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E17 Available From CVS
Lisandro writes "As stated by Rasterman on his site, Enlightenment 0.17's window manager is now available on CVS, which means you can build e17 completely from it, as it is, and give it a try. Of course, it's still work in progress, and lacking in several areas, but it is usable, and looks as gorgeous as ever. Also, in related news, the XFCE team, one of the best 'light' desktop environments for *NIX, has released the first release candidate for XFCE 4.2, with a lot of long due improvements." About e17, Rasterman's note says "It's limited in its support for ICCCM, no NETWM support and it has no iconification, virtual desktops, shading, keybindings or button bindings, but it does WORK (just). it's also fast and beautiful."
Enlightment has been work in progress for many many years and did include a complete rewrite. Which is OK because Rasterman considers himself an artist not a programmer. As for real world every day use, I'll stick to sawfish.
E16 has been quite-usable for a few years now. "Restarting" involves merely restarting the Enlightenment process, which takes a grand total of three seconds on any machine bought in the new millenium, during which time windows lose their positions and borders but are all back when E has finished reloading.
There is a common misconception (or more of a preconception as I doubt most people who hold this opinion have actually tried Enlightenment) that anything pretty must sacrifice speed. E16 (and from what I've seen so far, E17) are very fast to load and don't even register in 'top'. The main reason for this is that Enlightenment is just a window manager, not a desktop environment which has an entire framework of libraries that must be loaded to run the simplest programs. Enlightenment with all its bells and whistles will run faster on an old machine than KDE 2.x series or Gnome 1.x.
It seems that bashing Enlightenment of loading slow has become a Slashdotism as important as saying that Gentoo releases are made sooner than they can be compiled or Natalie Portman's hot grits.
Oh, but it's "fast"... I'm getting so tired of that. I remember when Sawfish came out and everyone loved it because it was so "fast"... then it added support for all of the desktop features everyone wanted and it was deemed too slow. There was a new "fast" window manager called Metacity. Gnome adopted Metacity as its primary window manager because they didn't want something that was that heavy-weight, but Metacity needed some additional features to be fully Gnomish.
Today's Metacity is as heavy-weight as Sawfish.
E has always been "fast", but fast in a different way. There are true optimizations that aren't just a result of feature incompleteness (mostly the rendering model which allows for greater hardware acceleration). Still, it's frustrating to see this process of the new toy being compared to a mature tool with a modern feature set. I love Gnome (and I'm sure I'd love KDE too) because it provides a deep and rich integration between applications. It doesn't really matter if the Window manager is Sawfish, Metacity, E or whatever comes out tomorrow, I'll still demand strong support for internationalization; multiple desktops; interaction with the session and desktop managers, panel and applications; configuration through the same configuration system as the rest of my apps; etc.
If your window manager can do all of this, THEN I'll look at how fast it is. Same for a mailer or terminal or web browser, etc, etc.
Actually, Enlightenment has as many shitty themes as every other WM/DE in existence - i've seen both e16 and e17 look pretty slick and nice with some themes and downright awful with others.
The important thing about e17 is, IMHO, the technology that drives it. Some of the stuff that can be done with the Enlightenment libraries (particularly Evas) is amazing, and simply couldn't be done with software available before.
Absolutely! In fact, I'm using E16 right now, as I'm typing up this reply. It's simple, good looking, very customisable, and extremely suited to someone who has very good linux skills. It doesn't have the clutter of KDE/Gnome, nor their orientation towards giving users an almost windows-like menu feel. It's almost perfect for me.
What you don't know is that Raster decided to rewrite the rewrite. And he possibly rewrote that too. This recent E17 release should really be called E20 or something around that. The CVS E17 hasn't actually had a window manager in it for ages, as they kept on working with the foundation libraries until they felt they finally got them right. Raster only started working on this new WM code in the last 3 or 4 months, and this is his first upload of that code to CSV, as far as I can tell.
Personally, I feel that naming this E17 is confusing many people. They think it's the same E17 window manager from a few years back, which is completely incorrect. This update is definitely news, and it's news I've been waiting for.
Rasterman's way of writing software differs quite a bit from others' in some cases. His direction and goals often encompass both cool and correct code.
Imlib2 for example has both efficient caching for remote image display as well as all-round support for image formats of various kinds and a lot of cool tricks up its sleave.
His decisions to create libraries of code that are used by other modules so that like can be kept with like and linked together as necessary is wise, even if it slows down release schedules.
I've been using DR16 for "ever" now and love it.
PS, DR17 has been in CVS for "ever" as well.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)