Enlightenment Lives

Anonymous Coward writes "The Enlightenment Project, far from dead, is pleased to announce the DR16.7.1 release of the Enlightenment Window Manager. With tons of fixes, a massive overhaul of the internals, and several new features this release is a must try for those who haven't run E in a long time. The window manager that redefined the way a desktop can look is still going strong."

Comments

cool to see it get fixes

[quelrods]

It's cool to see E is still alive. I've been using it as my wm for many years and haven't found anything else that does virtual desktops just the way I enjoy them. Does anyone know if they fixed the mozilla related focus bugs?

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[AstroDrabb]

But why is it? All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

To be fair, I thing E does better than most... more attuned to my taste than KDE or GNOME. But why must we have hundreds of hours of development hours go into something which is inferior to the two market leaders? Sure there are Lunix/BSD vs Windows/Mac arguments/fests all time time, but no Linux/BSD WM looks or functions as polished as WinXP/MacOSX (note I am walking WM/GUI here, not OS in general).

You are obviously stating your opinion, so why not make it sound that way? I think the default WinXP desktop is childish, though the Classic desktop on WinXP is nice and usable. As for Mac OS X, I have used it far too much, and don't like the GUI at all. I am dead tired of the over done theme, and can't stand every menu bar being at the top. I will take Gnome over Mac OS X any day, though that is _my opinion_.

which is inferior to the two market leaders?

Huh? What crack are you smoking? Max OS X is _not_ a market leader. There are some sources showing Linux desktop having a higher percentage then Max OS X as of December 2003. While others show Linux at around 1% or so and Mac OS X around 3%. No matter what source you take as gospel, Neither Linux nor Mac OS X are a _leader_ when it comes to the desktop. MS has that sealed. Now if you want to talk server. Well, Mac OS X is no where on the radar, while Linux is a _very_ strong second with MS in first, percentage-wise. Linux in fact has been the fastest growning server OS for the past 4 years or so, growing faster then any other OS, including MS Windows. So please don't call Mac OS X a "market leader" in any field, since Mac OS/X has always been and always will be a niche market.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting opinion. I don't share it. Yes, most window managers aren't the prettiest things ever, but I've found them to be far more functional than Windows' UI. With options like virtual desktops, dock apps, desktop-accesible menus, smart window placement, window shading, send to back, point to focus, snap to edge, and so on, I've found many WMs to be able to do much more than Windows can.

My personal favorites are WindowMaker, Fluxbox, and flwm. None of them look particularly pretty, but they're all more functional than Windows.

Yes, I'm calling flwm more functional than Windows.

Re:Oh goody.

[BJH]

Shit, if I'd known I was going to be modded down for speaking the straight truth, I would have posted with my +1 bonus to give you modders something to get your teeth into.

By the way, from the FAQ:
Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I used to run Enlightenment like, 7 years ago when it was considered "cool" to do so.

At the time, I found the widgets fancy but unintuitive.

Seriously, what has Enlightenment been doing these past 7 years? The screenshots don't look any better than my desktop did way back. Plus, you don't get the nice KDE or Gnome-related integration.

'E' is a window manager that was ahead of the pack, and fell to the wayside by not being able to keep up with the times.

Version numbering

[P-Nuts]

It seems Enlightenment has only gone halfway on dropping the leading 0 from the version numbers, as the news pages don't include it, but the tarballs do. It seems unlikely given how long E has been around that it'll ever reach 1.0, so perhaps eventually it will do an emacs, and drop the leading numeral (a 1 in emacs' case)

Re:Wow

[reverius]

I use iceWM as my only "desktop environment" (hahaha) on very new machines (my desktop is an Athlon XP 3000+). There's no reason to add bloat simply because your computer can handle it.

not dead, but comatose

[nbert]

it's funny to read this now - I just visited enlightenment.org some hours ago to check if they got any closer to 0.17 stable since the last time I checked (~6 month ago). Now / tells me that they finally made it to 16.7.1. I guess I'll have to lower my expectations. Don't get me wrong - I really like Enlightenment. I used it for several months before I finally switched to XFCE. 0.16 showed me the potential this project has, but it lacks some features which I really want to use. I started searching for alternatives when I realized that E wouldn't go anywhere for a long time. By the way: What was the most obvious April Fools story this year? I'd vote for 'Enlightenment 1.0 is out'.

Re:not dead, but comatose

[nbert]

Thanks for adding insult to injury, jackhole.

I don't really know why you would be offended by an insensitive clod like me, if you are comfortable with the current state of enlightenment.

I still think it's great, but I doubt that they are going to release 0.17 this year and I also doubt that they'll (at the current rate of development) be any better than some newer WMs/minDesktops in regards to innovation, features and usability. I found something which works better for me but I never would criticize someone who is loyal to E.

Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

Sheesh, just great, a third set of graphical toolkits to load in memory for nothing... Like we didn't have enough waste of memory with Qt/kdelibs and GTK/Gnomelibs having to be both loaded in memory most of the time (who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?)

Really, there are some times where the OpenSource approach to things isn't the right one. Sure choice of graphical toolkits is great, but do we look like stupids forcing users to have more memory to load several huge sets of similar libraries *just because* or what? I wish F/OSS folks decided to rally behind one and I'd happily follow, even if it wasn't my primary choice, for the sake of reducing the bloat...

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Add to this the fact that most people don't typically have a myriad of apps open at any given time;

You just need one, say GIMP in KDE, and there you have megabytes of additional, functionally identical code loaded in memory for nothing.

And you know what? even with 512M, when I edit really big images with GIMP, I need all the memory I can get. Memory isn't there for applications and libraries to waste as they please, it's supposed to be used for the data you create/manipulate.

Many years ago, it used to be that memory taken by applications and the OS was minimal compared to your data, simply because it was vital. Now it's the other way round, because developers have gotten comfy with Moore's law. The problem is, code grows faster than Moore's law...

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[nihilogos]

Like we didn't have enough waste of memory with Qt/kdelibs and GTK/Gnomelibs having to be both loaded in memory most of the time (who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?)

Join the 21st century. At $130 for 512MB of DDR2 who gives a crap about wasting memory any more?

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[nanoakron]

Who the fuck thinks this is +5 Insightful?

It's just the insight you'd expect from combining an arrogant linux zealot who doesn't care about product coalescence to reduce redundancy with a bloated american 'honey, let's take the SUV to the ATM tonight' approach to the world.

Beautiful to see in all its unadulterated corpulence.

-Nano.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[hawkeyeMI]

How about loathing SUVs not because of the environmental issues but because I don't desire to be killed by them? I drive a compact car, something which in a city is often helpful for parking, squeezing between cars on narrow streets, etc. Some people unfortunately seem to feel that they need to drive SUVs by themselves to get to work and back in the city.

I'll grant you that SUVs are useful in some situations and for some people. Guess what -- most of the time the people I see driving them will likely never encounter those situations.

I don't know if you're familiar with game theory, but there's something called the Prisoner's Dillemma, wherein two suspected partners in crime are apprehended and separated. Each is told that ratting out the other will lighten any sentence they might get, but if both rat each other out they're screwed. The best choice is for both to keep their mouths shut, because the prosecutors need their testimony to get anywhere, but as human nature would have it, in practice, they almost always both rat each other out, figuring that the other will have done the same.

This is how it seems to work with SUVs. The most common excuse I hear for driving them is, "I feel safer." Yes, they're safer relative to people like me in regular old cars. However, SUVs have been shown to be more likely to roll over in accidents, especially where vehicles of similar size are concerned. In other words, an accident between two SUVs is more dangerous than between two cars. The safest route would be for everyone to drive cars. However, some people 'sell' out for a little marginal safety for themselves and get SUVs, thus endangering everyone else. Eventually you have 50% or more of the cars on the road as SUVs, very dangerous for car drivers, and dangerous even for SUV drivers as now they have more 'peers' on the road, peers which in an accident are mutually more dangerous than if they drove cars.

SUVs are a huge problem, no pun intended. Let's just hope oil prices go up and hit their drivers where it hurts.

Re:E redefined the desktop?

[matusa]

Your statements are quite rude. For some reason, following gnome's irritation with imlib, bashing raster came into style. But that is another tale.

E had fully themed widgets, both for window manager utilities and the decorations themselves. Shortly thereafter I saw this creeping into other window managers and toolkits, and then windows and macs both unofficially and officially began carrying similar flexible interface enhancements. As far as this unparalleled flexibility, E _was_ the first, and the pattern I just described is no coincidence--the influence was definitely there to a not insignificant extent.

raster's a nice and very enthusiastic guy, dedicated and ambitious. Take a look at E17 if you have a moment.

(note zealotry is not the aim here--E is not even my primary; simply I hate this damned bashing)

I'd like to see it use the latest X stuff

[Nailer]

I'd reckon it'd be really nifty nifty if Enlightenment started using Damage and Compositing in the next Xorg releases to handle its transparency. This would also make E hardware accelerated for most folk.