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.
IceWM 4.0 fixes a bunch of bugs, including on OpenBSD, and improves Alt-Tab app switching
This is a salient reminder as the Linux world seems to obsess more over Wayland every day: there's more to FOSS Unix-like OSes than just Linux, and most Unix-like OSes run X11 in some form – even some on mainframes that lack any direct display output. X.org is not the only X11 server there is, and X11 isn't going anywhere.
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. The Register's sister site DevClass has covered Zig a few times, including the project's recent move from GitHub to Codeberg.
The Phoenix homepage says that it aims for simplicity:
Be a simpler X server than the Xorg server by only supporting a subset of the X11 protocol, the features that are needed by relatively modern applications (applications written/updated in the last ~20 years).
As such, the description reminds us of X12, which was a plan to devise a successor to X11. It's a big job but we wish them luck.
Even as new servers and window managers appear in the world of X11, other projects are eager to depart from it. The latest is the Budgie desktop environment, which just released Budgie 10.10.
This is planned to be the final release in the Budgie version 10 series. With it out the door, Budgie 10 is now in maintenance mode as the team focuses on the forthcoming Budgie 11.
As we reported back in 2023, the Budgie project has been exploring different routes to move off X11 and rebuild around a Wayland compositor instead. Version 10.10 follows just under two years after Budgie 10.9, and with this release, it can work with different Wayland compositors:
For Budgie 10.10, we recommend the use of a wlroots-based compositor. The team has put special effort into enabling a great experience with labwc, a modern, lightweight, and feature-rich Wayland compositor perfectly suited for Budgie Desktop.
That's the same compositor that openSUSE Leap 16 uses for a Wayland-based Xfce desktop. The Gentoo wiki lists ten wlroots-based compositors, so this seems like one of the best ways to offer users multiple compositor options.
This release drops some X11-specific components, and draws components from other environments such as Sway to implement things like wallpaper management, screenshot grabbing, and more. The new Budgie Desktop Services module orchestrates other components together, and interestingly given Budgie's roots in GNOME technologies, the new module is written using Qt 6, the same toolkit used in KDE Plasma 6 and LXQt 2.
The day after the new release, project lead Joshua Strobl published the latest State of the Budgie report, looking back at 2025 and describing the project's goals for Budgie 11.
Budgie 10.10 will be part of Fedora 44 and Ubuntu Budgie 26.04, which like the other non-GNOME flavors won't be a full five-year LTS version. ®
Source: The register