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Desktop Environments: COSMIC Desktop and Xfwl4
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ COSMIC Desktop ‘Frosted Glass’ UI Effect Previewed
COSMIC, the GNU/Linux desktop that can look and work however you dang well like, is adding more bling. System76 co-founder Carl Richell has given us our first look at the ‘Frosted Glass’ effect coming to the COSMIC desktop in Epoch 2 (as the desktop releases are named): System76’s engineering team is opting to use a ‘more performant’ Dual Kawase blur, commonly used in gaming, to handle the dynamic effect. This apparently offers a ‘close approximation’ of Gaussian blur, but is not as resource intensive. That’s important.
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XDA ☛ I tried COSMIC Desktop as a KDE Plasma fanboy, and one thing stopped me from switching
A little while ago, one of our editors gave COSMIC Desktop a try. Being someone who will die on the KDE Plasma hill, I was very interested to take a look at what COSMIC Desktop could bring to the table. After all, if I just blindly stuck with one desktop environment forever, I would miss out on all the cool stuff that other environments were up to.
So, I decided to give COSMIC Desktop a try. I put aside my undying adoration for KDE Plasma, downloaded Pop!_OS with COSMIC pre-installed, and gave it a go. And I would have been a covert, if it wasn't for one problem that ended up being a dealbreaker for me.
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LWN ☛ Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor
The Xfce team has announced that it will be providing funding to Brian Tarricone to work on xfwl4, a Wayland compositor for Xfce:
Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building blocks.