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Honestly I was talking about windows in that aspect, I dont use anything apple except for the iphone, and i will as of now not upgrade from my jailbroken 6S. With linux its implied that you can keep what ever UI you prefer as there is many desktop environments to choose from, versions included on almost every linux distro. And things like Enlightenment allow you to roll your own DE

"Something maybe rough around the edges but usable and exciting enough to use as daily desktop?"

Yup, that's pretty much the definition of Enlightenment

I love the Terminology terminal emulator and wish it was easier to install on non-Enlightenment distros.

"Something maybe rough around the edges but usable and exciting enough to use as daily desktop?"

Yup, that's pretty much the definition of Enlightenment

I love the Terminology terminal emulator and wish it was easier to install on non-Enlightenment distros.

See here: https://phab.enlightenment.org/phame/live/3/post/e20_alpha_release/

https://www.enlightenment.org/...

Yes, I know that, and I do use an alternative.

https://www.enlightenment.org/...

Really ? My terminal allow 256*256*256*256 color palette for the 16 colors in the UI and the full 256 in the theme definition. Maybe you should try it, and it can even do a hell of a lot more than that : https://enlightenment.org/p.ph...

I am looking forward when we can make alternate console daemon !

E18 eats all of them for breakfast!

That's probably why the Enlightenment home page shows it running on a phone.

..and you can use Terminology to edit that Hosts file, too.

Who'd have thought this troll would have an actual reference point to a submission...

After looking at the screenshots, I don't understand what the fuss is all about. If that's supposed to represent the future I need to remind you that we're in 2012.

From the screenshots, I'd say it looks a bit better than Windows 98, but not any better than current GUIs from all three major operating systems.

I looked at the screenshots you linked to and I had a different reaction. I thought, that looks great! There's little if no unnecessary clutter, no excessive and superfluous window decorations. It's clean, without quite being spartan, and functional with everything in a fairly familiar place. Fantastic!

I don't remember Windows 98 that well, but if it was like this, it was way ahead of its time. The new interfaces of KDE 4, Windows 8, Gnome 3 and Unity suck ass. Enlightenment looks like a breath of fresh air in comparison.

After looking at the screenshots, I don't understand what the fuss is all about. If that's supposed to represent the future I need to remind you that we're in 2012.

From the screenshots, I'd say it looks a bit better than Windows 98, but not any better than current GUIs from all three major operating systems.

I'm a heavy KDE user but I keep switching DEs and WMs every now and then. Currently I'm playing with Enlightenment which is as pretty as it always has been. More importantly, it starts up on my aging laptop in less than 2 seconds, which is years ahead of both Gnome and KDE. As another lightweight but full-fledged alternative to the big two, I recommend it highly.

Enlighenment will work with Wayland and will be getting better in the future. Bummer they think they need to extend Wayland itself though.

New E17 Snapshot (76819) Sep 18, 2012 at 03:00 PM

I'm sure there are people out there saying "There's no way two E17 snapshots will ever come out on the same day." My response is as follows:

This time, in addition to featuring the usual improvements of LESS CRASHING and IMPROVEMENTS TO NOT CRASHING, I'm pleased to announce some other changes, though this is not in any way a comprehensive list, and not all the changes were made by me:

• DND no longer causes random hangs in some situations
• Crashes now occur much less often when running executables from E17 as seen since last night
• Filemanager will no longer sometimes crash when changing directories as seen since yesterday
• Filemanager tooltips now properly hide when leaving the source icon of the tooltip

LOL

I wish to elaborate on why the painter model is inefficient with today's GPUs.

The painter employs an imperative approach that does not allow for much freedom. Example: begin(), line(), text(), line(), end(). The two line() calls should be grouped together, but they cannot, because then the result would not be equal (what if text() drew over the first line, then the second line() call drew over the text for example?). The result is pretty bad: the underlying implementation has to perform tons of unnecessary shader switches (since font rendering most likely uses different shaders than the line drawing code), and perhaps texture switches (if texture-based AA is used). In addition, every time the painter is used, a vertex buffer has to be filled with vertex data. It cannot be easily cached. And this applies to *every* begin..end painter sequence.

A declarative QML-like approach is a much, much better idea. The fundamental reasons are that (1) the renderer now always has a global picture of what the frame shall look like, (2) intermediate results are much easier to cache, (3) no strict sequence of drawings is given, therefore the renderer is free to reorder and merge drawcalls in any way it wishes. This benefits even pure CPU-based rendering - the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries render using a graph, and are extremely efficient (they clip and cull primitives early on, group primitives together, IIRC can even detect accumulated opacity from several alpha blended layers ..).

C++ QML bindings would likely consist of an API that can modify the graph. Either way, the painter-based approach is gone.

This is an imperfect solution which assumes that redrawing inside the window (which is the OpenGL texture) is done quickly enough. It also splits the system into two parts: the hardware-accelerated window compositing part and the unaccelerated drawing part.

More sophisticated solutions exist. Examples:
Using distance fields in OpenGL shaders for font rendering
Using textures for anti-aliased vector graphics rendering
Spline rendering in the GPU for non-affine vector graphics rendering (including text)

Such techniques assume the presence of a GPU. Forget about abstracting that away with a painter-based architecture. The fundamental problem is that the painter acts at a level that is too low. This is the reason for the higher-level QML scenegraph. As for the missing C++ bindings, thats debatable, but if some appear one day, expect a high level API. Nothing else makes sense.

It should be noted that the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries do something very similar with the combination of Evas and Edje.

Why can't you have both?

As zippy as your P4 with 768MB of RAM, only on a 300MHz P2 with 128MB of RAM. And that's with the compositing effects turned on with CPU rendering.

I like XFCE, but I wouldn't switch back to it now that I have a stable e17 system up... many of the work flow concepts are identical between them, though. They both treat work flow very differently from how Gnome and KDE do, and both are *significantly* more productive.

Here is the announcement that went out on the mail list over a year ago.

From: Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) xxx
To: xxx xxx xxx
Subject: [e-users] 1.0 Release of core EFL
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2011 12:43:25 +0900

Finally after a lkong time coming, we are pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the core EFL libraries (With the exception of Eet at 1.4). This has been many years coming. The following libraries have been released:

• Eina - 1.0.0
• Eet - 1.4.0
• Evas - 1.0.0
• Ecore - 1.0.0
• Embryo - 1.0.0
• Edje - 1.0.0
• E_Dbus - 1.0.0
• Efreet - 1.0.0
• Eeze - 1.0.0

You can download the respective libraries from our Download Page:

http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=download&l=en

It has also shipped in a commercial product (a smart refrigerator). I wouldn't be surprised if it has been used in other products but the e17 activity on the list skyrocketed so much after that announcement, the signal to noise ratio for e16 messages got so bad I unsubscribed.

I don't want to quibble over whether this means e17 was "stable" or not. This is the event I was referring to, please feel free to interpret it however you want.

Because I am Enlightened

Makes me miss the E file manager ...

The display looks like it's running the Enlightenment window manager. Samsung is a known, perhaps the biggest, sponsor of the Enlightenment project, which they probably use in some hardware already shipping now.

I think you want an advanced window manager and not a GUI. There are a bunch but I'd try enlightenment Since you are an Ubuntu guy, OpenGEU might be a distribution (live CD available) you would like that is a nice transition. They use enlightenment but with a more minimal version of Gnome.

First, I just want to give a great kudos to the Inferno developers who made this new Inferno-based Android. I am really impressed by what you guys have accomplished. For those that critizise the UI: They even mention that in the youtube video that the UI at the moment is based on Tk which is outdated. An idea that I got was that perhaps an EFL ( http://www.enlightenment.org/ ) port/binding to limbo would be the perfect match. 1) Language-wise: In contrast to its competitors GTK and QT, it is based on C rather than C++. 2) EFL already has its uses in embedded UIs, including phones. 3) Ideology-wise: EFL is permissively (BSD) licensed and fits nicely with the Android userland (Apache) and Inferno (MIT/X) licensed parts.

Try e17.

http://www.enlightenment.org/

It's entirely modular and totally customizable. If you like the Gnome2 interface, then set it up that way. If you prefer KDE's interface, then set it up *that* way. If you prefer, roll your own interface. XFCE is great, I used it for years, but it lacks the desktop gadget support that's built in to e17, and it uses more memory. :)

The packages for Ubuntu are way outdated, but there are e17-based distros that maintain their own packages... Sabayon, Bodhi (which I'm using), MacPup, and a few others leap to mind.

If you want to see some really beautiful C code, take a look at the Enlightenment project http://enlightenment.org/

Yet the EFL is now passed version 1.0: http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=news/show&l=en&news_id=28

Free software gets a great GUI and if forked _all_ devices will be faster.

No point in hating progress, proprietary is only extra competition. As we all know better does not mean more succesful. Take a seriously hard look at DOS and Windows. That said I think (at least technologicaly) nothing surpasses KDE 4.6 desktop iregardless if you like KDE 4.6 or not.

just look at linux GUI's just a rip of, of Windows.

-1 uninformed, at best
Classic Gnome with customization
Gnome Shell (useful screenshot)
Enlightenment (no screenshots on official site)
GNUstep
Fluxbox
Xfce

To continue on-topic: wasn't it just last week when we noted that the Windows Phone marketplace specifically excludes GPL software?

What's with the double line spacing, /.?

Uh?

I think he is referring to some easy to find links to screenshots which is obviously of little concern no matter the resolution of those using it. The definition of "full size" he is referring to is more like "doesn't feel like I forgot my telescope in my other pants".

There are a couple here but they look nothing like the marketing material on the main page (and are almost 2 years old).

The message I replied to was looking for API documentation.

Its all there. Follow the link to the Foundation Libraries, ( http://www.enlightenment.org/?p=news/show&l=en&news_id=28 ) and drill down for documentation.

Asking for screen shots of APIs Is kind of like asking for screen shots of a dictionary. But the GP did not ask for screen shots.

Damn new layout...

I'm running it on Gentoo. It isn't in the official portage, so one has to get it from an overlay, though there are three to chose from. The official enlightenment one, and two others (Vapier's is recognised as 'enlightenment' by layman) with instructions on the wiki.

http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/Gentoo
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/E17

It seems like the enlightenment one tries to keep ebuilds at stable builds, though Vapier's seems to get the latest from SVN, though I've never had problems getting from it.

Huh, that's odd:

Available Packages
Name : enlightenment
Arch : x86_64
Version : 0.16.999.050
Release : 6.fc13
Size : 5.9 M
Repo : fedora
Summary : Highly optimized and extensible desktop shell
URL : http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en
License : MIT
Description : Enlightenment 0.17 is desktop shell based on Enlightenment
                        : Foundation Libraries. It's highly optimized and provides extensive
                        : theming capabilities. A Desktop shell means it's a window manager
                        : plus a file manager, plus configuration utilitys all in one. It
                        : works reasonably fast even on old and low range computers,
                        : providing eye-candy environment.

The EFL begins with Evas, our canvas library. Because Evas is built on several different selectable engines (Linux FrameBuffer, DirectFB, X11, OpenGL/OpenGL-ES, QTopia, etc) the platform is extremely portable, which translates thru to all of the libraries built on top of it.

Hey, if they were good enough to run a Brazilian fridge, they should be good enough for you. Seriously though, you should take at look at the EFL. They are flexible, powerful and efficient. There will be a learning curve with whatever libraries you choose to use. You might as well get something wonderful in return for your investment of time and energy. You want the efficiency of OpenGL without the limitations? You got it.

Being different from Windows is a good thing. I use Gnome because I was looking for a clean, simple UI, like an old Mac, for other people to use. I actually prefer Enlightenment and all those beautiful game-like looks. I am all in favor of creativity.

http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e16

http://e17-stuff.org/

http://www.enlightenment.org/

Being different from Windows is a good thing. I use Gnome because I was looking for a clean, simple UI, like an old Mac, for other people to use. I actually prefer Enlightenment and all those beautiful game-like looks. I am all in favor of creativity.

http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e16

http://e17-stuff.org/

http://www.enlightenment.org/

I was all excited to see DEC back in the news. Oh how I missed you since that fateful day in 1998 when you got bought by Compaq, which inturn got bought by HP by the woman who now hopes to do for California and America, what she did for HP.

But alas, no. You are gone and shall never return. I guess I'll just have to file your section next to Enlightenment's, and all the other sections that people have no idea what they're for. Can't someone over clock a a DEC Alpha or something?

I'm really tempted to post some enlightenment news, but I wish it was something more than their most recent point release.

I was all excited to see DEC back in the news. Oh how I missed you since that fateful day in 1998 when you got bought by Compaq, which inturn got bought by HP by the woman who now hopes to do for California and America, what she did for HP.

But alas, no. You are gone and shall never return. I guess I'll just have to file your section next to Enlightenment's, and all the other sections that people have no idea what they're for. Can't someone over clock a a DEC Alpha or something?

I'm really tempted to post some enlightenment news, but I wish it was something more than their most recent point release.

Yeah, it strikes me as funny and sad that a comment on this site, which is supposedly a tech site that focuses a lot on linux, are so clueless that they are modding comments that are based on information that are at least three years out of date as insightful. Here's an image showing the configuration dialog on e17 that clearly shows a "fonts" category, using the old antiquated bling theme no less. Here's the svn repo. that shows that the fonts configuration is at least 3 years old. That isn't even when the fonts dialog got put in there, it's only when they migrated to svn. I know, I used e17 for many, many years. The real truth is that e17 is the most customizable and flexible desktop manager that currently exists. You can not only customize different classes of fonts (e.g. dialog text vs. window titles, etc.), but you can define nearly everything from what happens when a mouse clicks on a window border vs. windows interior vs. desktop and just about everything else. The theming possibilities are likewise the most interesting I have ever seen for any window manager.

The only reason I gave up e17 is that they decided to break parts of my theme for the login manager and I have just had enough of re-writing my theme every few months because they decided that they needed to do something differently. They're stuck in a point of perpetual alpha state software -- they have taken so long to release the software that they have to rewrite all the original code because it's old and out of date which means they can't release the software yet. It's not like it's getting more stable either because they *still* were breaking things nearly every other time I would update. A bigger issue however is the fact that I want compiz and I was having endless problems with vsync using the e17 compiz module which is a deal-breaker since I need to be able to watch movies on my PC and I want fancy effects.

Yeah, it strikes me as funny and sad that a comment on this site, which is supposedly a tech site that focuses a lot on linux, are so clueless that they are modding comments that are based on information that are at least three years out of date as insightful. Here's an image showing the configuration dialog on e17 that clearly shows a "fonts" category, using the old antiquated bling theme no less. Here's the svn repo. that shows that the fonts configuration is at least 3 years old. That isn't even when the fonts dialog got put in there, it's only when they migrated to svn. I know, I used e17 for many, many years. The real truth is that e17 is the most customizable and flexible desktop manager that currently exists. You can not only customize different classes of fonts (e.g. dialog text vs. window titles, etc.), but you can define nearly everything from what happens when a mouse clicks on a window border vs. windows interior vs. desktop and just about everything else. The theming possibilities are likewise the most interesting I have ever seen for any window manager.

The only reason I gave up e17 is that they decided to break parts of my theme for the login manager and I have just had enough of re-writing my theme every few months because they decided that they needed to do something differently. They're stuck in a point of perpetual alpha state software -- they have taken so long to release the software that they have to rewrite all the original code because it's old and out of date which means they can't release the software yet. It's not like it's getting more stable either because they *still* were breaking things nearly every other time I would update. A bigger issue however is the fact that I want compiz and I was having endless problems with vsync using the e17 compiz module which is a deal-breaker since I need to be able to watch movies on my PC and I want fancy effects.

Um, excuse me? What SoC are you talking about? With some simple googling, here's two videos - 1, 2 - showing 3D demos running on the OMAP3-powered Beagle Board. The linked news item (TFA) even mentions an OpenGL ES 'engine' for Evas being contributed by Samsung. 3D drivers are certainly available for the PowerVR GPU in the OMAP3 (albeit binary-only), and Enlightenment would seem to be able to use 3D acceleration.

Replying to self... Sorry, realised he wants virtual desktops seperatly using Xineorama/Twinview. iirc Enlightenment WM does keep each screen seperate, including alt+tab, and does to virtual desktops the way he wants.

Oh, or install Compiz, and try:

"Desktop" area --> Desktop Cube --> "General" Tab and untick "One Big Cube" in "Multi Output Mode".

(afraid I can't test it myself easily)

That link just describes the two alternatives mentioned in the OP. It doesn't even address the question posed by the OP.

In other words, your link describes two monitors sharing a workspace. OP wants two monitors with separate workspaces, while still being able to drag windows between them.

What I can't understand is whats the difference between twinview/xineorama while duplicating the menu/taskbar, and what the article poster wants?

Replying to self... Sorry, realised he wants virtual desktops seperatly using Xineorama/Twinview. iirc Enlightenment WM does keep each screen seperate, including alt+tab, and does to virtual desktops the way he wants.

If you're looking for a generic UI than I suppose easy to recognize generic symbols are the best. However, my dream is to make the UIs that actually mimic reality but the trick is keeping them fairly usuable still. I don't want it to be cartoonish, I want you to look at the UI and mistake it for a fantastic physical machine rather than a monitor. For example, if you look at the themes on the exchange site for e17, a lot of these not what you'd call an every day sort of theme but appeal to a particular aesthetic. Examples include steampunk, grunge, and baroque that incorporate photo realistic elements with varying efficacy (e.g. baroque is a cool concept but very hard on the eyes). The idea is to make the living-room computer more than just a tool, but a functional piece of art.

What I'd love to do is make a theme that looks like the 1960s version of futuristic computers and space ship aesthetic from the movie 2001, with light-bulb lit buttons of different colored plastic, lots of milled metal highlights and dark plastic everywhere.

If you're looking for a generic UI than I suppose easy to recognize generic symbols are the best. However, my dream is to make the UIs that actually mimic reality but the trick is keeping them fairly usuable still. I don't want it to be cartoonish, I want you to look at the UI and mistake it for a fantastic physical machine rather than a monitor. For example, if you look at the themes on the exchange site for e17, a lot of these not what you'd call an every day sort of theme but appeal to a particular aesthetic. Examples include steampunk, grunge, and baroque that incorporate photo realistic elements with varying efficacy (e.g. baroque is a cool concept but very hard on the eyes). The idea is to make the living-room computer more than just a tool, but a functional piece of art.

What I'd love to do is make a theme that looks like the 1960s version of futuristic computers and space ship aesthetic from the movie 2001, with light-bulb lit buttons of different colored plastic, lots of milled metal highlights and dark plastic everywhere.

If you're looking for a generic UI than I suppose easy to recognize generic symbols are the best. However, my dream is to make the UIs that actually mimic reality but the trick is keeping them fairly usuable still. I don't want it to be cartoonish, I want you to look at the UI and mistake it for a fantastic physical machine rather than a monitor. For example, if you look at the themes on the exchange site for e17, a lot of these not what you'd call an every day sort of theme but appeal to a particular aesthetic. Examples include steampunk, grunge, and baroque that incorporate photo realistic elements with varying efficacy (e.g. baroque is a cool concept but very hard on the eyes). The idea is to make the living-room computer more than just a tool, but a functional piece of art.

What I'd love to do is make a theme that looks like the 1960s version of futuristic computers and space ship aesthetic from the movie 2001, with light-bulb lit buttons of different colored plastic, lots of milled metal highlights and dark plastic everywhere.

If you're looking for a generic UI than I suppose easy to recognize generic symbols are the best. However, my dream is to make the UIs that actually mimic reality but the trick is keeping them fairly usuable still. I don't want it to be cartoonish, I want you to look at the UI and mistake it for a fantastic physical machine rather than a monitor. For example, if you look at the themes on the exchange site for e17, a lot of these not what you'd call an every day sort of theme but appeal to a particular aesthetic. Examples include steampunk, grunge, and baroque that incorporate photo realistic elements with varying efficacy (e.g. baroque is a cool concept but very hard on the eyes). The idea is to make the living-room computer more than just a tool, but a functional piece of art.

What I'd love to do is make a theme that looks like the 1960s version of futuristic computers and space ship aesthetic from the movie 2001, with light-bulb lit buttons of different colored plastic, lots of milled metal highlights and dark plastic everywhere.

I have switched to linux in 2006 partly because of its multi-monitor support in window managers such as e17 (Enlightenment.org), but in the meantime, things got even better:

Since we have xrandr 1.2 it is sufficient to just put Virtual 3520 1200 in your xorg.conf (or whatever the combined resolution of your setup will be) and run a simple xrandr command:
xrandr --output HDMI-2 --mode 1920x1200 --right-of HDMI-1
(You can put it into your .xsession to be run automatically after logging in)
Of course, you can also set up rotation, cloning, different modes, etc. with xrandr. Also try its --auto option which should automatically select the best resolution.

Now combine this with a window manager that supports Xinerama. For tiling window managers, my favorite one is i3 (see http://i3.zekjur.net/ ), which behaves mostly like wmii but adds some nice features and has proper support for xinerama.

If you are more into traditional desktop environments (not tiling), try e17 (see http://www.enlightenment.org/ ). While still not released, it works quite well. There are experimental packages for debian/ubuntu and other distros.

We have reached enlightenment.

Are you using Linux?

``Do we laugh or cry? It's like KDE and Gnome are in some sort of frantic struggle for who can botch desktop Linux the most.''

So let's put some more effort into the alternatives, such as Enlightenment.

Just a brief list of linux stuff that runs on top of OS X:

X11
kde
e17
For everything else there's fink and darwin ports.

In fact, darwin itself is open source, meaning if you really, really have a hard on to run just linux apps, you could run the core OS with the drivers and all with X11 on top of it. Beeslebob's point is spot on, there's no reason to take a perfectly good unix that has drivers custom written for it to replace it with a one-size fits all OS like linux (as awesome as linux is, hardware drivers are its Achilles' Heel because the hardware is often propietary).