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A major pirate release of NT4 used this splash screen.

Assuming you're not a troll, but I'm going to reply AC nonetheless.

Enlightenment
Pardon me, but what's innovative about that? It tries to look good, but it's uglier than OSX, and even looks less professional than Windows XP. It's not as fast and light as its equivalents, and it's not as functional or featureful as others, so where exactly is the innovation? Does making something look like The Matrix count as innovative?

I don't think you understand what innovative means. It doesn't mean pretty, professional, fast, light or functional. It means something new. The approach of rasterman to how to present a gui to you is not found in many other products. Look at the pager, microsoft certainly found it nice enough as it tried to patent it ( http://xcomputerman.com/pages/archives/2004/02/26/ microsoft-wants-to-patent-enlightenment-technology / ). Not that I, btw, think the E pager itself is that innovative, the idea is a bit older IIRC
Another innovative WM is ion, you should check it out, I bet you find it ugly.

Konqueror
A web browser with nothing exceptional about it. Firefox has got the open-source browser market cornered. Konqueror just feels like a poor man's Internet Explorer. Again, no innovation.

again you fail to understand what is innovative. The parent specifically referred to the extensions. Is there any other browser which can so easily turn into a filemanager, ftp client, sftp client (especially this), smb client, a nfs client, cdrom ripping application, etc etc. (Actually, nautilus is pretty good too, and it's also free software).

ogg
A clone of MP3 for zealots. That's not an innovation, unless incompatability is an innovation (in which case Linux is incredibly innovative).

rofl; ogg is not a clone of MP3 at all. I'm guessing you're talking about ogg-vorbis now (ogg is really only the container). It's a very good project (although perhaps not as innovative as some more obscure ones) from a designer point of view. It is IMHO very innovative in the way it allows encoding/decoding to be used without licenses being paid. Why do you think some hardware manufacturers are including it in their devices even although it eats memory and battery resources? It's a good format, high quality, and its free. Another innovation may be the peeling ability, but I'm not 100% sure that is not done before in any other codec and peeling is until today still largely a theoretical possability (as it doesn't really work well in practice).

Python/Ruby
We already have scripting languages which do exactly the same things. Changing the syntax and the whitespace doesn't make it an innovation.

Now you really prove you do not have a clue about what innovation is. I cannot comment on Ruby but python is a _very_ innovative scripting language. It is designed with experience about what makes all other scripting languages so bad. Exactly the fact it forces you to use whitespace makes it innovative. This is a really great idea and even although it is perfectly possible to do other (and perhaps nicer, faster, etc etc) things in other language. This is an innovation. A language which tries to force you to write clean and good-looking code.

Well it seems that raster has done some benchmarks. Raster has always done the right and wise choices, have you ever used EFM some years ago, it was the best file manager out there. Can't wait to see E17 released.

This is why it's still gonna be a while before we start to see any real benefits from Xrender/Xdamage/Composite and other such new features in Xorg:

(21:44:12) -!- raster [~raster@vagw.valinux.co.jp] has joined #edevelop
(21:44:15) -!- mode/#edevelop [+o raster] by ChanServ
(21:44:36) ok
(21:44:38) lets give xorg a run for its money
(21:45:06) werd
(21:45:10) *** ROUND 1 ***
(21:45:11) ----------------------------------------&#151 ;
(21:45:11) Test: Test Xrender doing non-scaled Over blends
(21:45:11) Time: 7.473 sec.
(21:45:11) ----------------------------------------&#151 ;
(21:45:15) Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing non-scaled Over blends
(21:45:17) Time: 7.460 sec.
(21:45:20) ----------------------------------------&#151 ;
(21:45:22) Test: Test Imlib2 doing non-scaled Over blends
(21:45:24) Time: 0.315 sec.
(21:45:26) it still sucks! :)
(21:45:33) that's ridiculous
(21:45:37) But not as much!
(21:45:48) thats the test in whihc xrender does BEST

(21:50:13) *** ROUND 3 ***
(21:50:13) ----------------------------------------&#151 ;
(21:50:13) Test: Test Xrender doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends
(21:50:13) Time: 105.336 sec.
(21:50:13) ----------------------------------------&#151 ;
(21:50:14) Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing 2* smooth scaled
Over blends
(21:50:16) Time: 105.866 sec.
(21:50:20) ----------------------------------------&#151 ;
(21:50:22) Test: Test Imlib2 doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends
(21:50:24) Time: 2.560 sec.
(21:50:26) :)
(21:50:28) thats a bit more like it

Here

The window management is Enlightenment running the new default Winter theme.

The kicker bar is Engage, an OS X docker clone based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. It is NOT a gdesklet, and it performs a lot better and smoother than that one. As you can see, he is running Enlightenment and drop shadows work fine, so the answer to your last question is yes.

The folks at Apple still seem to like the brushed metal theme. Meanwhile, the 5 year old E 0.16 has moved on, too, to the Winter theme.

The release is not of Enlightenment the Window Manager. It is a release of EFL, the libraries that they wrote to underpin Enlightenment. Here are some screenshots of E components that will depend upon the EFL: Evidence, Entrance. and Emotion.

Some other details:

Edje provides a revolutionary method of absstacting every aspect of your interface from the application itself. By passing signals between the interface and the application all communication is done in an interface neutral way. No longer are "themes" simple changes of pixmaps over a fixed area. Using Embryo we can provide scripting ability to the interface componant itself to harness even more power and flexability. [sic]

So, no, this is not just a brushed metal window manager theme (of course, E 0.16 was always more than that, too). I've been watching E, and making the same jokes on April 1st, but I must say that I'm looking forward to trying what they're coming up with once they've got a semi-stable release; and since the EFL seems to be close to a freeze, I think we can hope to see E 0.17 soon.

- As Mandrake pointed out, a new patch has just been committed to CVS that will enable E 0.16 to support new KDE/GNOME Window Manager hints. For the uninitiated, this means that it will finally be possible for you to use Enlightenment as your window manager in GNOME 2 or KDE 3 (and get the best of both worlds, if you wish). So expect an 0.16.6 release very soon. :)

- E17 as present is a moderately functional window manager, with few features but great looks. Expect this present window manager to be eventually nuked pending completion of the underlying libraries, to make way for the real Enlightenment.

- There are several other libraries and apps that are being worked on, notably ebg, ebits, ecore, ewl (widget library), evidence (file manager, although a fairly separate project presently), entrance (login/display manager) and so on.

Want to see what E17 looks like? Check out my collection of screenshots here and here.

And if you've ever done some sort of GUI programming, you need to check Evas out NOW! :)

- As Mandrake pointed out, a new patch has just been committed to CVS that will enable E 0.16 to support new KDE/GNOME Window Manager hints. For the uninitiated, this means that it will finally be possible for you to use Enlightenment as your window manager in GNOME 2 or KDE 3 (and get the best of both worlds, if you wish). So expect an 0.16.6 release very soon. :)

- E17 as present is a moderately functional window manager, with few features but great looks. Expect this present window manager to be eventually nuked pending completion of the underlying libraries, to make way for the real Enlightenment.

- There are several other libraries and apps that are being worked on, notably ebg, ebits, ecore, ewl (widget library), evidence (file manager, although a fairly separate project presently), entrance (login/display manager) and so on.

Want to see what E17 looks like? Check out my collection of screenshots here and here.

And if you've ever done some sort of GUI programming, you need to check Evas out NOW! :)

Methinks someone at Microsoft really needs to take their coffee regularly, especially with shots like this one (Read the caption!).

Whatever you say, it's still probably the most ironic screenshot I've ever taken! :)