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State of the E-nion
An anonymous reader writes: "Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) has posted a "state of the union" for the enlightenment project on their mailing list. It has been over 2 years since the last major release of the Enlightenment window manager. It looks like 0.17 is a ways off but it's nice to see an update."
I know many of you won't like this post as most of you adore the Mac OS X interface, but I believe there is jus too much work being done to make Linux GUIs look nice. Intentions may be good but they don't look nice at all. They TRY to look nice but they fail... and miserably too. PLEASE lets focus on functionality and not so much on looks like those damn rounded windows and buttons. Christs sake its a functionality contest not a beauty contest.
The Windows 95 interface is a great example in my opinion of a excellent GUI. It's not too fancy but not too plain either. A few enhancements and features to this already great gui would be the best thing to happen to linux since that faster and better new virtual memory manager.
Thank you for your time.
Last time I checked out e17 trying to contribute meant:
- Pulling stuff from cvs SPLIT and HEAD branches (both
had working and broken pieces)
- Finding some document describing the correct order to
build two dozen libs/apps; there was no such up-to-date
document on enlightenment.org
- Build failures, this month here, next month there
- Website says: "Don't complain it doesn't build. It does."
Nothing kills motivation like being told the problems you
are seeing and might even feel inclined to tackle don't
exist.
Geez, contributing to a freakin' OS kernel is a piece of
cake compared to the chores prospective e hackers are
facing.
Too bad, really. e16 is my wm of choice, and e17 has been
looking promising from its early beginnings.
If you read this and know better than I do, don't argue
about the details. The point I'm trying to make is that
e will see more contributions when it makes it easier to
do just that.
Not trolling, but... ;-)
1. Write heavily hacked code that create beautiful thing.
2. Rewrite it, using
2.1 a more object-oriented approach
2.2 a more conventional approach
3. Improve the code using heavily hacked code.
4. Goto (2).
Well, back to the topic - Enlightenment is what attracted me to the graphical world of linux, and well, I really hate them having put off my wet dreams when I was using efm (enlightenment file manager) several years ago. I thought that they will continue with the same codebase and evolve into something like MacOS.. now that they go for a major rewrite (wel, this is old news anyway)...
I have nothing to say now.
Although I do not use E, I have checked the progress of its development through www.cuddletech.com and their efforts to improve E and port it to Solaris. I actually like the idea of slow, methodical development as opposed to the "let's add every feature under the sun (no pun intended)" effort ending up in a convuluted mess of bad code and incomplete or non working features. My experiences with Gnome and KDE under Solaris attest to the "it's gotta look cool despite the bad code" effort. People complain about CDE's memory footprint, Gnome just sucks up memory like there is no tomorrow and the only "feature" I can see that remotely benefits anyone is the ability to have more than four desktops (Gnome 6, CDE 4). And lets not mention KDE's memory leaks (which I do not know if they have been totally fixed yet). All I want from a graphical interface is the ability to run graphical applications effectively. At least with cuddletech's efforts (being performed by a working system administrator) functionalty is not being lost to "cool features". Maybe it is time to take another look at E since (at least for me) I am not satisfied with Gnome and Sun's efforts to bring it to Solaris.
This is one of the annoyances of open source... the tendency of developers to undergo major rewrites.
:)
I've been following Enligtenment for some time, and the most annoying thing about it is that it undergoes a "major rewrite" nearly every major release. The new release always causes your current themes to break, and removes many of the features you were using.
Major re-writes are something developers like to do, but in the commercial sector their bosses won't let them. Why not? Most of the value of the re-write is in the developer's mind: they see the code, no the final product. There are three kinds of expenses to doing a re-write 1) the cost to actually implement the rewrite and 2) time cost to not market your products in a timely manner ad 3) loss of marketability due to feature loss and increased bug count. Even though it's free, the enlightenment project suffers from these costs.
Yes, I am a developer, and yes, I like to re-write. I'm just glad for my job's sake that my boss usually won't let me do it
Didn't Afterstep become GNUStep?
I have to agree with you, I miss the abundance of window managers that used to be out there. All the different approaches, the interesting ideas, etc... Now the innovation that was taking place is kind of dying. GNOME and KDE are nice, but they don't try much that is edgy. Enlightenment is about the last stop these days if you want to see some innovative ideas in GUI design.
I think a lot of this has to do with lowest common denominator thinking. MOST people are satisfied to be able to just maximize, minimize and close windows. In fact a friend of mine still questions the need for multiple desktops and windowshading. I think the point is that we need multiple approaches to be able to satisfy varying work environments. It's kind of like writing your own .bash_profile. No two are (or should be) alike, if you are talking about an advanced user. The GUI should be the same way. That's what projects like GNOME and KDE seem to forget. They are too focused on beating Windows by being the same.
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