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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."
I always thought Elnlightment was the most innovative WM I'd seen.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
something interesting i noticed, the group_id on sf is 2, (is this the first sourceforge project ever?!?!)
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I tried it years ago, when it was the new great thing, and was discouraged by the hideously difficult installation.
I've pretty much replaced Linux with MacOS X (and I'm not the only one - I notice another similar reply already), but I would be curious to know if it's any easier to install than the old whole day or more nightmare where it seemed like you needed every library on the planet to get the thing working.
D
So don't, I'm guessing they won't really miss you anyways and if you don't want to go through the effort (somewhat nontrivial) of trying it out then don't. Then again what do you mean by "works"?
There are a lot of people using windows, most are not going to switch to linux anytime soon because for them windows "works", of course they still have all the trouble with spyware, viruses, no multiple desktops, etc, but they say it "works". Same with IE, they figure it "works" and don't even consider activeX wonkyness or tabbed browsing (don't know what SP2 has done for this). So at what point does your window manager "work"? When it compiles? When it has no bugs? When it has nothing you can point to from your dialy usage and say "that's a bug"? Maybe when annoying UI issues are gone? I figure the only way a program is ever truly done is if it does everything you've ever wanted it to do as simply and efficiently as possible. So if you want to put in the effort to see what you might be missing from your window manager that "works" go ahead and try it out. I can tell you that I'm certainly not going to try it out today (heck probably won't even RTFA) but sometime later when I have some time to spare, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe never, who knows, I might just give it a whirl.
I stole this Sig
The last theme I installed on E16.4 was 23 oz of glass, it's like having a Mac face on a Linux box. Have ripples running on a 4x1 desktop on a lo-spec Thinkpad, with enough resources left to loop my favorite trailers to the tune of techno.
Pixelmoose if you're listening, don't forget to a)port your theme to E16.7.1 b) make a 23oz of glass xmms skin...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
This isn't a troll, or at least it's not meant as one, but try as I might, I could never get into using Enlightenment. And from the fact that Gnome and KDE get the majority of the press/developers/software, I'm guessing I'm not alone in this impression.
,after booting, am faced with the identical look and feel of the last time I used it. Nothing (on the surface, at least) had changed! No icons... Just a couple of odd, pager-like boxes.
Don't get me wrong: Enlightenment is certainly a powerful and capable windowing system, and there have been some fairly original looks/themes released for it, but, to me at least (he says, carefully circumventing the Troll under the bridge) it's not a GUI that a new user coming from the Windows/Mac/KDE/Gnome world can immediately begin using. Or configuring.
(This is where all the Slashdot/Linux "elite" begin to quote my thread for their 'RTFM', and 'How could it be any simpler than xxxx?' responses)
When I first began investigating Linux all those years ago, Enlightenment themes and screenshots were all the rage. KDE and Gnome were promising, but Enlightenment was how all the coolest geeks seemed to produce such cool eye candy-based desktops. But to a Linux newbie like me, coming from an Amiga/Dos/Windows background at the time, it was totally alien. It was just too much to have to begin learning Linux, and a totally different GUI like Enlightenment, both at the same time. So Enlightenment went goodbye after way too many wasted hours trying to become productive and look good doing it.
So flash ahead several years (last year, to be exact), and a much more Linux-savy version of Me decided to give Enlightenment shot again. I hadn't kept up with it, and had meanwhile become an avid KDE fan, but I wanted to try something different, and figured that Enlightenment had to have matured by this time, to a point wherein I could grasp it easier. I mean... KDE had came so far in this time.
So I boot it up after installing the latest version, and
Now... I'm not expecting enlightenment to change their way and become KDE or Gnome or anything. But they've gotta realize that virtually any converts to their window manager will be coming from an environment such as KDE, Gnome, Windows, etc. It's a totally different methodology from that of Enlightenment. You'd think that one of the first things that you'd see on a default desktop would be a "how to get started" type of document.
Yeah, yeah... I know. RTFM. Yes, I also know that I can configure Enlightenment to look and interact like whatever I want it to, but I'd kind of expect "something" to push the new user in the right direction.
But other things were not impressive also. Fonts, in paricular, looked poor when compared to the more popular window managers around.
So flash foward to todays announcement here on Slashdot, and so I decide to take a look at Enlightenments page to see if anything's changed yet. I see this. Come on... For crying out loud, someone get Enlightenment a PR director. If the programmers hope to grow the userbase of their window manager, they really should make it a bit more accessible. If an "intro level" of usability isn't a possibility, then how about a simple "Introduction to Enlightenment" document, or walk through? Something to offer the new user a glimpse of the power of Enlightenment. And without requiring them to hunt it down, or surf out to a website.
At least make the default font's look better. This is a good example of both the default look of Enlightenment, and it's default fonts. Conversely, this is the default look of KDE. I'm not saying that KDE's superior (to me it is, but who cares), but the default look, which all of us have seen many times before, and consi
:-) I use both. I have Enlightenment set as my X11 window manager for 10.3 and it works really well (via Fink).
I can't say I'm a big fan of CVs, but I just downloaded and extracted all the source packages from Sourceforge, and a simple
was all I needed to do on my Slackware box. No problem.
There is also Evidence, the enlightenment file manager. See the Screen Shots and download the release.