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
- Red Hat Offers DRM, TPM, and Backed Doored 'Confidential' Containers (CoCo) for Microsoft (Proprietary Spyware)
- No kidding!
- [Meme] Plagiarism Does Not Eliminate Jobs by Replacing Humans, It Replaces Human Knowledge With False Cruft
- We need to boycott sites that fake their output
- [Meme] Doing Dog's Job (Not God's Job)
- The FSF did not advertise the talk by RMS (its founder), who spoke in France almost exactly 23 hours ago
-
- Richard Stallman's Remarks on His Pain
- Published two days ago
- Focusing on the Issues
- we'll do our best to find the news and not talk about "Mr. T"
- Only About 3.6% of Web Users in Pakistan Use Vista 11, According to statCounter
- It's not hard to see why so far in 2025 Microsoft has already had several waves of mass layoffs - more than any other company
- Rumour: In IBM, Impending "25% Reduction in Finance Roles"
- 25% to be laid off?
- [Meme] Fake Articles From linuxsecurity.com (Just Googlebombing "Linux" With LLM Slop)
- Google should really just entirely delist that site
- RedHat.com Written by Microsoft Staff, Promoting Microsoft' Proprietary Software That Does Not Even Run on Linux!
- This is RedHat.com this week...
- Links 22/01/2025: Mass Layoffs at Stripe, Microsoft's Illegal Accounting Practices Under Scrutiny
- Links for the day
- Fake 'Article' by Brittany Day (Guardian Digital, Inc) About Linux Mint 22.1 'Xia'
- Apparently they've convinced themselves that this is OK
- Red Hat Dumps "Inclusive Language", Puts "Master" In Official Communications and Headlines
- Red Hat: you CANNOT say "master" (because it is racist). Also Red Hat: we put in it our headlines.
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, January 21, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, January 21, 2025
- Gemini Links 21/01/2025: Media Provocations and Nazis Not Tolerated
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: BetaNews Plagiarism and LLM Slop by UNIXMen
- "state-of-the-art" plagiarism
- What Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Debian Elections Teach Us About the State of Weak (or Fake) Communities
- They show a total lack of trust in these communities
- Links 21/01/2025: Mass Layoffs in "Security" at Microsoft (Despite Microsoft Promising It Would Improve After Many Megabreaches), Skype is Dead (Quietly)
- Links for the day
- Alternate Version of Daniel Pocock's 2024 Talk, "Technology in European Parliament Election Campaign"
- There's loud ovation at the end of the talk
- Gemini Links 21/01/2025: London Library, Kobo Sage, and Beyerdynamic DT 48 E
- Links for the day
- The January 20 Public Talk by Richard Stallman (Around Midday ET), Livestream 'Assassinated' by Google's YouTube
- our guess is that the 'cancel mob' sabotaged it, possibly by making a lot of false reports to YouTube
- [Meme] Free Software and Socially-Engineered Groupthink (to Serve Big Sponsors Like Google and Microsoft)
- They do this to RMS all the time
- [Video] Daniel Pocock's Public Talk About Free Software Politics, Social Engineering, Debian Deaths and Suicides, Coercion and Exploitation of Women
- took many months to get
- BetaNews Cannot Survive If Its Fake Articles Are Just SPAM for Companies Like AOHi and Aren't Even Composed by Humans
- This is what domains or former "news" sites do when they die and look very desperately for "another way"
- Pocock shot in the face, shot in the back, shot on Hitler's birthday saving France, Belgium and FOSDEM
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Dr Richard Stallman in Montpellier, Robert Edward Ernest Pocock in France
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 20, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, January 20, 2025
- Links 20/01/2025: Conflict, Climate, and More
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 20/01/2025: Conflicted Feelings and Politics
- Links for the day
- Daniel Pocock's ClueCon 2024 Presentation Was Also Streamed Live in YouTube and Later Removed by Google, Citing "Copyrights". Now It's Back.
- The talk covers social control media, Debian, politics, and more
- Google 'Cancels' RMS
- Is the talk happening?
- Microsoft Revisionism Debunked by Microsoft's Own Words About “the Failure of OS/2”
- The Register on “the failure of OS/2”
- Improving Daily Links by Culling Spam, Chaff, and LLM Slop
- the Web is getting worse
- Links 20/01/2025: Indonesia to Prevents Kids' Access to Social Control Media (Addiction and Worse), Climate News Catchuo
- Links for the day
- [Meme] EPO Targets
- Targets mean nothing if or when you measure the wrong thing
- EPO Union Says Monopoly-Granting Targets at EPO "Difficult to Achieve Without Compromising [Staff] Health, Personal Time or the Quality of the Final Products" (Products as in Monopolies, Not Real Products)
- To those of us (over 99.999% of people impacted by this) who do not work at the EPO the misuse of words like "products" (monopolies are not products) should be disturbing
- The EPO is Nowadays Trying to Trick Staff Into Settling Instead of Solving the Underlying Problems of Corruption and Injustice
- This seems like a classic case of "divide-and-rule" or using misled/weak people to harm the whole group (or "the village")
- Links 20/01/2025: More PR Stunts by ByteDance and MLK’s Legacy Disrespected
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 20/01/2025: Magnetic Fields, NixOS, and Pleroma
- Links for the day
- BetaNews Spreads Donald Trump Propaganda, Promotes Scams, and Publishes Fake 'Articles' About "Linux"
- This is typical BetaNews
- Richard Stallman 'Unveils' His January 20 Talk in Montpellier, France
- It's free (gratis)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 19, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, January 19, 2025