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At the risk of getting flamed by KDE enthusiasts here, if you are using X windows, I would have to say that you should look into using window managers other than KDE (or even Gnome for that matter). Although KDE and Gnome very pretty, I still prefer to use just plain Enlightenment. If you want to run KDE or Gnome apps (which I still can and do), just install the libraries. I've removed all my window managers from my install and am just running a clean E desktop. My screen is not cluttered with window bars and icons; my apps are accessible through a pop-up menu with a click of the mouse; and best of all, it's still very fast to login to my account/desktop (faster than windows 95)--and this is all on a dinky Cyrix II 333MHz system that has uptimes on the average of 30-40 days before I reboot for a kernel upgrade or some other system setting change.

There already is one. It's called Enlightenment. That's the new one I'm waitin' for.

Linux is the true path to enlightenment

Well... it is .

Does Windows use Enlightemment? Didn't think so...

Soko

I completed high school just over a year ago in Victoria, the other major Australian state.

This is nothing new in Victoria. New South Wales is just catching up.

The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail, and about the filters setup so anything with swearing would be blocked and redirected to her. High school age kids throw words like "shit" and "fuck" around like nothing, so this was a little unfair, especially considering it wasn't documented until a year later.

The web access was worse. They had this state-wide thing called EduCache. It was just a great big filter, allowing only officially checked websites in. It was at the school's discression to activate it; you can guess our school had it on. (I also won't mention how this made the web virtually useless for most students, and I spent half a year teaching people how to change their proxy settings to bypass it. But I digress.)

Students could submit sites to this cache. I requested many tech sites, from here at Slashdot, to Be Inc, to Enlightenment, just to name the ones I remember. I also tried to add The Sync, just for Geeks in Space. It was rejected. Probably something to do with JenniCam...

Look, these schools don't care about privacy. Eventually, they made students sign sheets saying they wouldn't do bad things. Bad things like look up porn or submit anything anonymously to the net. By this stage, I had 12 months left at the school, and refused to sign. Didn't use a school computer for a year (well, not with my own account at least...)

Oh, and before you think I was some rebel kid hacking the school network; I wasn't. I was one of 3 students that sat in on the IT committee meetings. They were all just too busy bickering about their different areas of education to do anything constructive.

Sorry, ranting. Probably bad grammar from the rush. I just don't seen this as a surprise.

(I'll leave the 'My IT teacher called a mouse a GUI' and the I got in trouble for opening a command prompt in NT, because I was "accessing DOS"' rants for another day.)

I just went and checked out some screenshots for Enlightment and WindowMaker. The default screen for E 0.16 looks completely unintuitive. There is obviously a window showing a desktop in the lower left but I have no clue what the window below it does and the window in the lower right is anybody's guess. After years of using Windows I had an easier time of figuring out the Mac and CDE interfaces.

Now let's look at 0.17 CVS screenshot. Without being able to do some test clicking, it looks like a varient of the traditional taskbar. Go here and there is very little to distinguish it from any other WIMP interface.

WindowMaker is different and I used to use it all the time under linux. The Dock is pretty nice. However, it is still just another WIMP interface.

The stuff that really differentiates&lt sp? &gt Gnome, E, Windowmaker and the rest from Windows is the ability to do multiple desktops, the abilty to roll-up windows and the like.

A screenshot is only going to tell you so much.

I just went and checked out some screenshots for Enlightment and WindowMaker. The default screen for E 0.16 looks completely unintuitive. There is obviously a window showing a desktop in the lower left but I have no clue what the window below it does and the window in the lower right is anybody's guess. After years of using Windows I had an easier time of figuring out the Mac and CDE interfaces.

Now let's look at 0.17 CVS screenshot. Without being able to do some test clicking, it looks like a varient of the traditional taskbar. Go here and there is very little to distinguish it from any other WIMP interface.

WindowMaker is different and I used to use it all the time under linux. The Dock is pretty nice. However, it is still just another WIMP interface.

The stuff that really differentiates&lt sp? &gt Gnome, E, Windowmaker and the rest from Windows is the ability to do multiple desktops, the abilty to roll-up windows and the like.

A screenshot is only going to tell you so much.

I just went and checked out some screenshots for Enlightment and WindowMaker. The default screen for E 0.16 looks completely unintuitive. There is obviously a window showing a desktop in the lower left but I have no clue what the window below it does and the window in the lower right is anybody's guess. After years of using Windows I had an easier time of figuring out the Mac and CDE interfaces.

Now let's look at 0.17 CVS screenshot. Without being able to do some test clicking, it looks like a varient of the traditional taskbar. Go here and there is very little to distinguish it from any other WIMP interface.

WindowMaker is different and I used to use it all the time under linux. The Dock is pretty nice. However, it is still just another WIMP interface.

The stuff that really differentiates&lt sp? &gt Gnome, E, Windowmaker and the rest from Windows is the ability to do multiple desktops, the abilty to roll-up windows and the like.

A screenshot is only going to tell you so much.

There are several exciting theme systems out there now: both PicoGUI's theme system and Enlightenment's Ebits are theme systems based on a database, capable of storing data for the windowing system, the widget toolkit, and all the applications. If a system like this were implemented in the major GUI toolkits and window managers on the desktop, it should give a way for all applications, toolkits, and window managers to be consistant and completely under the user's control.

Actually this has more potentiality than many people seem to realize.

What I mean is that making a GUI that is >95% like Windows doesn't mean that everybody should use it. It means that ordinary (stupid?) end users can use it and never now it's something else than Windows.

Most people won't find a difference between Win98 and Win2000pro even if you can find it on the side of your start menu (ever worked as a helpdesk ?)

Those that know the difference, would still have all the choices out there, whether they want to run Enlightenment or evilwm. After all, you can run KDE apps under Gnome and Gnome apps under KDE, if you just have the libs. If other people where running Linux apps too and have they look&feel like Windows, then you could run the same apps with whatever you like. Now you have to use Outlook just to see when your you should be in a meeting.

Maybe we could start this new "Windows GUI project" with GTK+ theme that looks and feels like Windows :)

Maybe you can check out the latest Enlightenment.
Release 17 will be something absolutely awesome !

I use E16.5 , and borrow apps both from Gnome and KDE, but
I don't actually use any more of them than I need.

Check out Evas. It features an excellent, very easy to use/simplified API, hardware acceleration, anti-aliasing and all of those cool things and is designed in such a way that you don't need to be concerned what kind of hardware your app will run on - evas will scale accordingly. Plus, there's rumors that rasterman is building an Evas client-server API that could almost supplant X, while not necessarily supplanting X...I think it's a pity not enough people are looking at this excellent library.

Enlightenment 0.17 is built upon Evas, and from my experience with it, it does run very fast.

Hmmm ... I remember a certain Rasterman disappearing from RedHat ... and then E was no longer part of Gnome (although I use it because its dramatically better than the alternatives in my opinion).

It happens.

short-term recall and task performance were dependent on whether the task/info was learned while the subject was in the same state of mind for the testing (learned stoned, performed straight; learned stoned, performed stoned; ...).

I have some anecdotal evidence to support this. I know a auto-body repair guy that is just freakin awesome at his job when he is slightly boozed up. He can't concentrate on the task when he is sober, and just plain sucks.

I also know of a few programmers that are genious when they have a pint or two in 'em. Ex: Raster man... ;) But, just try to read their code when they are straight... EEK! (We all love you, raster)

I have no doubt that this phoenomenon(sp!) exists...

You should check out Enlightenment - both 0.16.5 and 0.17.

CmdrTaco, don't you mean this enlightenment?

Also, who needs KDE or Gnome anyway? Enlightenment's all ya need. All those "features" just get in the way of doing stuff.

Carl
Vote Libertarian

On the other hand, if Apple were smart, they'd parly the desire for Aqua themes into Mac sales. A simple and direct ad campaign, "why settle for a cheap immitation when you can have the real thing..."

Funny, I seem to remember a bunch of "Not just IBM Compatible, it IS IBM" campaigns from the 80's. If the effectiveness of this simple and direct ad can be guessed by their PC sales, it won't work.

The question that needs asked is: "Do the current Aqua-like themes use graphics taken from the real thing?" Apple can own the right the those images, the cool colored dots, window shade, check-boxes, et al. However they have no say if someone whips out GIMP or Photoshop and makes their own theme "inspired by" Aqua. If anything, this would be better for the end user; I like the colored dots, but the check boxes, dialog buttons, and radio buttons are annoying as all get out. In the mean time, I'll stick to the stock ShinyMetal theme for Enlightenment, one of the few true innovators in "look and feel". Who else has things like a slide out bar on the upper right of each window to hold the infrequently used options such as minimize-maximize?

Toodles

A link from that page shows why people think that there isnt any progress on E.

http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/enlightenment.h tml

If people dont hear anything they they tend to assume nothing is going on, I used to checkout the various development releases of E, but after 0.16.5 and the "mythical" E17 I stopped. If there was the odd DR release for people to check out then people could see the project is still very alive.

what annoys me it that they do not copy the intelligent concept behind Aqua: display PDF.

Sounds like you need Enlightenment.

1. First, the finished one. You might want to look at XFCE. Think of it as CDE done right. Uses GTK as its widget set, so it interoperates very well with Gnome/GTK programs.
2. Someone else has mentioned GNUSTEP already, but that seems to be advancing about as quickly as GNU/HURD.
3. Lastly, Enlightenment seems to be turning into a complete desktop environment of it's own, and looks good if you like that sort of thing.

As I mentioned in my other comment, EFM has (had, now it's out of cvs) exactly this. Not built in command line, no constantly running terminal, but the ability to just type and have your typing be a BASH command (or do things like open directories, etc).

KDE's command line ALT-F2 is just a way of running a program, not a true combination of GUI and CLI. Konq's terminal emulator is closer, but still not there.

Note: I don't run E, nor am I a KDE basher :) I just happen to have installed EFM one day and went WOW!!!

My question is : doesn't imlib2 has some sort of mechanism to do exactly what I saw on gnotices?

My question is : doesn't imlib2 has some sort of mechanism to do exactly what I saw on gnotices?

My question is : doesn't imlib2 has some sort of mechanism to do exactly what I saw on gnotices?

I installed Linux for the first time a few days ago and was amazed at how far things have come since the "old days." I was browsing around and wanted to drop a note of praise to the Enlightenment authors until I found this:

> "Enlightenment is my little baby. It's still growing and getting more adept - but
> it's still a baby. Enlightenment was my answer to ``DAMNIT! stop giving me
> twm!''. My University decided twm was a great window manager and a great
> environment to get things done in... I have to thank them for this cruelty of
> imposing this on us poor students as we, for the first time had to deal with
> UNIX. It drove me to the edge of insantiy"

Ouch! How should I respond?!?!?! I'll bet *you* never tried to write a window manager on punched cards! ;-)

Anyone here ever heard of "uwm"? It was the only window manager available when X11R1 was released in 1987 and it turned out to be my inspiration to write twm because uwm "drove me to the edge of insanity." I know the twm code spawned a whole family of other window managers and I can see from the above comment that it's still inspiring new development. ;-)

Back to my original topic, a big thanks to the Enlightenment authors, you've done a great job. Hopefully you'll have the time and resources to continue your work.... otherwise, I may have to come out of X Window retirement and write something that opens up a can of "whup-ass" on the big E. ;-)

I'm glad to hear that the project is still alive and doing so well and that this issue is being resolved. He's always been very passionate about E and no matter what window manager you use, you have to appreciate this kind of enthusiasm he has for his project. It's this kind of attitude that helps to continually drive the whole Linux community forward.

You should check out efm Here. while it's not complete yet, it does exactly what you are talking about, you can use it's typebuffer to select files in the file manager window or launch apps like you would from a terminal, very cool stuff.

When are we going to see the XFce Alliance and the Enlightenment Confederacy?

What is everybody prediciting as the next evolutionary step in interfaces? Voice. Companies like IBM are positioning themselves to get in at the ground floor. Microsoft even put out a dictation package a few years back. And you can bet that all those users with microphones are not going to want to say "Move the mouse 3 -- no, 6, -- pixels left -- up more -- click --" every time they want to do something. They are going issue words as commands ("Launch Emacs. find-file"). The future UI looks like a CLI with a bunch of windows plastered on to it.

That's why EFM will be at a tremendous advantage. Now, it's great because if you know how to use the command line, you can combine the two (try typing into an EFM window). In the future, EFM will be even better, because it will already have completed the painful evolution other file managers will have to endure. Word will act like Emacs, in that everything will be a text command you can enter.

I've tried Nautilus, and I love it. But long term, CLI is the future. And after trying EFM, I can take the future for a test drive any time I want.

As a side issue, who wants to bet every interface company will suddenly invent command redirection? Picture advertisements for a great new feature that looks like this: |.

I think efm can.

Or they could use efm for desktop management. Windows decoration is *definitely* E with BlueSteel (vertical titles, somewhat thin frame, dark diaginal bars on a title bar, steelish color...)

I'm glad somebody else has the dream of customizing the colours of Slashdot .. the white/teal look, while is nice and pleasing to the eye, is getting a little old :/

Now, colour schemes like Enlightenment's (with the nice graphics .. I know, it's white on teal. Cut me some slack here!) would be a nice change of pace!


------------
CitizenC

Slackware is about the only distro i know that still has Openlook... with is funky green background and filemanager its probably the coolest little file manager you can find... and it (like Enlightenment) dont have that menu bar on the bottom... i know you can move it in kde/gnome/whatever.....BUT once you use something like enlightenment you see what serious configurability is all about... i mean the first thing i do on any new system is copy my ~/.enlightenment dir. fix the file pointer (which i think are stored so very well!) and good to go.
Try it out (0.16.5 just came out!!)
http://www.enlightenment.org/!
And all you Gnome/Kde users.... they are good too and provide a lot of cool features for most users, but if all you want is something to give you a good devel env. (a screen for Xemacs, one for Eterms, one for Mozilla(/.) and finally one for mail/etc.) enlightenment gives you a clean and good looking window manager with a lot of punch.... try it out and then flame back at me :)

I've stopped using GNOME a long time ago to replace it with just plain enlightenment. I've recently started using EFM, the enlightenment file manager. While EFM is still pretty slow and buggy (version 0.0.0), it has many features which make it unlike KDE and GNOME's filemanagers. For example, if you begin typing in a window, a transparent box will come up so you can see what you're typing, with this you can do all sorts of things, from selecitng files to running commands to opening web pages. If you were to type 'www.slashdot.org' it will open a new NS window of it, typing 'make' will launch an Eterm running make in the current directory. EFM fits my needs better than any of the other linux FMs that I've seen, annd I can't wait for it to get more stable. Though nautilus has many interesting features which EFM doesn't, they're probably aimed at different audiences anyway, EFM is more 'graphical shell' than filemanager. Nautilus may be good for people who want an embedded web browser/mp3 player/etc. in their filemanager, but I think that we can all benefit from their work, regardless of weather we are interested in the filemanager itself.

Except, I couldn't get ESD working. Hanged Gnome-startup for ever. Since I'm only using my computer as a desktop-computer, that rendered FreeBSD useless for me. And I couldn't find any help to fix this.

Do you actually need ESD to use Gnome? You probably could disable it from starting up.

But perhaps I just should drop Gnome all together and go KDE2...

Drop those two. Go Enlightenment. :)

Apple is setting the standard and always has. Did anybody notice how important 'transparency' has become since apple demoed Mac OS X?


Actually, the Enlightenment window manager has used transparency for some time, as has Eterm, whose functionality was duplicated in gnome-terminal. I suspect there are others, as well. Apple would be quite dumb if they hadn't stolen most of their ideas from others. TrueType text, as a further example, is largely a subset of Metafont from TeX, with some differences in the mathematical complexity required to draw characters.

If anyone has been setting a standard, it is the Redmond company running 90 percent of the world's desktop boxes.

The competitive desktop efforts of linux are exactly why they will become much stronger than Mac or Windows. If you have a Mac or Windows and you want a new desktop you need a new OS or a new computer.

If you have linux and you want a new desktop you need only change the pulldown menu in XDM. This creates an unprecedented ability on the part of the consumer to change his desktop. This creates competition without barriers, and that will only result in much stronger product lines. Besides, we can already see that human interface designers from Windows and Mac worlds are working on various aspects of GNOME and KDE.

With competition, we all win. It may not occur now or even in 6 more months, but it is coming, and it won't be too long.

GNOME1.2+ is much more stable and versatile than KDE.
Try looking at theGtk themes site if you want a good windows clone.

Of course, enlightenment is going to crush them all when E0.17 hits the world...

Rara Rasputin

For all his statements he sure doesn't look around too much. We all mostly know about Enlightenment and it runs on X-window with everything that he wants including the anti-aliasing and such. As to a single floppy with xwindows and a kernel. It can be done, our university had it done as a masters project. True it doesn't use a support everything kernel or anything like that but it does meet all the requirements.

The problem is that the QPL is not compatible with the GPL.

I have to bring up a minor point: it is the GPL which is incompatible with the QPL in this case. I use Enlightenment, so I really have no concerns over KDE or GNOME.

Not sure how that relates to 3D.. Anyway, couldn't Enlightenment's window icons be considered "compressed / distorted" representations of a window? For that matter, couldn't a minimized icon be considered the same thing? It's all about abstraction, right? So it really boils down to personal preference and available technology..

Perhaps you are thinking more along the lines of the movie Disclosure where you make use of a virtual reality helm and gloves.

UGH. Puh-LEEZE. The worst concept for a VR interface to data I've ever seen. To find that data you need, you have to walk down the virtual hall, find the correct virtual filing cabinet, and flip through the damn virtual manila folders until you find the data. No thanks - I'll stick with SQL.
seanmeister

Secondly, there's much refining being done in the area of the GUI. Just look at some of the enlightenment screenshots to see what I'm talking about. Different, but very powerful. (Those screenshots have sucked more than a few new users into Linux!)

Everything else has been a "refinement" process in the area of GUI research. So, here's my idea for a new GUI:

One of the best features of the newest refined GUI's is customizeability - the ability to choose what the OS looks like. Let's take that to the maximum - a generic plugin-based system that lets skin authors completely change the feel of the OS. The User Interface would load plugin modules (swappable at will) that perform the following functions:

• Task management - switching between windows on the screen.
• File management - browsing the files on the hard disk
• Program launching - starting up programs from some sort of menu
• Menu management - if one is loaded, the active program's menus are displayed in this widget, ala MacOS X or NeXT.
• Others I can't think of right now...

Now the only advantage Win2K has over linux is a transparent start menu.

You haven't seen enlightenment window manager yet, have you ? Check out the EFM pages, and yes, it has had transparent menus for a while. But it also antialiases fonts and alpha mixes them for the transparency.

I know the parent post is a troll, but just for the sake of clarity here are some urls, including the original /. story.

• Microsoft Clarifies Linux Myths
• Mandrake's Rant on the Subject
• More response to the myth
• Linuxworld's Take on the matter

Anybody who's ever started e with a badly formed theme (and got the lovely pink borders) knows that e itself is very, very fast. It's imlib that's slow, and using all of those pixmaps.

I used E for several months. Then I tried out Sawfish (back when it was called sawmill) just to see what it was like. I immediately noticed that my machine seemed a lot faster, and many operations (like switching desktops) became less clunky. Sawfish uses imlib, and I'm using the same theme I used on E (except the Sawfish version, of course), so I don't think it's fair to blame imlib for E's "lack of speed". E is slow, its configuration language is a hack, and it's becoming more bloated all the time.

There's enough misinformation posted here that I feel some factual information is in order. I am doing work for Eazel on a consulting basis on graphics and rendering. Librsvg (the renderer for the reduced SVG subset) is my baby.

Yes, Nautilus has the capabilities to do fairly advanced antialiased rendering. The current development snapshot has the option to use the antialiased renderer in the Gnome Canvas (joint work between Federico Mena-Quintero and myself). This does full alpha-blending and enables the use of icons with semitransparency. The Xlib renderer will probably remain an option for those with slower computers. Icons can be provided in both SVG for full scalability, or in PNG in a graded series of sizes.

My current project is integrating Freetype 2 text with librsvg, adding antialiased text capabilities with both TrueType and Adobe Type1 font support.

The current architecture of X makes it relatively straightforward to implement antialiasing and alpha compositing within a window, but impossible to composite across windows. Thus, Aqua effects such as having windows cast soft shadows, or having drag'n'drop icons antialias correctly, are currently beyond the scope of what X can do.

There is active work ongoing to add true alpha to X, led by Keith Packard of SuSE. I'm following this work closely, and am eager to see it come to fruition so that we can start to apply a rich imaging model across the entire screen.

Raster is doing some very cool work with EFM. Some people seem to think there's a kind of war going on between the Gnome and E camps. I don't see it this way at all - to me, it's a friendly competition in the best sense of the word. Raster is at the cutting edge of graphics capabilities, while Gnome is doing more work on integration and making sure everything works well on a broad range of systems and configurations. Both approaches have their merits, and if nothing else Raster's work serves as excellent protypes for Gnome development. I had lunch with Raster and Andy last week, and we had a really nice discussion about extending X, getting access to hardware acceleration for antialiasing and compositing, and so on. We also talked about some of the requirements for making sure all this stuff is useful from the Gnome Canvas, and I'm hopeful good stuff will come of it.

I also want to talk a little about antialiased text. The best of all possible worlds is an unhinted, antialiased display at 140 dpi or higher. Since those displays aren't widespread yet, we have to make do with some tradeoffs. The most fundamental tradeoff is between edge sharpness on one hand, and smoothness on the other. Also hanging in the balance is the faithful reproduction of the glyph shape. Whenever you antialias, the edges become softer. However, you can sometimes get a slightly better tradeoff by aligning vertical and horizontal stems to the pixel grid, thus ensuring sharp edges for these, while diagonal and curved segments get smoothly antialiased. However, this process does distort the font somewhat.

In order to take advantage of 140+ dpi displays, you have to write your apps to be resolution independent. Fortunately, with the Gnome Canvas (which is what Nautilus uses for its icon view), it's pretty straightforward - in fact, there's a zoom control that scales the whole canvas uniformly. I was surprised and a bit disappointed to see that Aqua is not resolution independent, and in fact has many of the dimensions hardcoded. Thus, down the road I think it's not unreasonable to expect free software to have the best rendering, bar none.

It's a lot of fun to be developing this stuff, and I'm looking forward to getting a desktop with advanced graphical rendering into the hands of lots of people.

Anyhow, stop reading this right now and go check out EFM from CVS. It's awesome. Be sure to check it out of CVS, the tar ball is oldish.

Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG

Gnome doesn't use Enlightenment anymore, but rather Sawfish which is supposed to fit in better with how E does things... There's an interesting article What's New in Gnome 1.2 on LinuxPower

Reading through the comments, and seeing lots of negative comments about how X looks, etc.. I just thought I'd add my bit. My X setup looks a hell of a lot better than the Windows interface, BeOS etc, because I run Enlightenment, a rather nifty Window Manager for X.

Go check out the screenshots, and drool. It certainly pushes X to the limits as far as graphical performance is concerned.

"Motif is just an absolute nightmare to deal with. Half of what you want to do, has to be done hrough Xlib or Xt calls anyway!"

Enlightenment needed a file-selector, and they would've used GTK+, but they couldn't figure out how to make GTK+ and Xlib work together, so they had to write their own file-selector, and thus was born EFM.

Is it possible to mix GTK+ And Xlib? If it's not, then I suppose that that's something that Motif has going for it.