Devuan developer creates GTK2 fork
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=20175
A developer with the Devuan project has created a fork of the GTK2 toolkit with an aim to maintain it, provide fixes, and make it possible for older applications to remain compatible with the GTK toolkit. While GTK2 has not been maintained upstream for years, and it has been dropped from the latest versions of some distributions, it was the basis for many applications, not all of which have migrated to GTK3. The announcement thread has more information and the code has been published in Devuan's git repository.
Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6 Adds Support for Fedora 44, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
This release also adds support for the LoongArch64 architecture on Debian 14 Forky/Sid and support for the Mageia 10 distribution.
Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) R14.1.6 desktop environment has been released today for nostalgic KDE 3.5 users as the sixth maintenance release of the R14.1.x series, adding new features and enhancements.
Coming about five and a half months after Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.5, the Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6 release introduces support for recent GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon), Fedora Linux 44, and Mageia 10, as well as support for the LoongArch64 architecture on Debian 14 Forky/Sid.
Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6 also updates the available search engines and graphical UI, adds a "Go to Desktop" action to the Konqueror browser, adds an option for a 3D border to the Kicker application menu, and adds drag and drop support of snapshots into other apps from the KSnapshot screenshot utility.
In addition, this release adds "Compatibility options" and "Currency signs" options under Kxkb's "Miscellaneous options", improves the handling of special unicode characters in TQt (Trinity Qt), and improves arrow key and Page Up/Page Down navigation and scrollbar in the KCharSelect characters tool.
Furthermore, Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6 brings improvements to various TDE-branded icons, pictures, and artwork, removes the sloppy Flying Konqi wallpaper, adds support for XZ archives to TDE's KIO slave component, and adds support for Poppler 26.04 and later to TDE's graphics utilities.
TDE's TWin (Trinity Window Manager) has been improved as well in this release, with fixes to tiling of maximized windows and opacity-related issues, making using transparency easier and providing an overall better user experience.
Also improved was signature verification in KMail's encrypted emails, language translations in the KVIrc IRC client, and handling of special unicode characters in TQt (Trinity Qt). Moreover, TDE R14.1.6 adds filesystem type indication in the TDE Display Manager's Meta Info property page.
Of course, numerous bugs were fixed, so check out the full release notes for more details about the changes included in Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6, which you can download for Linux distros, as well as BSD and DilOS systems from the official website. Upgrading from Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.5 should be straightforward.
Dillo Browser Release 3.3.0
https://dillo-browser.org/release/3.3.0/
https://dillo-browser.org/
Dillo is a fast and small graphical web browser with the following features:
- Multi-platform, running on Linux, BSD, MacOS, Windows (via Cygwin) and even Atari.
- Written in C and C++ with few dependencies.
- Implements its own real-time rendering engine.
- Low memory usage and fast rendering, even with large pages.
- Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library.
- Support for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and local files.
- Extensible with plugins written in any language (see the list of plugins).
- Is free software licensed with the GPLv3.
- Helps authors to comply with web standards by using the bug meter Bugmeter icon.
The Fedora Linux 44 Release is Here!
https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-44/
I'm excited to announce that Fedora Linux 44 is here! Keep reading to discover highlights of Fedora Linux 44, or if you are ready, just jump right in and give Fedora Linux 44 a try!
Thanks to everyone who helped!Thank you and congrats to everyone who has contributed to this release. And thanks to everyone who showed up for the virtual release party last Friday. We celebrated a little early this year, just after the go/no-go meeting made the release official. If you weren't able to join us live, you can watch the recording and hear about some of the great work from the contributors involved.
Looking to upgrade?
If you have an existing system, Upgrading Fedora Linux to a New Release is easy. In most cases, it's not very different from just rebooting for regular updates, except you'll have a little more time to grab a coffee.
Ready to Fresh Install?
If this is your first time running Fedora Linux, or if you just want to start fresh with Fedora, download the install media for our flagship Editions (Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Cloud, Server, CoreOS, IoT), or one of our Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, Cosmic, Budgie, Sway), or alternate desktop options (like Cinnamon, Xfce, Sway, or others).
What's new?As usual with Fedora Linux, there are just too many individual changes and improvements to go over in detail. You'll want to take a look at the release notes for that.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday May 03, @02:08PM
I've really missed how well GTK2 performs and have hated 3.x onward, everything from the theming syntax to the performance. If they're serious about modernizing GTK2, it would also revive things like the LXDE project.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Sunday May 03, @03:58PM
I welcome the forking of GTK2-NG and the ongoing maintenance of Trinity. The desktop was done 20 years ago, with Windows 7, Snow Leopard, GNOME 2, and KDE 3. Boot into Ubuntu 10.04 - and you'll feel (or at least I feel) everything was in the right place, and it just worked. In fact, the original Mac in 1984 had it mostly right, with the only significant funcional features missing being content-size proportional scroll boxes, tool tips, and right-click context menus. If one has to maintain vertical market applications that are made for the desktop over many years, no change is good change.
Corporate America has other ideas, because that model means no profit, and even the last C-suite dimwit had realized by 2010 that only rent-seeking was the way forward. As a result, we have lots of web applications, where a desktop version would be clearly more elegant and much more frugal on resources, and Google Chrome now de-facto is the single (very inefficient) OS for SaaS deployments. It appears Linux for general computing might finally become an unstoppable avalanche and replace Windows, so we also have the push to turn it into green pastures for such endeavours. This needs some preparation:
First, a platform that is robust against greedy market players rather than accepting friendly community members. Technically that means a zero-trust architecture on the local machine. Everything from why a Mac asks if an application may access the "Documents" folder to the weird obsession of Wayland people that applications can't place their windows. Google is already there with Linux/Android and it's app store, and particularly around GNOME, they tighten the shackles to turn Linux/whatsleftofGNU into a similarly secured appliance runner. With the ultimate goal to gold-cage the users for eternal rent flow.
Second, getting rid of annoying licence requirements for source releases would be of much help. Note how all the the Rust porting changes from GPL to MIT to enable that? The bosses won't care if the code is some well hung C legacy (now also audited by increasingly better AI for security), or some provably memory safe-except-where-unsafe new Rust creation. They care about being able to include some secret sauce in there to prevent forks and competition. Oh, and they wouldn't want any Euro-Trolls in, so Qt is a non-starter in that game. (On that matter, it occurs to me that there could be a conspiracy to discredit Qt by labeling data inheritance as evil. Hmmm. cf. my journal entry on the inheritance topic).
However, the above developments bereave not only desktop power users of their platform. Even software providers in vertical markets for which the software is just a means to an end are affected. Some 70 to 90% of worldwide software development effort is vertical market, i.e. is not sold as application package to some user. It's not so bad for one group: A bank, for an internal planning system, today would likely roll out a solution running under Chrome, because it's the only (to them) acceptable way to reach Windows and Macs, and everyone's doing it anyway (efficiency be damned, just use that package to auto-infer TypeScript from JS and compile that to Wasm). Another group is high-end embedded. These need complete control of the GUI (for Kiosk use on the floor, and non-Kiosk mode for maintenance) and complete control of the machine (because some complex external process might be controlled). This latter group is cut off. Also, much of the vertical market will have developed for W7 so far, but those might now be in a situation where MS won't talk to them about getting official standalone 10LTSC for five customers, and the GNOME/Wayland world just doesn't do what they need. This might me a rather large group on the search for a suitable platform now or soon.
... yikes ... That was way longer than I wanted to write, but it should line out my thoughts. I guessa the existing Linux desktop power users, existing Linux high-end embedded developers, and an influx of former Windows high-end embedded developers looking for a new home will be enough of a critical mass to sustain a "grassroots" desktop as we know it. Making predictions (I promise, no worse than Gartner), I can see MS accepting the fate that they can't maintain the Windows ecosystem performance alone against the entire world (including themselves!) working on Linux. They would switch the WSL stack order (Linux kernel below, so gaming and AI catches up in performance) and eventually fuse with GNOME. The Azure App Store can then deploy Flatpaks - for rent. Meanwhile, on the other side, creating the great 2028 Linux Schism, Mint have switched to Devuan as base, apply some lipstick to the greybeards' pig, and the world is in balance again. :)
Technically, on the topic of GTK2-NG, two years ago, I did port a 20 year old application over from GTK2 to GTK3. Most of the work was getting single byte encoding to UTF-8. I suppose most GTK2 versions already do UTF-8 ex-works. Other than that, I think I thought "reasonable cleanup" in GTK3 in some places where I had to make changes, and "well, that's stupid" about GTK3 in others.
Right now, I have a project where a Linux backend is supposed to be added to a C++ framework, and I settled on GTK3. It still mostly fits the event flow metaphor compared to NextStep, Carbon, WinForms and such platform toolkits. IIRC, I spotted a few places in GTK4 where that wouldn't fit in anymore (aside from the window moving issue), so I stuck with 3. Even in 4 there are a few places where I thought "reasonable cleanup", but here the majority was where I just thought "twats". I'm also not fond of how theming is handled past GTK2, e.g. the CSS engine in 3 is pure bloat.
So yeah, a modernized GTK2 would be easy to use and a welcome fallback position for several things I'm involved with, especially for the case that GTK3 gets discontinued with GTK5 out.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday May 03, @09:30PM (1 child)
Thanks for the post, it’s nice to get a roundup on browser and OS rosters here and there.
(Score: 2) by cereal_burpist on Saturday May 09, @05:13AM
I had never heard of Dillo either, until I started using it as the HTML viewer in Claws Mail (via plugin).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 04, @05:50PM
Most discussion of this topic is very top down by people who use operating systems instead of apps.
Mot people use apps to do "stuff", not desktop systems.
Historically I've had excellent results using I3 as my program starting system and not using a "desktop" as I'm not very interested in what heavy desktop systems can do.
Recently I've run into problem with "electron based apps" wanting to use XDG and I3 under XDG is ... questionable. In that case I'm better off with XFCE.
XDG is a middleware, your app ask XDG to open a file chooser window and on a Gnome system it opens the gnome file chooser, on a KDE it opens the kde file chooser, on a system with XFCE it opens the XFCE file chooser, on a system that only has I3 installed, it usually coredumps and pisses me off immensely.
So much for using my favorite tiling WM I need a "desktop environment including XDG support" to run stuff. Very annoying when all I want is a program launcher and get out of my way. KDE and Gnome are so huge and slow and hard to use and hard to automate configuration, very annoying.