IceWM soldiers on while Budgie jumps the Wayland ship.
Two new Linux GUIs – plus Phoenix, an experimental new X server in Zig.
The new year brings releases from opposite ends of the Linux GUI spectrum: IceWM, an X11 window manager from the late 1990s, and Budgie, a newer full desktop environment that has gone Wayland-native.
Version 4.0 of IceWM came out on January 1. Ten days later, the Budgie desktop environment followed with version 10.10, the first entirely Wayland-native version of the environment.
The first release in the IceWM project’s own version history was 0.8.9 in 1997, which means that it’s about to turn 30. Although for humans this is a point in life many find quite troubling, by FOSS standards it’s almost geriatric – but even so, it remains active and in good shape.
We covered the release of version 3.0 back in 2022, and development hasn’t slackened since then. It’s gone through every version from 3.1 to 3.9, so the change in major version looks to be more numerical than based on it being a major rewrite. This release does have improved handling of switching between windows with Alt-Tab and it defaults to working in 32-bit RGBA color (that’s Red/Green/Blue/Alpha, for transparency handling). It also fixes half a dozen bugs, including keyboard-layout switching on OpenBSD.
