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."

Comments

stick to e16 for a wm, but e17 has nice stuff

[Trepidity]

If you want a working window manager, stick to e16; e17 isn't really being actively worked on as a window manager yet, and doesn't have many features. The work is on a lot of useful backend stuff; the joke is that once the backend is done, the window manager will be five lines of code. Take a look at the components though. Many of them are in a very good state, and the E folk are to be commended for their excellent modular development -- many of these components are already being used by other projects (imlib2 in particular), and many of the others either are or soon will be in shape to be used in other projects too.

Of course perhaps I'm a bit biased, since E16 is still my favorite window manager (a better way to view/edit remembered window/app attributes being my only real feature request), but I think the E17 team is doing a good job contributing to the overall Free Software codebase. And though it's a bit frustrating that E17 is taking so long, reading through the components is impressive -- everything is being engineered carefully. While many window managers hack things in, everything in E -- from the theming engine to the window decorations -- is carefully designed with a clean interface. Should be impressive when it's done.

My only main worry about E17 is that it seems to be going desktop-environment-ish, a la GNOME/KDE, which I really can't stand. Hopefully we'll be able to turn all that off.

Re:stick to e16 for a wm, but e17 has nice stuff

[koekepeer]

[quote]
My only main worry about E17 is that it seems to be going desktop-environment-ish, a la GNOME/KDE, which I really can't stand. Hopefully we'll be able to turn all that off.
[/quote]

it's going to be a desktop shell. they'll have an icon bar, a filemanager, and a desktop, epplets. now that would be rather okay, because i like their original ideas, and my guess is that it will outperform gnome/kde in that area. probably speedwise, and certainly interface-wise.

i think E16 is the most easy to handle WM i have used (and i've used a lot of them). this is all a matter of personal preferences of course. the deal is, E has a tradition of being able to change those preferences to suit your needs. i think this is one of E's bigest merits (customisability)

this will probably translate into the ability to switch off everything if you want to in E17. and you'll just have a WM again :)

Re:it lives ?

[leoboiko]

I'm waiting to run E17 in a GNU/Hurd system...

I really wish things would pick up...

[Jerk City Troll]

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!