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."

Comments

Re:next big thing?

[BlackSol]

I tend to agree with you.

The interview doesn't give much insight over what value it adds over existing GUI's. Without indicating what its going to do better and what value this adds, there's no basis for calling it the Next Big Thing.

The interview, really seems to state that the next version, available when 3d cards are the default, will be the "Next Big Thing"

Sexy.

[be-fan]

E17 very well might be the technology that makes advanced drawing APIs popular on desktop applications. NeXT never really made it very far into the market, and OS-X, while popular, is still pretty slow. I know 10.1 is supposed to be faster, but there is only so much you can do with software rendering! My only concern with EVAS is whether or not it will hurt the performance of windowed 3D apps (like 3D modelers).

As an aside, this Rasterman guy is the only person in the OSS community that has any asthetic sense. While the Mandrake guys are busy designing lavander icons, the SuSE people are busy with the (ugly) Lizard motif, and the KDE2 guys are trying to make their desktop look like something out of Mattel, E genuinely looks good. I know there are themes, but the "look" of KDE or Mandrake are unescapable. Mandrake freezes you into installing their freaky purple desktop by making every X app depend on mandrake_desk. (No, I don't have the time to try to figure out the menu config file format and change it back!) And with KDE2, everytime something SIGs out, a cute little dragon comes up to inform you that your app crashed. Here's my theory. The KDE project is trying to capitalize on the success of the PaperClip from Hell (TM).

Right pew wrong church

[dar]

Easy to use is not the issue for Linux. Most users could get used to E or kde or whatever manager. Heck, lots of people got by with DOS for years before Windows 3.1 came along.

The problem with Linux is that it's just too darn hard to install - if you want sound, scanner, email, games etc. working.

It's called a theme. Check into it.

[Chris Burke]

I'm sick of these damn "E looks ugly" comments... Look, yes, the themes Raster comes up with are ugly. Yes! Ugly! But since the whole point of E is themeability, it's just idiotic to condemn the program because of the graphic design preference of one theme maker.

And don't give me crap about the default theme. The first time an E user clicks on the desktop they're going to see the "themes" menu item, and they can change it. There are some very fine and minimal themes for E, and a couple actually come with the download.

As to the time delay... Well, it has been a while, though the team obviously hasn't been sitting on their thumbs. Since everyone else had so much to do to catch up with where E was, they really aren't behind at all.