Plasma, the desktop environment from the KDE team has a big new upgrade coming with the release of Plasma 5.21 Beta and it's looking to be a thing of beauty.

Their current aim with Plasma 5.21 is to finely polish the experience overall, with the KDE team saying it pulls in "many improvements into Plasma’s design, utilities and themes, with the aim of providing end users with a more pleasant and accessible environment".

Plasma 5.21 will bring with it a redesigned application launcher, theme improvements, a brand new UI for the Plasma System Monitor, Plasma Firewall settings added to the overall system settings to let you configure both UFW and firewalld, plenty of UI cleaning done on system settings and much more.

It's big in many areas, not just design tweaks, with a big plan in progress to have KDE push for first-class Wayland support with KWin. They say that Plasma 5.21 "makes great headway to reach that goal". KWin, the compositor, has been "extensively refactored" and so you should see reduced latency throughout the entire stack.

Also available are mixed refresh rate setups with Wayland and Plasma 5.21. So now you can have one set at 144HZ and another at 60Hz and things won't bug out on you, and they say that early support for "multiple GPUs was also added on Wayland". Other Wayland interactions got improved too like virtual keyboard supporting GTK apps, along with many other Plasma components and KDE apps being more ready for Wayland.

Love a mix of dark and light themes? They have you covered there too with the introduction of Breeze Twilight as an official theme. It will give a dark theme for Plasma directly while mixing in light styles for applications. I must admit, it does look pretty good in they shot they showed off:

See the release announcement here .

GNOME Shell is already quite different to how traditional desktop environments feel, and they're planning to mix things up again with some design overhauls for GNOME 40.

The GNOME development team blogged about some of the upcoming plans in late December 2020 , which did look and sound quite promising. With the main focus being on the Activities Overview feature, which is where you access application launchers, open windows and more - the big overlay you open on GNOME. This is what shall be adjusted in their planned overhaul.

Expanding on this recently in a fresh blog post , the team showed off where they're currently at with this new design. Which you can see in action below, which they shared running from a Virtual Machine:

They're keen to note that everything else is the same on GNOME, just the Activities Overview is seeing the revamp and even with this new layout it's "structurally the same as the previous version". It will also work fine with vertical monitor positioning and shouldn't cause problems for multi-display setups either and they even said they have "some ideas for how to improve multi-monitor support".

Why are they doing this though? Quite a few reasons actually. It's going to be a lot more customizable and more personal, you will be greeted with a more welcoming screen after booting up instead of a blank desktop, much improved touchpad gesture support, easier understanding of workspaces and more.

GNOME mention how this was done as a result of "6 separate user research exercises" and they shall be providing details of that research to the public in a future post. Additionally, they do plan to open it up to wider testing and an "intensive period of bug fixing and evaluation" before they have a UI freeze in "about a month’s time". Not long to go though, as their Roadmap is aiming for a GNOME 40 release in March.

What do you think to the flow and design changes?

A KDE developer who regularly blogs about all the work going into the KDE ecosystem through the likes of the Plasma desktop environment and the various applications, has given an overview of what they expect to see through 2021.

Sounds like there's plenty of exciting work coming up for KDE and Plasma this year! Nate Graham mentions in the latest post that amongst other things, they might finally have a "Production-ready Plasma Wayland session". A lot of work went into this through 2020 and before that Graham mentioned that it "felt like a mess" but a whole year of progress changed that. Through 2021 we can expect to see a "trend of serious, concentrated Wayland work to continue in 2021" and to be in a better shape for more people to use.

Quite a long time coming, as it's been said that Wayland would replace X11 for years now and having KDE in top shape with it will certainly help push it forwards even more.

Something else exciting coming up is a replacement for the 'Kickoff' application launcher (Windows users would know it as a 'Start menu'). There's a merge request open, which they expect to be available in the Plasma 5.21 release for the new design and it's looking really quite slick:

On top of all that they're looking to get fingerprint support ready throughout the entire tech stack including everywhere you would need it from the login screen and the lock screen to their KAuth authorization library.

KDE does always look impressive, with tons of options for customization and hopefully 2021 shall be a big year for it.

1 year and 4 months of work later, the sleek and simple Linux desktop Xfce 4.16 is out now along with plenty of visual upgrades and some big tech upgrades too. A desktop for those of you who like less bling, more "classic" styling and one that just stays out of you way.

On top of various visual upgrades including a whole new set of icons for the default applications with a consistent colour palette, Xfce 4.16 has seen some other impressive improvements with one major tech change being the introduction of display scaling with a new fractional scaling option in the Display Settings.

They also merged together the preferred applications and mime-type settings into a single window, letting you pick all the defaults together. Saves time with less clicking around and just sounds like it makes a whole lot of sense. Thunar, the file manager for Xfce, also saw some big tech improvements too including the ability to easily pause file operations, queued transfers, view settings per-folder are remembered and support for GTK transparency is added in.

Xfce 4.16 also saw the Panel get plenty of work too including new animations, dark mode support, launchers having more options in the right-click menu, a new Status Tray plugin that combines both legacy Systray item support with modern StatusNotifier item support and various other little changes elsewhere like the About application now having a section for basic details of your PC.

Have a tour of what's new here . Full changelog here .

Ever tried or heard of the Budgie Desktop? It's a modern and feature rich Linux desktop environment from the Solus Linux team and they need a little help.

I'm quite a big fan of Budgie despite not using it directly myself, as their focus on keeping it clean really shows. That along with the slick sidebar to show off various applets like a calendar and media controls looks really good when you start using it. Developer Joshua Strobl who is the Experience Lead of the Solus project has issued a " Call To Action " as they're looking to get translations done for Budgie.

Pictured - the Budgie Desktop and Raven sidebar. Credit - Solus.

If you've wanted to dip your toes into helping a FOSS project, this could be a good starting point. Not everything is hacking away at code or doing graphics, there's tons of other areas to contribute like documentation and in this case translating your native language.

The release of Budgie 10.5.2 is "around the corner" and they're looking to get help with these languages:

• Belarusian (for Belarusian (latin))
• Bosnian
• Chinese (Hong Kong) and Chinese (Traditional): Same team as Chinese (Traditional)
• Croatian
• Esperanto
• Finnish
• Galician
• Japanese
• Latvian
• Malay
• Norwegian (Nyorsk): Same team as Norwegian (Bokmål)
• Punjabi
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish (Argentina), Spanish (Chile), Spanish (Mexico): Same team as Spanish and Spanish (American)
• Tatar
• Urdu
• Vietnamese

If you think you might be able to spend some time doing translations, you can head over to this linked forum topic to find out how you can get involved.

Want to learn more about Solus Linux and the Budgie Desktop environment? Check out the Solus website .

Plasma is arguably one of the prettiest Linux desktop environments around, and it's highly configurable too. The KDE team just released a huge upgrade with Plasma 5.20. This is a massive release that upgrades all parts of the Plasma desktop.

Fans of Wayland which is gradually replacing X.Org, compatibility continues being a focus and they've managed to make more steps as of this release. They mentioned that since 2019 they set a priority goal to adapt everything to support Wayland and it's "starting to pay off big time" now. As of this release middle-click paste with the Klipper clipboard app now works, plus the launcher/search tool KRunner now shows up correctly. Mouse and Touchpad support is getting close to being on par with X too, screencasting is now supported and more. Lots of steps taken.

That's just the under-the-hood stuff, tons of user-facing changes and improvements can be found across the whole desktop like the task manager being icon-only by default. A nicer default I think, as grouped icons look great and save precious space.

There's also new on-screen displays when you perform various actions like adjust volume, the system tray pop up now uses a grid rather than a list which looks a huge amount better, the digital clock widget is a bit more compact and has the date by default, the ALT keybind to hold and then drag windows around was moved to the Super key (also known as the "Windows" key) which is a nicer default with so many games needing the ALT key it was a common interference and the list of subtle improvements goes on for some time. Little things add up, and sane defaults are seriously important.

You can also find a newer Plasma Disks application which will add storage drive S.M.A.R.T monitoring directly into your System Settings — nice!

Check out their new release video:

Watch video on YouTube.com

See the release announcement here . Full changelog here .

GNOME 3.38 "Orbis" just landed today, which brings in another 6 months of hacking away at all the tech behind the GNOME desktop for a fully modern Linux environment. The Orbis code-name is to recognise the team behind the GUADEC 2020 conference, which the GNOME team said "is only possible thanks to the hard work of many volunteers".

This latest release brings in some big stuff too, here's some highlights:

• The application grid got new tools along with drag and drop support for setting it up how you want
• A newly design fingerprint dialog and better login support for it, along with new parental controls
• Special QR codes to give other devices access to your WiFI easily
• A better Maps application with a night mode too
• Improved screen recording with PipeWire
• Better multi-monitor support
• Updates to the Games app

Check out their seriously slick release video:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Full release notes can be found here .

As for when you will be able to get it, that depends on your distribution. For Ubuntu, which has GNOME as the default, it will be in the Ubuntu 20.10 release and the same for other distributions with regular release cycles. For distributions based on Arch Linux, it will no doubt arrive in updates shortly.

Lightweight classic desktop environment Xfce continues advancing, with a new pre-release update available for testing pulling in some great features.

Their current plan is to have a second pre-release at the end of September and if needed a third in October. With the aim to have the final Xfce 4.16 release in by November. It's shaping up to be a pretty exciting release, with lots of working going into all areas.

One of the big addition is support for fractional scaling, giving you better options to get your desktop exactly how you want it to be on whatever resolution that may be.

There's plenty more coming like a fancy set of new icons (shown below), they dropped lots of older GTK2 code to improve maintainability, the "About Xfce" dialog has been revamped, they added client-side decorations for settings dialogs, tons of bug fixes and more.

It's not just icons and application adjustments, they've also tweaked and upgraded the main panel user interface of Xfce too. There's a new "Status Tray" plugin, with unifies the system tray and the status notifier plugin to make life easier and more streamlined for users. If you set your panel to autohide, there's also now an animation to make it clear that's what it's doing.

Pictured: autohide animation.

Plenty more tweaks elsewhere to improve the flow. These tweaks include having launcher now show the desktop file action when right clicking (like being able to open a private window with Firefox), the application window list now supports "launching a new instance" in the right click menu, the panel can have a dark mode depending on theme support and the list goes on. Sounds like a real quality upgrade coming.

See the full post here . More about Xfce on the official site .

I have to admit Xfce is a wonderful Linux desktop environment. Especially if you like your classic style. If I wasn't so happy with MATE, Xfce would be my next choice.