News About Desktop Environments: Enlightenment, KDE, GNOME, and Others
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-02 10:13:07 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-02 10:13:07 UTC
Enlightenment
With the latest Git development work for the Elementary tool-kit and library, applications can run directly from the DRM driver interface without any display server / compositor / window manager. Applications can be created to run in DRM and by setting the ELM_ENGINE=drm option the apps will run in a standalone mode without anything else underneath.
Current support work is being done to enable client-side applications (as opposed to making a Wayland compositor itself - that is a future plan). Currently EFL applications that use the lower-level Ecore-Evas and higher level Elementary API's will work and display correctly in Wayland, handle input, resizing and moving. Client-side frames are already provided. Both Shared-memory buffers AND EGL/OpenGL-ES2 buffers are supported. The Shared-memory buffers are purely CPU-rendered, meaning that they will work with or without OpenGL hardware acceleration support. They are fast and usable. The OpenGL-ES2 display is fully accelerated with all primitives being rendered by OpenGL (Hardware acceleration) and already work fully due to a long history of supporting this under X11 and other embedded EGL/OpenGL-ES2 environments.
KDE
April 1, 2014. Today KDE makes available the first beta of Frameworks 5. This release is part of a series of releases leading up to the final version planned for June 2014 following the previous alpha last month. This release marks the freeze of source incompatible changes and the introduction of the Frameworks 5 Porting Aids.
And KDE knows what happens when you alienate a group of users since the moment when the anger of some people over KDE 4 lead to the first prominent fork of KDE software, the Trinity Desktop Environment.
Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the fourth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.8. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
Part of the KDE PIM group is meeting over this weekend in Barcelona in the spacious BlueSystems offices, hacking on all sorts of things. Me and David Edmundson took the oportunity to do some super huge changes to our KPeople library that are needed and as the library is in its dawn, it's better to do it sooner than later. These are all internal and boring changes, but one of the changes we've been working on here is really cool and worth mentioning.
The CD and DVD era is coming to an end and developers don't really bother to innovate when it comes to applications that deal with this media. There are quite a few apps that are capable of writing to DVDs available for the Linux platform, and K3B is one of the best.
The fourth beta of digiKam Software Collection 4.0 is now available for photographers interested in testing out this popular KDE software component.
digiKam team is proud to announce the fourth beta release of digiKam Software Collection 4.0.0.
Qt3D is the Qt component that adds 3D support to Qt Quick for easily integrating 3D functionality. Qt3D has been in development for some time and was going to be an "essential" module to Qt 5.0 before being moved to just an add-on as part of Nokia's Qt changes prior to selling it to Digia. Qt3D offers up a lot of potential for 3D user-interfaces and applications, but hasn't seen too much work recently -- the last time we got to mention it was when talking about OpenGL taking on a greater role within Qt in late 2012.
The KDE Project developers have just released the first Release Candidate of Applications and Platform 4.13, and it's all about fixes and improvements.
“KDE has released the release candidate of the 4.13 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing,” said the KDE developers.
“The Calligra team has released version 2.8.1, the first of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active in the 2.8 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.8.0 and we recommend everybody to update,” reads the official announcement.
GNOME
Announcing her departure, Karen said: “Working as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director has been one of the highlights of my career.” She also spoke of the achievements during her time as Executive Director: “I’ve helped to recruit two new advisory board members… and we have run the last three years in the black. We’ve held some successful funding campaigns, particularly around privacy. We have a mind-blowingly fantastic Board of Directors, and the Engagement team is doing amazing work. The GNOME.Asia team is strong, and we’ve got an influx of people, more so than I’ve seen in some time.”
Zukitwo, a beautiful theme designed for GNOME 3.12 that makes use of the GTK2 engine Murrine and the GTK2 pixbuf engine, is now at version 2014.03.29.
The Zukitwo theme was updated shortly after the release of GNOME 3.12 and it’s probably the first theme to support the new version of GNOME. A lot of other themes will probably follow soon but, coincidentally, Zukitwo is also one of the best ones around.
Our dedication towards Wayland has pushed us to build a cleaner architecture overall. What used to be a proliferation of X-specific video and input drivers is mostly culminating in centralized, standardized code. For input, we have libinput, which we’re using from Weston, mutter, and Xorg as well. What used to be a collection of chipset-specific video plugins for doing accelerated rendering have now been replaced by glamor, a credible chipset-independent acceleration architecture. What used to be large monolithic components heavily tied to Xorg and the Xorg input and video architectures have now been split out into separate, easily-reusable libraries with separate, easily-maintainable codebases. New, experimental features can be prototyped faster than ever before.
One of the great things about Linux distributions is the customization. In contrast, an operating system like Windows 8 is rather limited. Sure, you can change some colors, wallpapers and sounds, but pretty much, it is what it is. What you see is what you get. That is probably fine for most people, however, Linux users are not most people.
Itching to get your hands on the latest goodies from Gnome? Look no further… If you’d like to see the project’s latest efforts, including getting the best look at the latest Gnome core apps (Music, Weather, Maps, Videos), Matthias Clasen has a special gift for you. He’s made a special live CD containing a complete Gnome 3.12 atop Fedora 20.
Review When the GNOME 3.x desktop arrived it was, frankly, unusable. It wasn't so much the radical departure from past desktop environments, as the fact that essential things did not work properly or, more frustratingly, had been deemed unnecessary.
THE GNOME PROJECT has released Gnome 3.12, the latest version of the heavyweight Linux desktop environment, which adds support for better displays and faster startup times.
Earlier today GNOME 3.12 has been released, bringing major new features, several redesigned programs and three new applications: Logs, Sound Recorder and Polari.
Misc.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
- Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
- Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
- now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
- Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
- Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
- Gemini Links 25/12/2025: Hibernation and TV Detox
- Links for the day
- The Right to Repair (Especially When Products Are So Poorly Made)
- Many electrical appliances fail often/quick and are nearly impossible to repair
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- Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
- Links for the day
- Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
- I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
- Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
- "Quantum" is the future
- The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
- The important thing is optics
- So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
- In light of recent experiences
- Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
- So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
- An "AI-Infused" Windows
- Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
- Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
- Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
- Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
- Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
- The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
- What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
- And as the Year Turns...
- The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
- Appliances Versus Computers
- Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
- A Dark Side of Europe
- They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
- Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
- I will continue to publish for many decades to come
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
- A Tribute to Richard Stallman
- It's about knowledge and sharing
- Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
- Links for the day
- Canonical is Making the Cost of PCs Very High, Due to Unnecessary Ubuntu Bloat
- They say the reason for the price surge is LLM hype/frenzy
- Canonical's Ubuntu is Bloatware
- How did Ubuntu get so fat?
- The EPO is a Very Vicious Organisation You Neither Wish to Join Nor Stay in for "Too Long"
- Consider what the EPO thinks of its own workers, the staff that actually does real work
- 2026 Will Hopefully Turn Out to be Slopless
- we seem to be starting the post-Christmas period on the right footing
- Links 25/12/2025: Mail Carriers in "a Murky Future", Dihydroxyacetone Man’s "Chip Embargo Against China Backfiring Spectacularly"
- Links for the day
- The Register MS: All I Want For Xmas is Microsoft
- they actually put effort into it
- How to Win Nobel Prize for Peace
- Do you get to Heaven (or peace platitudes) by sleeping with 72 virgins?
- Links 25/12/2025: Ample Cover-up Found in Jeffrey Epstein Files; ChatGPT Causes Psychosis, Not a Good Use Case
- Links for the day
- Giving Money to Free Software
- In life, people must make sacrifices to do what's right and just
- The Register MS: Don't Use Linux
- That really says a lot about The Register MS
- EPO People Power - Part XV - EPO Cocainegate to Resume This Weekend
- The next installment (number 16) will probably come out this weekend
- Microsoft: XBox is Going "Online", "Cloud"...
- XBox as a console is pretty much dead
- The Year of the Bubble
- We hope that in 2026 the marketing liars will find some new buzzwords to latch onto and quit calling everything "AI"
- Mozilla Firefox is a GAFAM Browser With Slop, Move to a Free Software Web Browser
- on mobile the options would be more limited
- libera.chat Was Under Attack Last Night
- Several months from now libera.chat turns 5
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raises Over $300,000 Before Christmas
- the FSF made it past $300,000
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 24, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, December 24, 2025
- Sounds Like Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' (Slop) Ran Out of Money to Borrow
- Maybe in 2026 slop will be scarce enough that eventually, maybe by year's end, we'll manage to just ignore it.
- In India, Staff Works on Christmas Eve, Becomes Unemployed (Last Day)
- The company fires based on how "expensive" workers are more often than based on their productivity
- Links 24/12/2025: US TACOs on "China Chip Tariffs Until 2027", Russian Snickers in U.K. Convenience Shops
- Links for the day
- Links 24/12/2025: Cheeto President "Accused of Rape in Jeffrey Epstein Files", Windows to be Replaced by Slop?
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 24/12/2025: Tea, Love During Pain, and Gaming This Year
- Links for the day
- GAFAM is a Bubble, Nothing is Free in This World
- Nothing is free in the world
- My New CD Player/Stereo Didn't Even Last a Year, My CD Player/Stereo From the Early 1990s Still Works
- That helped reaffirm what I said in recent years about production/manufacturing standards of "modern" things
- GitHub Isn't Free, Microsoft Subsidises It (Losses) to Entrap You Inside Proprietary Software, Now Come the Fees
- GitHub was never free
- XBox Console is Dead, "Microsoft is Rethinking What XBox is"
- So XBox is now "cloud"
- IBM SkillsBuild: Teaching Slop to People
- What skills does that give? Making more slopfarms?
- Maybe 2026 Will be the Last Year of António Campinos
- Europe's patent system is run by thugs and it serves thugs
- 2025: The Year LLM Slop Rose to Prominence and Then Fell
- the slop hype is bound to end
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, December 23, 2025
- Links 24/12/2025: Spotify Surveillance and Shadow Over Rule of Law in Hong Kong
- Links for the day