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Rasterman Speaks On E17 And The Future
JigSaw writes: "The team consisting of TheRasterman and Mandrake (among others) are hard at work to bring Enlightenment 0.17 to the Linux desktop. E17 will be a lot more than a window manager, something closer to a complete GUI solution for X. OSNews hosts an interesting interview with Rasterman and also features some (unseen-before) screenshots of E17. Some say that E17 will be the next big thing in the GUI design (even if Rasterman states in the interview that Linux won't probably take over the Desktop), with plans to incorporate libraries like eVas, which look very modern in concept, design and implementation."
While it might rejoince some that everybody is jumping the alpha-blending anti-aliasing bandwagon behind Apple's OS X, what annoys me it that they do not copy the intelligent concept behind Aqua: display PDF.
What Apple has done is define an abstraction for graphical applications. What other copy is some of the nice uses of those abstractions: anti-aliasing and alpha-blending.
It's really a shame the only thing they understand is the surface...
I have been using "e" from Dr14 on, Even when trapped in WIN32 hell, I emulated the Look and feel of "E" under Litestep.(even thought there was a win32 port E-Seance) DR17 is really really fast. And very impressive. If you do a CVS build and give it a honest go, I think you will find that it is much faster than your current windows manager. Even runing evas_test app shows you the differance in rendering technics. I am very Impressed with the latest offerings from the E team, But I agree that new logo blows!
My two Cents!
If you can figure out windows, you can figure out most any other window manager I've run across that even remotely considered itself "for the typical user". Windows is horribly unusable, especially for those of us used to Macintosh. The very design of Windows with its BS document-window-inside-application-window is a major drag on its usability, imho... If you're not in maximized mode you spend time hunting for your toolbar-- and now with Win2K you'll be clicking at the bottom of your menu to actually get to see the whole menu. Thank god for right-clicking, but that's no real compensation for a crippled menu bar.
Windows is one of the worst window manager in existence. It doesn't do one thing and do it well, it doesn't have any shining features whatsoever. NOT ONE. So, my point is simple. The fact that Windows is so widespread has nothing to do with usability. The fact that many users are comfortable in Windows has nothing to do with usability. But they've learned to use it, so they consider it natural. But it's a computer. Using it is going to take practice-- and maybe even training. It's a very complex machine.
Nobody expects to be able to drive a car five minutes after taking it out of the box, unless they've driven before. And yes, if you go changing all the controls radically, the driver's going to need retraining. So look at it this way. Would you expect to be able to drive an F1 just because you can drive a Ford Escort? I wouldn't. Same goes for powerful window managers like E versus crap like Windows.
My biggest problem with E is that there don't seem to be any E applications. If I use E I still need to load half of KDE to run Konqueror, and then I'll need gtk for GIMP, and then there's all those applications that have pretty windows around them, but are really just ugly X applications. I cut my losses and just run KDE, but I'd rather run E.
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