"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."
"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."
"As additional evidence that X11 isn't dead and shows no sign of disappearing just yet, a very preliminary new X11 server debuted at the end of 2025. Phoenix is very new so far, but it's an entirely independent new X11 server - it's not a fork of X.org. Rather than being written in C, it's being developed in the Zig language, a relatively new low-level language that aspires to be a better replacement for C."
IceWM released version 4.0 on January 1, continuing active development that began with version 0.8.9 in 1997. The project moved through versions 3.1–3.9 after 3.0 in 2022, so the major version bump is largely numerical rather than a full rewrite. Version 4.0 improves Alt-Tab window switching, defaults to 32-bit RGBA for transparency, and fixes several bugs including keyboard-layout switching on OpenBSD. Budgie released version 10.10 on January 11 as the first fully Wayland-native release in its series. A new independent X11 server, Phoenix, debuted at the end of 2025 and is written in Zig rather than C, remaining very preliminary.
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