Desktop environments Archive

After benchmarking an extensive set of Window Managers for X, we have found that Enlightenment DR17 comes out on top in terms of speed. The benchmark was performed on old (FVWM) and new (Metacity, new KDE / KWin) window managers and rated them in terms of window mapping and response time. The bechmark can be found here (both results and source).

Have a look here for an appliance-like desktop environment.

People have said many times that Blackbox development, the minimalist window manager for X, was dead. With sometimes as much as two and a half years passing between stable releases, I can see why they'd get such ideas.

Rasterman talks about other's opinions. As he says, E17 has several of the tecnoologies gnome and others are searching. He adds two videos as a proof with animate backgrounds and other things.Perhaps it's time for the linux desktop world to stop reinventing the wheel and collaborate one with each other. Gnome has things like accesibility and lots of apps, enlightenment has a very powerful rendering engine. It'd be a shame to see people reinventing the wheel.

The EDE Team presents version 1.0.2 of the Equinox Desktop Environment and version 2.0.4 of the Extended Fast Light Toolkit (eFLTK).

Matchbox is a 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. Version 0.9 was released today.

Window Maker, a window manager for X11 which mimics NEXTSTEP as close as possible, was released today. The most important news are antialiased fonts, UTF-8 support, font configuration in WPrefs, xinerama support, NetWM support (allows running well with GNOME 2.x, KDE 3.x) etc.

AfterStep is a Window Manager for X which started by emulating the NeXTSTEP look and feel, but which has been significantly altered according to the requests of various users. This release has improved stability and speed, an Ident module, updated docs, and added menu keyboard shortcuts. Wharf animation has been fixed, and there are many other bugfixes.

DistroWatch has a quick write up on the current status of FVWM, an old favorite.

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are a collection of libraries that make up the foundation of the future enlightenment-0.17 window manager, and of several applications:

From Slashdot: Waimea 0.5.0 was released after about a year from the developer disappearing. It turns out he was just working on getting the OpenGL backend for Cairo completed. Waimea is the first window manager that uses Cairo for rendering.

In the Unix world of computing, it is possible to exchange your window manager with an advanced one. The window manager's main purpose is to move/resize windows on the screen. These improved window managers differ from the way people are used to interact with windows in the Microsoft Windows world.

FLTK-based Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) 1.0.1 is released. Current released features: Small memory footprint; Fast loading, comparing to other window managers; Theme support; Window decorations support; Xft support (text anti-aliasing support); Wallpaper support (support for may image formats); Taskbar with configurable menu, cpu status, easy keyboard type switching; Localisation support; Graphical front-end for: xscreensaver configuration, software installation (.rpm, .deb, .tgz), time and time-zone configuration fast file and directory finder.

This AfterStep release fixes numerous bugs and cleans up build system. In addition new WinTabs module had been added, althou it still remains undocumented and experimetal, but in future it will allow combining similar applications, such as text editors, terms, etc, into single window with tabs.