Desktop environments Archive

"There are literally dozens of window managers that you can use with your favorite desktop environment to get a beautiful and appealing desktop. If you want to fine-tune your window manager, here are two programs that can help you control everything from application window size to pinning an application to all workspaces to fixing a position for your application windows to resizing desktops. One, wmctrl, works with any window managers that adheres to the Extended Window Manager Hints, while Devil's Pie is a window-matching utility, which means it can configure application windows based on defined rules."

"wmii is a dynamic window manager for X11. It supports classic and dynamic window management with extended keyboard, mouse, and filesystem based remote control. It replaces the workspace paradigm with a new tagging approach. Its minimalist philosophy attempts not to exceed 10.000 lines of code (including all shipped utilities and libraries), to enforce simplicity and clarity." Version 3.6 has been released. Its little brother, dwm, has also seen a new release.

EDE 1.2 is a new version of EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) which brings mostly bugfixes. Also it comes with full German and French localization. The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small desktop environment, built to be simple, to have a familiar look and feel and to be reasonably fast.

Rasterman, the lead developer of the Enlightenment project, speaks about the future of Enlightenment, including the project's focus on the embedded world (Rasterman works at OpenMoko now), the relationship with commercial vendors, reorganized leadership, and even some hints at an upcoming release. "The primary thing of importance is getting E17 out the door. It's actually looking petty good. Only 2 really big TODO items left. I'm doing a theme revamp. The Default theme has very much aged. The gold bling isn't incredibly popular. I'm working on something I think people will love - and it still shows off E. It will replace the current default - and will also knock off some of the comment the default theme so its better documented for people to build new themes from and learn Edje."

Fluxbox 1.0 has been released. There's a changelog, and a download page, of course. "Fluxbox is yet another windowmanager for X. It's based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. Fluxbox looks like Blackbox and handles styles, colors, window placement and similar thing exactly like Blackbox (100% theme/style compability)."

E16 version 0.16.8.10 is now available for download. Changes: "Fix infinite loop when regenerating menus; fix potential incorrect termination of IPC connection which could cause segv.; eesh: fix bad event loop causing hangs in certain situations; fix xinerama head selection in certain situations; fix menu placement on xinerama screens; various minor bug fixes and enhancements."

Another release candidate for Ion3 has been released, hopefully, again, the last. "Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind."

A new release of dwm is available, dwm 4.5 "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed."

Enlightenment 0.16.8.9 has been released. It contains several bugfixes and other improvements. "Version 0.16 of the Enlightenment window manager was released in 2000, along with its dependencies Imlib and Fnlib, and remains in heavy usage today. While rumors of its death still circulate, DR16.8.9 was released on August 11th, 2007, and it remains in development today with a long life still ahead of it. DR16 has been the choice of power users and artists due to its low overhead, highly graphical, widely theme-able, extremely configurable, yet unobtrusive interface. Nearly all functions of the window manager can be handled without mouse input, including application launching via e16keyedit. It also remains highly portable, with ports avalible for Linux on all platforms, FreeBSD, IRIX, Solaris X86 and Sparc, HP-UX, AIX, OS/2, and more."

Openbox 3.4.4 has been released. "Openbox is a minimalistic, highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support. Openbox lets you bring the latest applications outside of a full desktop environment. Most modern applications have been written with GNOME and KDE in mind. With support for the latest freedesktop.org standards, as well as careful adherence to previous standards, Openbox provides an environment where applications work the way they were designed to."

A new release of dwm is out, dwm-4.3. "dwm Is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed."

"If you want an adaptable window manager that doesn't drain your resources, try Openbox. Its latest version, 3.4.2, released this month, has several visual improvements and dozens of new usable features. Since it's easy to customize, many people replace their stock window managers with Openbox. It can run inside both GNOME and KDE (but not Xfce), replacing their native window managers. It can also be used as a lightweight desktop environment on its own."

The third release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This third 'rc' release again simply fixes some minor problems in the previous release." Get it from the download page. Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.

"The OpenMotif Project Team announced today the release of OpenMotif 2.3, marking the most significant version of OpenMotif since it was released to the open source community in May 2000. OpenMotif 2.3 includes major feature enhancements and over 25 bug fixes requested by developers of enterprise applications. OpenMotif is the publicly licensed version of Motif, the industry standard user interface toolkit for UNIX systems provided on more than 200 hardware and software platforms including HP, IBM, Sun, SGI, and Linux (Red Hat and Novell SUSE)."