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."
Evas is the technology in E17 that can really turn heads. For the uninitiated, it's a display library that abstracts the pixels, handling hardware accelleration and optimization for you. The concept is very similar to Quartz Extreme on OS X (except I don't see any of the functionality of Display PostScript).
We really need Evas and the rest of E17 to get mature -- it's something that can potentially make Linux desktop technology take off in a big way. Think about an OpenGL accellerated composited windowing system. That would lend itself to all sorts of interesting possibilities for desktops.
For one, we'd certainly get rid of a lot of the ugly artifacting and flicker that you see with Qt and GTK today (assuming they could somehow be ported). While a lot of that could be fixed with double buffering, you still wouldn't get all the benefits of Evas.
If you wanna see what I mean, you can go and download only the Evas package and run a small test suite. If you've got an OpenGL accellerated graphics card, you're in for a real treat -- this stuff is incredibly cool.
Now only if they would finish it!
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