Desktop environments Archive

What is wrong with KDE 3.x? What is wrong with GNOME 2.8+? These seem to be the two questions arising from the recent revival of Linus vs. GNOME spat. We all know the history; Linus called the GNOME guys 'interface nazis' and advised Linux users to use KDE, which resulted in the longest comment thread on OSNews ever. That kind of fizzled out, only to be brought to light again by Linus submitting a few patches to make GNOME behave more like he wants it to behave.

"The ROX Desktop is a lightweight alternative to GNOME or KDE built around the ROX-Filer file manager. The project's name is an abbreviation of 'RISC OS on X'. The ROX Desktop's performance is reminiscent of IceWM, and it's noticeably faster opening programs than GNOME or KDE. However, its speed comes at the expense of a needlessly redundant default configuration, and some users may balk at some of the assumptions its design makes about how they prefer to work."

The Enlightenment team has released 0.16.8.4, and as usual, this is mainly a bugfix and maintenance release. You can grab the release from the Sourceforge page.

In an attempt to convince The Open Group that they finally want to fully Open Source Motif and CDE Peter Howkins has started a petition to help gauge how much interest there is. CDE, the Common Desktop Enviroment, was the default desktop on several commercial UNIX distributions. Motif is a X Windows widget API used in many programs, including CDE and other projects such as nedit and DDD. Howkins is not going to try to convince anyone to use either of them, but if you use them and would like to see them Open Sourced please sign the petition. For more background information about CDE and this petition visit the petition site or go straight to signing the petition.

After a year from last 1.0.4 version, new one brings a lot of changes, new features and bugfixes. Details about changes and download links can be found here.

Enlightenment 0.16.8.2 has been released, and it includes some bugfixes and speed improvements. Remember that E16 is the 'old' Enlightenment; E17 is the new one, and there's a short article on HowtoForge explaining how to set it up: "Enlightenment 17 or E17 as it is generally called, is a cool Window Manager for X. The latest stable version of Enlightenment is E16 (0.16.8.2). In this article we will talk about the latest CVS build available (0.16.999.023)."

The Enlightenment team has released a new version of e16, e16-0.16.8.1. This is mainly a bugfix release. You can download it from the download page (well, if it'll appear there, 0.16.8 isn't listed either), or wait until your distributor packages it for you. In addition, Rasterman announced a few days ago that CVS was back up.

Matchbox is an Open Source base environment for the X Window System running on non-desktop embedded platforms such as handhelds, set-top boxes, kiosks and anything else for which screen space, input mechanisms or system resources are limited. Information on the 1.0 release is here.

Enlightenment 0.16.8 (now known simply as 'E16') has been released. This new release comes with a built-in composite manager, a systray, simplified configuration files, and session scripting. E16.8 is incompatible with configuration settings and custom menu configuration files from earlier versions, and as such they will have to be changed in order to work with E16.8.

A new release of Blackbox in the latest 0.70 series is now out: 0.70.1 cumulates new features and bugfixes added to CVS over the last 8 months. Read on for a list of the most notable changes.

EDE 1.0.4 is a new version of EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) which brings full FreeBSD support, various bugfixes and new features. 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.

Here is a review of E17. "On the whole, I am very happy with the new Enlightenment. On their homepage, the Enlightenment team states "We believe your desktop should not be an eyesore. It should be functional AND beautiful." They are doing well on both fronts." Screenshots included.

Elive, the Debian based Enlightenment (16.7 and 17) liveCD project has released version 0.1 for download. See the package and features list for more information. A screenshot tour is also available.

WindowMaker 0.92 has been released. Many bugs have been fixed, among other things. You can download it here.