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
- More Microsoft Cuts and Layoffs (Microsoft Media Mole Jordan Novet Tries to Float "Hiring Freezes" Spin After the "Headcount" Spin Failed)
- As one might expect...
-
- New Upcoming Series About DRM and TPM
- We'll do our best to name and explain some of the alternatives that are still available
- Links 15/01/2025: Efforts to End Wars and 'Newsflation'
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 15/01/2025: Abandoning Windows for GNU/Linux, SIS Progress Update
- Links for the day
- Links 15/01/2025: Social Control Media Spreading Lies, TikTok Banned in 4 Days
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Breaks Linux Again
- Does it even care? It's selling Windows.
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, January 14, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, January 14, 2025
- Links 14/01/2025: Vaccination Hesitancy Problems and Kangaroo Courts (UPC)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 14/01/2025: Introduction to GrapheneOS and Small Internet
- Links for the day
- Dr. Miriam Bastian From the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Gives a Talk in a Couple of Weeks at FOSDEM (Brussels, Belgium)
- It's good to see people from all around the world and with very different backgrounds united around digital philosophy
- Andy Farnell on Eating Your Own Dog Food
- focuses on security but goes beyond that
- EPO Uses the Misnomer "AI" to Attack Software Developers in Europe
- The EPO is nowadays a huge pile of crimes
- The European Patent Office’s (EPO) Communication on "Reform" is "Incomplete and Misleading," Says the Central Staff Committee at the EPO
- This puts Europe at risk and makes it more vulnerable
- [Meme] How to Lose Social Life (While Pretending to Still Have It)
- Talk to people, not to microphones
- Android (or AOSP) is More Free Than iOS, Both in Practice (as OEM Bundles) Both Are User-Hostile
- In a perfect world, people would choose and deploy software that is entirely made up of reciprocally-licensed bits
- Neuroscience of Consciousness Paper: Why Social Control Media and Proprietary Spyware Harm Your Health
- "Software Freedom turns out to be good for your health"
- Access to the Source Code of the Programs You're Using Matters (Even If You're Not a Coder and Cannot Fix Bugs)
- Companies like Microsoft tell us that full access to all the code isn't important
- Guardian Digital (linuxsecurity.com) Publishes Fake Articles About Linux and About (for) 'Linux' Foundation Openwashing
- Brittany Day is at it again
- Links 14/01/2025: LA Crisis and EU, UK Respond to "X.com" Threat From South African Oligarch
- Links for the day
- The Word About the Upcoming Talk by Richard Stallman - Scheduled for Friday This Week - Has Spread ("The Cost of Freedom," Lausanne, Switzerland)
- So the word is spreading
- "AI Music" is Not Music and It's Hardly "AI" Either
- Synthetic garbage is a solution in search of a problem
- Webspam in BetaNews
- Not only is it marketing SPAM
- [Meme] 13 Years a Slave of Microsoft
- Might makes right?
- Gemini Links 14/01/2025: The Gemtext Print Hurdle and New Game: Fill!
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 13, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, January 13, 2025
- Links 13/01/2025: Conflicts, Prisoner Exchange, and Homes on Fire
- Links for the day
- Angola: Microsoft Windows Falls Below 10%
- Microsoft has a really bad 2024 in Africa
- [Meme] Twitter ("X") Has Been Grooming Radicals Since 2022
- Musk's very own "grooming gang"
- [Meme] What Free Speech Ought to Mean
- It does not sound like RMS suggests anything other than quitting social control media
- Gemini Links 13/01/2025: RestFest, Yule, and Deedum
- Links for the day
- Modern Web Browsers as Web Censorship Software
- We continue to recommend Geminispace
- Two Weeks From Now Dr. Richard Stallman Speaks at The Summit of Future 2025 (India)
- he will be giving a "Keynote Address" in India
- Microsoft is Tight With Money: It's About the Salaries ('Cost' of the Workers)
- a question of cost, not skill
- Google Got People Sort of Addicted to Android So It Can Cash in (Services, App Store, Advertising) Decades Later
- This is not software freedom
- The Free Software Foundation Reaches 370k Dollars in Funding, Due Date is January 17th When Richard Stallman is Guest of Honour in Lausanne (Switzerland)
- Even fellow board members seem unaware of it
- Record Lows for Windows (Microsoft) in Botswana
- The market share of Vista 11 is seen as going down
- Preserving Deleted Articles About Bill Gates Talking Like a Drug Dealer About Computer Users
- Now it's 2025. Different challenge.
- Links 13/01/2025: Disinformation, Social Control Media Actively Promoting Nazism, and Catchup With Ukraine
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Front Group Starts the Year by Championing Underage (or Child) Labour
- the fake 'FSF'
- TPM Boosters Inside Debian (TPM Isn't About Security, It is About Control Over Users and Their Machines)
- We're not rushing to any conclusions
- Aaron Swartz Died 12 Years Ago After a Vicious Government Campaign to Stop Him
- The Aaron Swartz story is a reminder of the importance of having verifiable/verified information out there for the general public to see
- Links 13/01/2025: GitLab Enshittification and Minimalism and Efficiency with Gemini Protocol
- Links for the day
- Links 13/01/2025: Hardware, Health, and Conflicts
- Links for the day
- Chatbots Are Not Data-Driven, They're Human-Censored and Rely on Wage Slaves (and Sometimes Unpaid Volunteers)
- This is the Microsoft wage slavery
- Microsoft Appears to Have Fallen to Only 15% in Maldives
- This is a problem for Microsoft
- Rumours of IBM Canada Layoffs
- We'll keep a vigilant eye on this
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 12, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, January 12, 2025