04.02.14

News About Desktop Environments: Enlightenment, KDE, GNOME, and Others

Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enlightenment

Enlightenment Elementary Apps Can Now Run Directly On DRM

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.
We support Wayland

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

KDE Ships First Beta of Frameworks 5

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.
Freedom Maximized!

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.
KDE Applications and Platform 4.12.4 Officially Released
KDE Ships April Updates to Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces

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.
[Development] Qt 4.8.6 Release Candidate available
KDE PIM Sprint and KPeople

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.
K3B 2.0.2 Review ‒ Why KDE Should Have All the Fun with Writing CDs and DVDs

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.
digiKam 4.0 Beta 4 Adds More Tools

The fourth beta of digiKam Software Collection 4.0 is now available for photographers interested in testing out this popular KDE software component.
digiKam Software Collection 4.0.0-beta4 is out..

digiKam team is proud to announce the fourth beta release of digiKam Software Collection 4.0.0.
Image Manipulation Software digiKam 4.0 Beta 4 Gets Awesome Features
Qt3D, QtOpenCL Spark New Interest

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.
KDE Applications and Platform 4.13 RC Officially Released

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.
Calligra 2.8.1 Office Suite Is a Major Update

“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

GNOME 3.12 Open-Source Linux Desktop Gets Bevy of New Features
Linux Top 3: GNOME 3.12 and New Betas for Ubuntu 14.04 and OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0
Karen Sandler Steps Down as GNOME Foundation Executive Director

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.”
Beautiful Zukitwo Theme Is the First One for GNOME 3.12

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.
GNOME 3.10 has resurrected what was once the darling of the Linux desktop
Wayland in 3.12, and beyond

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.
Mozilla CEO Oops, Ubuntu 14.04 Beta, and a GNOME Review
Linux desktop environment GNOME 3.12 available

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.
Try Gnome 3.12 Right Now!

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.
GNOME 3.12 Released, ‘Sup Apache, King of Office
GNOME 3.12: Pixel perfect … but homeless

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.
Gnome 3.12 adds high-res display support and faster startup

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.
Gnome 3.12 review – work Ubuntu could have benefited from
GNOME 3.12 Released with Major Features, New Apps, IRC Client

Earlier today GNOME 3.12 has been released, bringing major new features, several redesigned programs and three new applications: Logs, Sound Recorder and Polari.