Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc

An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)

Comments

Re:Well

[Oopsz]

A lot of people don't like enlightenment, because it's "fluffy". What's wrong with a WM that's functional *and* beautiful?

It's one thing to have a GUI that shows up all my win32 using friends, but when the mac geeks are taken aback at my windowing environment, it's something else entirely.

Re:Talk is cheap

[TomorrowPlusX]

That's part of the problem. While Raster's done a magnificent job -- and frankly, it's pretty mind-blowing -- he's completely not concerned about backwards compatibility regarding toolsets. Again, what he's done is amazing but it's basically a canvas, not a traditional toolkit.

The OSS GUI world is so deeply rooted in Qt/KDE and GTK+/Gnome that there's no chance at *all* that people will adopt his APIs for the next gen display system.

Red Hat's people are concerned with achieving this kind of stuff without too deeply breaking source compatibility. If they can pull that off, my hat's off to them.

That said, red hat's people can learn a *lot* by working with Raster. Clearly, his code is fast, and his technical design's good. But the model is likely inapplicable to traditional widget toolkits.

fame?

[CAIMLAS]

More like infamy - at least to anyone that's followed E's development for any significant period of time.

Get something working, then throw it out and start over. Repeat constantly until any semblance to the original working copy is destroyed and all their dedicated beta (alpha/cvs) users are alienated to the point of not even using the "stable" (beta) E release.

That said, the Enlightenment team has turned out some amazing work (imlib2, etc.), and it's a shame to see the recycling destruction that takes place. If they were to be lest "artistic" and concentrate more on getting something working for the masses "out the door", E would still be an incredible and highly-advanced wm. We'd likely also have a slew of 3rd party apps built with imlib2 (et al), all on top of technology which would blow away gtk and qt. It's really too bad nobody forked the project and took what was good from E as they went along to create something perminant.

Re:Talk is cheap

[Lisandro]

Well, a lot of e16 libraries are widely used on *NIX. ImLib2 is the top example. If the e17 core libraries are half as good as promised, you can bet you'll see them used a lot aswell.

Yesterday, just for the sake of it, i emerged (installed on Gentoo) Evidence, e17's to-be file manager. I was hoping to get a glimpse of the e's login manager (Entrance), but for some reason i typed Evidence. It looks great, and even silly things like clicking on an icon and see it zooming transparently in the background makes you see what these guys can do with e's core libraries. Rasterman is right, what the X team is talking about as "next gen rendering", they can do now. He's well entitled to want to make it public.

And yes, one has to give kudos to Rasterman and the whole e17 team for that matter. They are putting a lot of work into e17, and it shows. I just hope they just finish it someday ;)

my favorite part...

[pohl]

The videos are very nice. I'd love to see X11 modernized in this way (so long as the right abstractions are put into the right layers). My favorite part about this story, though, is how Rasterman's post jaws on about how all of this stuff is already done...that sentiment juxtaposed against the first video is hilarious:

About --> Enlightenment...

...and a dialog box pops up that says "version 0.16.999.001". I've never used E, so maybe the version number isn't funny in Rasterman's world...but it's funny in mine.

the circle is complete

[SQLz]

Rasterman left Redhat because he felt noone there really followed his vision of an X desktop. Here we are years later and we've come full circle. Now, many (if not most) users in the community are looking for highly customizable desktop eyecandy and Gnome, KDE, and Xorg are all out there trying to deliver on what Rasterman was doing 3 years ago.

Re:So where is the response?

[eno2001]

Have you seen E17? It really looks great. I compiled and ran it on a PII dual CPU box and it ran nice and smoothly over SSH tunneled VNC! :) The only problem with it right now is that many major features are missing (it's devel so what can you expect?). You can't iconify apps yet, and there is no complete app panel to launch your apps with. But there are some beautiful animations in the WM and the basic dead panel that put it at the very least on par with Mac OS X.