14 DAY TRIAL // Ken Moore, the creator of the FreeBSD-based TrueOS operating system using the Lumina desktop environment, announced today the release of Lumina 1.4.0.
Lumina 1.4.0 is a major release that introduces several new core components, such as the Lumina Theme Engine to provide enhanced theming capabilities for the desktop environment and apps written in the Qt 5 application framework. The Lumina Theme Engine comes with a configuration utility and makes the previous desktop theme system obsolete, though it's possible to migrate your current settings to the new engine.
"The backend of this engine is a standardized theme plugin for the Qt5 toolkit, so that all Qt5 applications will now present a unified appearance (if the application does not enforce a specific appearance/theme of it’s own)," said the developer in today's announcement. "Users of the Lumina desktop will automatically have this plugin enabled: no special action is required."
The Lumina Theme Engine also comes with a bunch of superb wallpapers contributed by various artists (check them out in the screenshot gallery attached at the end of the article), and Lumina 1.4.0 is the first release of the desktop environment to ship with a standalone, built-in PDF viewer called lumina-pdf, which can be used to view, present, and print PDF documents.
Coming soon to an operating system near you
Under the hood, it looks like some of the Qt5 dependencies have been bumped to new versions. For example, the lumina-core component now requires Qt 5.4 or later, lumina-mediaplayer needs Qt 5.7 or higher, and the rest of the components rely on Qt 5.2 or later. The developer recommends always using the latest version of the Qt 5 libraries when compiling Lumina desktop for your operating system.
That being said, the Lumina 1.4.0 desktop environment should soon come to an operating system near you, so make sure you update to this version as soon as it lands in the stable software repositories of your favorite OS. We recommend studying the full changelog attached below if you're curious to know what else is new in this release, which also adds a couple of new ZFS integrations.
