minor bug fixes and enhancements, see ChangeLog for details." Get it here.
Read More