IceWM 4.1.0 Drops Seven Months After 4.0, Brings Stability Tweaks and Scripting Upgrades
The lightweight X11 window manager addresses an alpha blending regression and adds a couple of useful options for power users.
Gijs Berkers shipped IceWM 4.1.0 on August 6, 2025, wrapping up the first major release cycle since version 4.0 landed on New Year’s Day. It’s a maintenance update, but one that finally tames the visual artifacts some users hit when alpha blending became the default back in January.
Keep in mind that IceWM has never chased bleeding edge features. The project has deliberately stuck to speed, simplicity, and minimal interference with the user's workflow ever since Marko Maček first wrote it in C++ in 1997. That philosophy still drives every point release.
The biggest win here is a forced Alpha = false default. As Berkers noted in the release notes, the change avoids "rare video performance problems reported by users with certain hardware configurations." You no longer have to hunt through a config file to silence display glitches on finicky GPU setups.
What’s Actually in the Update
The rest of the patch set tightens up configuration parsing and X11 resource cleanup. Unterminated strings in icewmrc files will no longer crash the window manager during load. A _NET_STARTUP_ID parsing bug is gone, which should make application startup tracking play nicer with other EWMH-aware tools. And yes, the picture resource now frees properly before its pixmap, silencing an X11 error that used to pop up during shutdown.
Next, the feature additions land quietly. A new ignoreUserTime window option lets you keep specific apps pinned to the background without them fighting for focus based on user-time timestamps. In icesh, a mousemove action now lets you shift the cursor position straight from a CLI script. Both are niche, but exactly the kind of toggle scripting communities tend to build their workflows around.
Translation strings got a refresh for Ukrainian, Turkish, Greek, Georgian, Danish, and both Chinese variants. It’s worth noting that IceWM 4.0 itself pulled in a lot of weight. The redesigned Alt+Tab quick switch with letter search, standardized HiDPI icon sizes, server-side picture caching, and a handful of new icesh commands moved the project forward considerably. The community liked it, landing 24 reactions on the GitHub release notes.
It’s not the most exciting point release of the year. But if you run IceWM daily and were dealing with alpha blending glitches or parsing crashes after 4.0, this is the patch you want. The only real friction is package manager lag. You might need to build from source or wait for your distribution’s packagers to catch up.
If you need a refresher on the desktop environment itself, IceWM ships a taskbar, pager, dynamic menus, multi-monitor support via RandR and Xinerama, a wallpaper manager, session handling, and a system tray. It runs on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, NixOS, openSUSE, Gentoo, Slackware, antiX, CentOS, and most *BSD variants.
Grab the source tarball directly from the repository. The file is icewm-4.1.0.tar.lz with shasum 8c6e335fa8089c04cb453acaca08b6e7efbfdeb9. The project is licensed under GNU LGPL.
