Slashdot Mirror
Enlightenment DR17 On the Linux Desktop
StephenJoiner writes "There's a new review on Mad Penguin of the latest VectorLinux release, which includes the in-development Enlightenment DR17 desktop. As far as I know, this is the first time DR17 has appeared on a production desktop... even as a "technology preview". All I have to say is Enlightenment on VectorLinux is absolutely off the scale." Enlightenment was in Slashdot news earlier for both the involvement with Elive and their use of Epeg bits to deal with thumbnailing.
- but where's the review now? Did you wonder this too? Well, here it is! VectorLinux 5.1 Deluxe Review
Howabout you link to the madpenguin article?
Here.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Does it run Lin..
I was wondering what happened to Enlightenment!
Is there a live cd distribution that contains Enlightenment? I can't be bothered with installing a distro just to try it out.
There was recently a how-to posted on getting Ubuntu and E16-E17 paired up on ubuntu forums if anyone is interested and hasn't seen it:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=54476
Clearly the editors know their readers so well! Due to the overly popular method of not reading the article, editors have apparently stopped including links to them all together so that readers aren't bothered by those nasty changes in text colors.
Well done.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
For anyone interested in testing out Enlightenment 17 in Fedora, you can find a repository here: http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~didierbe/news_e17.html I've used it with FC2 & 3, haven't tried FC4 yet, but so far it's been fairly stable. I do still prefer E16, but it's worth a shot.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Looking at the screenshots, Enlightenment seems to be bringing amazing eye candy to the standard X server. As they haven't yet leveraged the additional transparency & acceleration features present in some developmental X servers, its exciting to think how far they can speed up and enhance these visual effects even further. Despite being in development for so long, I think this presents an interesting design/style challenge to the more conservative KDE & Gnome desktops.
Business Voyeur
Its off the hook! Not off the scale.
Jeez, don't you know anything about the hip-hop subculture?
Nearly had a heart attack when I saw this, for a sec I thaught e17 had been released... finally, I have been using e16 since I first started linux (slackware 7.0) I have tried gnome, kde, windowmaker, etc. since then but always go back to enlightenment, it si just the best, I cannot wait for e17 to be finalized! but this is a good start, it leads me to beleave that it is time to try out e17 again (last time it was VERY early development stage)
I've been using E17 for the past few days. It's beautiful, and it's as stable as any desktop environment I've used--perhaps more so. Not all the features have been implemented; it still needs a menu editor to be really useful (or just tell me which config file to modify, and put one there by default), and I'd like to see an e17 terminal.
Still, it's lightweight, beautiful, features real transparency, and is unusually stable for being in heavy development.
The difference between those flavors is not (only) in the looks but in behaviour.
here here.
good luck getting an ion theme for style XP.
a question of "lightweight" vs "heavyweight" window managers can't be answered with themes alone.
I use it daily on my laptop here on FreeBSD 5.4. It really is superb. I previously used xfce4, but have switched over to this now. Startup time is about 3 seconds, speed is excellent with loads of graphic effects. Themes available are really nice. The only criticism I have is the use of binary files for some config stuff (menus and icons).
I highly recommend it. Can't wait for the full release (not least because I haven't bothered to compile the extra utils).
I'm not a Gentoo apologist or advocate, but it has had DR17 available as an ebuild (like the rest of the distribution) for months.
Can somebody explain to me the reasoning behind WHY they use such a strange numbering methodology for Enlightenment?
In the end, don't you get what you pay for?
Traditionaly yes, but with free stuff, you get what someone else paid for. If they paid a lot, you'll get good stuff.
However people who pay a lot to make something will usually want to get their investment back.
Now software came along with people who had ideas for the greater good. People donated their time and skill for this noble goal. What do we get, in some cases quality stuff for free and in other cases junk.
With normal stuff you can actually hold in your hand, I agree that you get what you pay for, or someone scammed you.
I need. What about that?
Sorry, but styles can't affect functionality [or] simplicity. If I want the eyecandy (KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment...), I can choose it. If I just want a screen to open a bunch of terminals in it (Ratpoison anyone?) I can have it too. It's called "option", and it's a blessing.
i believe the question is if it runs OSx86 these days.
I have installed DR17 from CVS on my gentoo distribution, so I was really interested in looking at vector linux's website after reading this. However, it appears to me that since I can't get through, then they must have been slashdotted.
Yes it is
I'll bite.
Enlightenment is not a flavor of anything.
Enlightenment is not a desktop environment a la MSWindows explorer.exe .
KDE and Gnome are something like that.
Enlightenment is a window manager evolved into a desktop shell and lots more.
Imagine you were not a Windows user, and you didn't feel their metaphor is the natural metaphor for a GUI system.
Enlightenment proposes a different interface, plus a different interaction with objects from the user perspective. You can't really compare enlightenment with gnome, because they are completely different in their own essence.
Aside from that, enlightenment is a project that provides lots of useful general purpose libs, but back in the day, they defined what general purpose meant in many areas (e.g.:imlib, esd).
They are building libs that they think should be available to anyone building next generation stuff. They can be right, like before, or they can be coding useless stuff. We'll see.
Which way?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I didn't even notice the story didn't link to the article.....
I find this strange... Enlightenment is not a product you are paying for. You are not paying people that are writing it. You are not a stock holder in a company developing it. What right to you have to say the people working on it shouldn't?
If you do not like it don't use it. If you want a customizable engine like StyleXP then write it. Nothing is stopping you.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually if you look on Rasterman.com, he does a few comparisons of different stock window managers using a script that he wrote, and E-17 kills.
http://www.rasterman.com/index.php?page=News Scroll down to the post "E17 is being Optimized"
I'm particularly fond of the way the pager behaves. I like being able to drag and drop iconified windows between desktops. Although this works in Gnome, it will place the window in the new desktop at the same coordinates it was in the old one. With the pager in E, you can actually *place* the window within the pager...
Imagine you were not a Windows user, and you didn't feel their metaphor is the natural metaphor for a GUI system.
Well, you could always use Mac OSX. Wait! It uses the same metaphor! So how come no one ever bitches that KDE and GNOME are OSX ripoffs?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
eHave eYou? (iApple and KDE?)
I run e17 (16.999.whatever) on Ubuntu from a HOWTO available in the forums. There is a .deb repository you can tie into, so now even the 'Ubuntu update' auto thingy even finds updates to those, so it's part of my system now. It's very slick, feels like the speed of Fluxbox but the look of, well...nothing really; it's in a class by itself.
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
Anything to speed up desktop drawing. I installed Ubuntu v5.04 on my Inspiron8000/512MB/GeForce2GO, and gnome-terminal was sucking up 80% CPU, just by dragging the cursor across it! After searching all kinds of maillists, I learned to drop antialiasing, which still puts gnome-terminal at 5-15% CPU when cursor dragging. To say nothing of the rest of the drawing updates: I can see the pixels redrawing as I drag windows around, nevermind the slimetrail of "windowprints" where I dragged it from, until I drop it.
Linux usually gets much more efficient use of the same HW than Windows. But I never saw GUI lethargy like this with Windows installed on that Inspiron.
--
make install -not war
Oh, right, the reason Linux hasn't hit it big yet on the desktop is because it's software is not as customizable and skinnable, not because of how said software behaves and interacts with software written for differing toolkits. Give me a break, for theme and style lovers you're already able to make your applications appear to seamlessly blend with one another, with a wide selection of visually appealing styles for lots of software, not to mention you can hack your own theme into pretty much any environment if you had the will to. You can either use a look-and-feel that was designed to bring the desktops together (Ala Bluecurve/Wonderland) or you can even use your QT-styles in GTK+ apps using the qt theme engine. I'm not aware of any way to bind QT to use GTK+ widgets and appearances, but I really wish they would get to developing a way, because it seems silly to be able to have my GTK+ apps use my QT style, but I can't use my GTK+ style with my QT apps.
If anything, the last thing needed is a billion different interfaces to choose from (Speaking from an average end-user standpoint who's looking for sane defaults). What we've needed for a long time is an acceptable standard that most distributions build upon for user interface design, and more cooperation between projects to ensure that simple necessities like drag-and-drop function properly, that enabling the eye-candy for high-end systems doesn't crash the system or cause other glitches (COMPOSITE extension, anyone?), and overall that performance refinements become a higher priority. Memory usage, CPU usage, there are many areas for improvement other than appearance.
QT is already extremely customizable in appearance and behaviour, and GTK+ is just as good as QT if not slightly improved (GTK+ sure does seem to get a lot more themes that get attention, at least).
P.S. -- What the heck do you mean by flavours of GNOME/KDE/Englightenment? I would think a flavour of a specific desktop environment means a theme/style, but if that were the case, then your post defeats itself.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
What you are missing, however, is that no matter how many skins you can toss on XP it is still just XP painted a little differently. Can you get tabbed windows like Fluxbox? Multiple desktops like... err... everything? These different window managers and desktop environments all have different purposes and design goals. For a full desktop, there is Gnome (with its huge collection of themes), for something a little lighter on resources there is XFCE, for bare bones but slick as snot there are window managers like Fluxbox. For a shiny gaudy desktop whose applications all start with the same letter, there is KDE. These different interfaces don't just look different from each other, they also *work* differently.
enlightenment DR17 is *much* more customisable than StyleXP, in fact, StyleXP looks like simple color-changer next to it. I would reccomend just looking at get-e.org and see what can be accomplished by themes
Who modded you as insightful?! You clearly don't know wtf you're talking about!
If you and the modders bothered to take a look at TGTSoft's FAQ, you'd notice that they explicitly state that StyleXP is not a skinning engine.
What is Style XP?
Style XP is not a skinning engine. It uses Microsoft's built-in visual style engine, but enhances it by providing many useful tools. Style XP can import, select, rotate, and manage Themes, Visual Styles, Wallpaper, Logons, BootScreens, Icons, and Explorer Bar. Future versions may support sounds, cursors, screensavers, and packages of all the above.
Pfft, what a shameless plug for a sub-standard product! Jeez louise...
Noble in what way? The MS Monopoly is still with us. So basically the only noble effect is that companies get free software, and a few moochers get free software. The majority of the world continues on like nothing's happenned.
Does it run on Linux?
But is it... "Outta Site!"?
Is it "Off the Hook!!!"?
Is it "To the Max!!!"?
Is it "Total Extreme!!!"?
Is it "Rad!"?
Is it "Bitchin'!!!"?
Is it "Narly!!!"?
I need to sit down, I feel overwhelmed by a case of stupid.
Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for 10+ years now. Oh, and if you look at his benchmark results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box, too.
Incidentally, I'm not knocking Raster here. He's done some wonderful stuff, and for the most part, been quite badly treated by some of the big players. But fvwm rocks.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Real men don't use desktops, they use twm and throw down with some .twmrc
.07 of my memory and exactly 0.0 of my cpu.
Seriously though, while those screenshots do look nice, I haven't yet looked at a flashy desktop and wished it on my system. I prefer every ounce of my cpu going to my applications. top -p 4148 just showed twm using
Well it is also for some a highly functional way of organizing the desktop and has been in personal use for years. I still use enlightenment on my MAME box as it is just such a damn sexy thing to have the television with guests over.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Well, that's an elitist attitude! This is the EXACT reason why Linux has a rough time on the desktop. Users are used to saying well I like this like that and I wish the taskbar was green instead of blue. Linux developers need to design FOR the user instead of themselves if they want to take market share from Microsoft. The goal of developers should be to have peolpe USE their software. I fully believe Raster cares. Otherwise they would not have rewritten Enlightenment which is what DR 17 is for the most part.
Gorkman
What does this window manager do that Mac OS X's doesn't? It seems that it has copied the dock straight from that, and window transparency is already well supported on the Mac as well. I ask not because I'm trying to trumpet OS X; I'm trying to understand whether there's real innovation here, or whether this is being touted only because it's more advanced than Gnome/KDE.
because they're not? Have you ever used OSX? It's almost completly different. For example, with the dock+expose+the way windows get tiled, you don't need multiple desktops. First thing I did (after installing developer tools, x11 layer etc..) when I got OSX was download a multidesktop hack, but within about 2 days I found it wasn't necissary. Even the hacks that try and make KDE/etc into Aqua don't get it right (I'm assuming they're jsut looking at screenshots or something)
KDE/etc are way closer to windows then Aqua. The whole NeXT (neXt? NEXT? who knows) thing its got going is really different. Having all the windows pseudo PDF's, having everything done in opengl, all the vectorized graphics etc, and thats just visuals. The interface is vastly differnt.
I used e17 for a few weeks last month as my primary WM. It is indeeded beautiful and all of the fancy effects worked smoothly even on my toaster 800mhz transmeta laptop, but I eventually switched back to something more stable.
:P
It's really not ready for prime-time yet, although it is certainly close. Maybe they've fixed these bugs in the last few weeks, but I noticed-
* sometimes windows refuse to close after their owning process has been killed. These things just linger on the screen, filled with random garbage.
* multiple monitors profoundly confuse the desktop-switching gadget and pager
* evidence CVS was broken, so there's no e17 native file manager and I resorted to using nautilus
And of course it needs an e17 native version of eterm... that will be excellent when it shows up
The themes available so far don't really make use of the way-cool stuff edje can do... e17 is going to be really amazing once more themes and applications are built with its core libraries.
Because KDE predates OS X, and GNOME was released in the same month as OS X?
Amen!
What does off the scale mean? Good or bad?
...the greatest desktop known to man and machine. It is what convinced me to dump Windows altogether. It is THE killer app. That is all.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Look, I'm not trying to get into a pissing match over which WM is better or anything. The parent subject indicated that E17 was vapourware, and you and I both know that's not true. He also wanted to know what was significant about it besides the eye-candy. Obviously high performance on a small footprint is significant - particularly if you take into account that it actually looks half decent.
StyleXP is not an engine, it's just a really horrible hack to enable unsigned msstyle files to be used rather than luna. It patches XP's themeing engine in memory, whooptydoo. Save yourself some money and patch the real uxtheme.dll yourself, there are plenty of free patchers available to do it.
The last release of Enlightenment (an XWindows windows manager) was 0.16, and it used to be the default window manager for GNOME. It was released in 2000 (last stable) and an update was released December of last year (2004).
DR17 indicates it is a development release (i.e. not advisable to use in a production machine) of the next version (0.17, or "17" for short). There are some very novel things in it, and all-in-all, it is a very powerful engine. See the ./ article for interesting, albeit self-described, forward thinking of the project.
If you want the full effect you have to go into Gconf and tell nautilus to not draw the desktop, but otherwise it works pretty good. I have found that overall its faster than Metacity, and is more stable with xcompmgr. I just wish I could find another way to task switch in E17 that is not alt-tab, and I hope that one day E17 will conform to Freedesktop standards so I can use Kompose with it!
Open Source Sushi
The last time I tried enlightenment, I was not impressed. Eye candy is great, but I also want something that lets me work efficiently and consistently (Please, somebody modernize OS/2's WPS and make a WM that uses those concepts!). If enlightenment can deliver consistency and a usage model that gives us power (simple things are simple, hard things possible, etc), that would be great. If not, I'll just settle to next best thing to WPS I can find on linux, which is currently windowmaker with Rox-Filer.
ARE YOU TRYING TO COVER UP THE SERVICE THIS GUY HAS PROVIDED FOR THE LAZY EDITORS? Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
come on mods, sort it out, its a genuine question.
Just wanted to mention it, there's a KDE prog called Komposé which adds the Exposé functionality to KDE. I haven't had a chance to try Exposé myself so I can't really compare the two, but you might like to try it though.
What a vacuous, inane, empty load of rubbish. I use OSX alot, Linux moreso. If anything OSX is UNIX done 1 Way, and a reasonably inflexible, non-free, hardware dependent way at that. Is that "UNIX done right"? Next you'll be telling me the one button mouse is necessary because it encourages software developers to write applications with simpler interfaces.
eEnlightenment
Get your Unix fortune now!
I have been using E17 for about a month on Ubuntu 5.04 and I have to say I really like it. The OS-X style iBar functions as a task manager/app launcher, and the file manager Evidence works quite nicely. My biggest problem with the entire environment is configuration is quite difficult. I can't seem to make the file manager right click menus work properly. They are supposed to use extensions and mime types to provide custom menus based on file content, but they dont usually show you what you need. The menus are quite nice, and I like the default window focus scheme of following the cursor. As far as stablility is concerned, it only usually crashes when I restart it to update the menus, and it starts again instantly at its previous state. Once it is polished a bit more I think E17 could be the flagship DE for Linux.
WHAT THE HELL?! Instead of looking at E17, trying it, using it, seeing how it fits your needs, you write it off as a "dead end street" like the majority of all linux users. You ARE toeing the line.
Not toeing the line?
Because you are harshing on one of the highest Holy Grail joke-butts in Slashdot history?
You could try to be a little more appreciative, but that's not troll-material on its own, A/C..
E17 is not E16, E15, or even E14.
Do yourself a favor, get it in front of you, and see the Easter Bunny do a jig with the Tooth Fairy under a fleet of Flying Pig musicians. There's more to it than "Oooh, shiny"
Are you trying to get us to convince you? Take a look - not at screenshots. See it in action, then look at some screenshots circa 1998.
Look at Avalon & Aqua, and consider the programming forces behind them.
Now, take a look at Rasterman.
And I'm no fan-boy of any spelling. It's just good stuff!
Also, ICQ has been in beta for about that long. Google was in beta for what, a year & a half?
Beta, shmeta. Is there code? Does it run?
From the link " Enlightenment has grown to be much more than a window manager."
But, do we want it to be any of that? To me it sounds like it will be very much bloat, too, after some more years.
Does anyone know if enlightenment plans on having tabs? IMO that's the single biggest feature missing from enlightenment and the reason I'm going to have to stick with fluxbox
E is cool and everything, but it has been in Beta for what ... 8 years now?
And? It took Apple about that long to develop a modern OS, but nobody writes OS X off as a dead end. It's taking Microsoft nearly that long to develop Vista, but we all know that, like it or not, Windows is not going to die as a result. And it took humans several tens of thousands of years to develop the wheel - does that mean that mankind is a dead end street?
particularly if you take into account that it actually looks half decent.
Unlike FVWM.
KDE has resemblances of MSWindows, with much of the good, and some of the bad (too much for _my_ own taste). It seems to _me_, just from observation, with no scientific evidence whatsoever, that they try to implement all the functionality the user needs, and they make it accesible with ways familiar to a common [MSWindows] user, thus obtaining a familiar environment for common [MSWindows] users.
Gnome, on the other hand, seems to me that they might lack some functionality common users can miss, but they focus more on making the interface they want than on providing every little fature users are accustomed to, but keeping more control on the interface.
The fact that Gnome might seems similar to OSX is possible, because is you are going to copy interfaces, Apple is one of the leaders, and there are not many good ways of implementing a good interface, you might even implement the same things starting from scratch, if you follow the same authors guidelines.
On the other hand, I don't see where you see that KDE seems like OSX.
How long has E17 been in Development?
I was using E16 until they mentioned that it would not longer be supported, because they were working on E17, which would not be backward compatible.
There's a lot of talent developing Enlightenment, I only wish it would maintain a code base long enough to get some real apps built for it.
Enlightenment is what it is. A work in progress where a lot of innovation is going on. Like your shiny brushed metal interface on OSX? Guess where that came from? You're right, DR16.
DR17 is pretty much used by a lot of people. Obviously not as many as those using OSX, but then, even if only a handful of people ever visit your personal website/blog that doeswn't make it useless or pointless, does it?
At the end of the day, you use what suits you, your job and your habits. The role that OSS is playing today is both instrumental and inspirational. Instrumental because it gives systems like OSX the tools (samba, khtml, etc) to make it work flawlessly, and insipirational because it innovates where it would be too risky for a company like Apple to invest in.
And so everyone gets a lot more than they bargained for.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I wonder if they'll start taking advantage of Cairo and Glitz. Doing so would let graphics cards accelerate GUI drawing via OpenGL, a la Quartz on OS X. Hardware accelerated GUIs are a hallmark of modern operating systems (OS X, Windows Vista), it'd be nice if Linux could join the party too.
A one button mouse is necessary because it encourages software developers to write applications with simpler interfaces.
Sorry, had to be done.
We are still waiting for binary.
I started compiling DR17 couple months ago and it's not done yet!
Yeah, i agreed with you until I actually tried it. If it's got bloat in it, it don't run like it. It's probably the most responsive desktop i've used, and the one with the most eye candy i've used, including OS X, Windows XP, Gnome 2.10, KDE 3.4. Those two things don't usually go together. Somehow rasterman pulled it of, if it is bloated. Otherwise, he's just a damn good coder.
I doubt it. If you've looked at what they're doing, there's an excellent base of graphics and graphics manipulation libraries (the EFL) and a few smart function and themeing libraries (also part of the EFL) that wrap everything together, but e17 doesn't actually come bundled with any non-necessary apps... Sure there's the EFL-based file manager Evidence, which is great, but it doesn't "ship" with enlightenment, and I don't even think all the devs use it. There are also image viewers (entice), audio players (eclair, euphoria), and a hell of a lot more, but they're all just EFL apps akin to the peripheral QT apps that don't actually ship with KDE. Ultimately, the core libs are what links everything together, and there are different apps built off of those. True, EFL apps go quite well together (because they use the same libs and themes), but ultimately, everything's still separate... even all of the "modules" for the desktop aren't loaded by default. The e-team has done an amazing job at cutting out bloat while pushing beaty (or, if you don't like their themes, at least opening the doorway to it).
[ you and I are ugly ]
http://www.soulmachine.net/wiki/index.php?title=En lightenment_on_Debian_unstable
my blog
You said: does that mean that mankind is a dead end street? That would be a resounding yes. I am working on developing the eventual sentience in machines. That is where things are going. ;p
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Here are some great Enlightenment videos. http://lycos42.free.fr/e17/cvs/videos/
http://enlightenment.org/Enlightenment/Screenshots /files/_files/e17_video.avi
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I keep hearing people claim that KDE is like Windows, but GNOME is not. But never is there any evidence of it. Is it the wallpaper? Every desktop has wallpaper! Is it icons? Every (modern) desktop has icons! Is it the panel? Every desktop has a panel of some sort! Titlebar on top of windows? Every desktop has that by default! W.I.M.P.? Yup! Folder/document metaphor? Yup! Yup! Yup! Yup!
Is it just because GNOME puts its panel on top instead of bottom that people think it's not Windows-like? Because it has higher contrast icons by default? WHY?!?!
On the other hand, I don't see where you see that KDE seems like OSX.
Let's see. Docker-like panel with zooming icons. I can put app menus on the top in a child panel just like Mac. And I can theme it with an Aquafresh Toothpaste style. Konqueror isn't Finder, but then again, neither is Nautilus.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Well, that's an elitist attitude! This is the EXACT reason why Linux has a rough time on the desktop. Users are used to saying well I like this like that and I wish the taskbar was green instead of blue. Linux developers need to design FOR the user instead of themselves if they want to take market share from Microsoft.
Elitist:
1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.
2.
a. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.
b. Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class.
Ok, now what is there in this definition that matches the developers? Are they expecting favoured treatment from someone because they are developers? No. Are they making demands that they feel they have an intrinsic entitlement to because they are developers? No. Are they attempting to use their developer status to control anyone? No.
Now, lets apply this test to YOU, the user. Are you expecting favoured treatment from someone because you are a user? Yes, you're demanding that the developers should cater to your needs. Are you making demands that you feel you have an intrinsic entitlement to because you are a user? Yes, you appear to think that being the user makes you the King, and apparently you're used to being listened to when you make stupid demands like changing colors etc. Are you attempting to use your "user" status to control anyone? Well, your whole point was that there is some natural order to things that places you at the top of the heap because you are a user.
So, I guess what I'm basically saying is stop being elitist, and go learn what the word means before you use it in public.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I got yer virtual desktops right here.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Windows powertools allows some fun stuff, like Linux-style mouse focusing, multiple desktops, MacOS-like Expose switching...
However, programs aren't expecting windows to have capabilities like that, so it's a bit glitchy, sometimes, haha
That said, Every Linux WM/DE that I've used has implemented these capabilities better.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Somewhere a few posts back someone (not you) was talking about how people should just work on building one perfect desktop environment. A dumb comment IMHO -- along the lines of "let's perfect Vanilla, forget about Mint Chocolate Chip."
... I too downloaded a multidesktop program within a couple days of getting my powerbook as well -- and I still use it. Compose just doesn't do it for me -- perhaps it's because I'm on a laptop (15"). I like having my procrastination junk on the first desktop -- mail/calendars on 2nd -- work stuff on the 3rd -- and 4th for a blank space if something comes up. Anyway, everyone works differently and for some Compose is cool, and for others it isn't so great. Thank goodness for alternatives.
Anyway
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I don't know why you mention multiple desktops, because Windows does NOT HAVE MULTIPLE DESKTOPS!
There is some third party software that will do it on Windows, but it's not there by default, nor is it in any way common. Your idea that OSX is different from Windows because it doesn't have multiple desktops is strange, to say the least.
p.s. Expose is *NEW* to OSX. Are you claiming that pre-Expose OSX (as in 2004) was Windows-like?
p.p.s. I'm not claiming OSX to a clone of Windows. I'm only claiming that they use the same desktop paradigm.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Thanks for the chuckle. So where on my 2k desktop do I make the taskbar, and just the taskbar, green?
I understand the need for backward compatibility, but why can't Enlightenment use the newer composite/damage/etc when the server offers it, and enable less candy otherwise?
The way I see it, EWM could do it using a plugin model, where the plugins/extensions are only loaded when supported (and not disabled by custom option)
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The site is back up now
[I know this is a troll.. but what the heck...]
/gam/
What the...? You want a way to customize your window manager's themes? Most window managers do that for you. Besides, after a quick look at the StyleXP site, it appears that they're using something that Microsoft designed but didn't implement. Essentially, you need to buy this software to enable the native functionality in that OS that *should be provided by Microsoft* already.
*sigh*
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
Sure, gnome is a lot like windows... but if the contest was between which DE (gnome or KDE) looked more like which commercial WM, it's pretty obvious that gnome resembles OSX more than KDE resembles OSX and that KDE resembles windows more than gnome resembles Windows... This is why it's easy to compare the two as people do...Perhaps the ways in which gnome is more like osx and kde is more like windows are few, but they are also quite obvious, methinks: - gnome...er metacity or whatever has a bar at the top; windows has never done so standard, neither has KDE (to my knowledge)... but OSX has and gnome has. - gnome presents fewer options that "clutter" the screen, like OSX. Look at the doc in osx, it's pretty simple. Look at the menus in gnome, pretty simple. KDE presents every option on the face of the earth in some distributions... windows can be awfully cluttery, too.... ESPECIALLY on a new install loaded with dell/hp/gateway/whatever-company bullshit applications. Macs simply don't come loaded with all that crap visible, and Gnome keeps it to a minimum. There are other similarities, too, but these are the most obvious and therefore the most important... once you get much further than this, you start nit-picking into things people don't even notice.
[ you and I are ugly ]
Oh, yay! MS finally came up with an add-on which lets you do something I've been able to do since I started using Linux in 1996. How very innovative of them.
Oops, Houston, we have a problem. I see that it lets you have a total of four virtual desktops. Lessee, I'm running nine right now, although only six are actually in use, so I guess that won't quite work for me. Gee, I wonder if things like dragging an application off the pager onto the current desktop, etc. work? Not.
Do us a favor; let us know when MS actually comes up with something that someone else wasn't doing better 10 years ago, 'k?
Read the name backwards: It's evile. EVIL-E! Get it? It will suck out your soul and install a Microsoft OS. Better stick to KDE until enlightenment has a distribution approved by the Pope.
We used to code in a showbox in the middle of the road.
Robert Anton Wilson
Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for 10+ years now.
The E pager is very nice and I hope everything is just as good. It's been a long time since I've used fvwm, just as it had been a long time since I used E. I like E's real division between virtual desktops and screens, so you can have multiple pagers in E each with it's own desktop with multiple screens. I also like being able to drag and drop between the different pagers.
E also gets minimized viewers right too. It draws a thumbnail or an icon and grows to accommodate what you have open or scrolls, your choice. You can also turn off the borders, so nothing but the icon or thumbnail gets in front of your background image.
Theme transparency already rocks. Add that to animated backgrounds and you have something unmatched in the commercial world.
Oh, and if you look at his benchmark results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box, too.
Like this benchmark?
It looks a little funny to me to, but it's a benchmark with both window managers on it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I know that's a loaded question but that's why RH gave it the boot to begin with. I know some people love their eye candy but most I suspect most want something which has a passing familiarity with things they already know and are comfortable with.
Still I'll give it a go and see how far E17 has progressed.
Features
Blah Blah Blah
* In a nutshell: Everything you could want... and more.
But it can't be everything I want... and more. I don't want "more."
It seems like there's foundations/organizations out there supporting a few major linux components, there's some high profile linux devs that are sponsored and can work on it full time.
...
I'm just curious why that doesn't seem to be the case for Enlightenment. Of all things, it's not even some boring behind the scenes CompSci work that the user won't notice, it's got glitz and glamour. As far as wow factor it's so there and in your face. So I'm wondering why there's not someone or some company out there backing them and helping to channel more resources to it?
If I was a rich millionaire E17 is the thing I would be backing... Of course in the real world, there's going to be many factors I'm ignorant of. But for a project with so much promise behind it, I wonder why it seems to continue to putter on in the background at a slow quiet pace?
Does it really kinda bother anyone else that in one of the Enlightenment screenshots, the guy is playing videos with transparency enabled? Who the hell would watch video with transparency enabled?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Using the location of the panel on the top or the bottom as an indication of Windows-ness is petty. Supremely petty. Bordering on stupidity. Did you know it takes all of three seconds to put the KDE (or Windows) panel on the top of the screen? Ooooh, maybe we could be truly innovative and put it on the side!
Fewer options that clutter the screen? In KDE I have one panel and two icons by default. On OSX I have one panel, two icons, and one menu bar. That's one more element. The panel itself may be more cluttered in KDE (since it has a clock), but it isn't any more cluttered than GNOME's.
Yes, there are more menu options in KDE. Much much more than in Windows (which is pretty sparse by default). But GNOME has many more options than Windows as well! Shame on them! Bad, bad GNOME!
But simplicity or complexity has NOTHING to do with Windows-ness. That's petty as well. "Look Ma! It has more than two buttons in the dialog, it must be that Windows thing they keep warning us about!"
So that's it? Those are the three big things that makes KDE a Windows clone? Panel on bottom, lots of icons on desktop, lots of items in menus? Pardon me if I sound skeptical.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
naaah, it's just the latest version of motif.
Don't do that to me I thought it was finished when I scrolled past that article!
Of course no E ever gets truely finished until Rastaman decides he is trashing it and going onto The Next Great thing.... E17 will be finished when Rastaman decides he is trashing it all and doing E18 and replacing imlib2 with imlib3....!
Yes, non free is always bad. How's the free car you drive or the free cpu you're running.
Current x86 processors are SO inflexible. I really think someone should come out with an open source processor that will be free to make and will change with whatever thing I'd like to bolt on it.
Wonder why I'm seeing so many powerbooks with OSX at genetics conferences these days. Damn sheep I guess.
Like your shiny brushed metal interface on OSX? Guess where that came from? You're right, DR16.
QuickTime 4 predates DR16. It's possible that Apple copied the idea of brushed metal from DR15.
Anyway, I see that DR17 has borrowed a few ideas from Apple.
There's a BitTorrent for VectorLinux at http://www.mininova.org/tor/80583
I think you'd better revise your definition of vapourware. According to this website, it's software not yet in production, but has already been announced. Doesn't exactly match the perennial development of E17.
More than a tech demo, mate. It's very usable. I've been using it full time on my work desktop, for the last few months. It is perfect for what I want in a WM. For others, it may still lack some features, but for me, it's great!
Spoken like someone who hasn't even tried E17 lately. Do you often criticize before you try? I could make a snide comment about this being Slashdot, but I actually think most Slashdot postings are quite decent.
And no, I'm not new here.
Well, let's look up the meaning of Troll
Actually, no.
Developing sentience in humans (or more precisely, Transhumans) using machine intelligence is where it's going.
But, yes, humans are a dead end - if you count being Transhuman as an "end".
Actually, one could say that the distinction between living and non-living - biological and machine - will be removed with the ascension of Transhumans, since they will have no biological components of the sort present in planetary entities, but will have all of the adaptability of biological entities.
I understand in the deeper realms of biology, the distinction between life and non-life is purely a matter of perspective and technology anyway, these days. If it interacts with its environment in some meaningful way, it's alive; if it doesn't, it isn't.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
So when will enlightenments interface not be orrid-not the eye candy, but the inanelysmall widgets and what not.
In the interim you may use "off the chizain" or "off the chizizain" to maintain the freshness of the slang. If pressed "off the chizzle" may be used but could lead to confusion since a chisel is a tool, not a chain.
Agreed. I use E16 fulltime most of the time because I'm in a dual-monitor dual-screen (not xinerama) configuration, and E17 has a few issues here. Seems no matter where I try to open an app, it always displays on :0.0. When I do manage to open the app on :0.1, if I move the window around or resize, the coordinate display is on :0.0, which is just kinda weird.
I really like Engage, though. I'd like it more if it was a bit more tightly integrated. I can't open a menu within a certain area of the icons, and if the zoom factor is set too high, the icons get cut off. Some sort of dynamic sizing would be nice to minimize the unusable area of the screen while still allowing for zooming. But the whole thing is still under development, so I'm hoping it eventually polishes up.
E17 has had a menu editor, called Entangle, for a few weeks now. All you have to do is checkout E17 and the E17 apps from CVS. You can add, remove, and edit icons in the menus or on the icon bar by right-clicking them like you'd expect to in a modern desktop environment.
"emerge e" is all that's required on Gentoo, other distros will be doing it manually. There is some good documentation at Get-E.org.
Blag Linux (http://www.blagblagblag.org/) has E17 preview in a production release for months, I don't see why this is so amazing...
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
Microsoft's implementation of multiple desktops is a joke. If you want multiple desktops on a windows machine, get virtuawin. It's still nowhere near to what you can do with FVWM or E17, and there seems to be no decent pager, but it actually works, and it makes the time I spend working on windows much less painful.
AccountKiller
Actually, GNOME was started in '97, and OSX's first release was 2001. Not sure about beta tests and the like, but GNOME was 1.0 in '99 (and usable much earlier).
:)
GNOME is becoming a fair bit more OSXy in some ways, but I actually quite liked OSX (except for Mach-O linking silliness and the general lack of speed on my poor 800MHz iBook
like Linux-style mouse focusing ...in windows powertoys is seriously broken, to the point of being unusable. Ditch it and get txmouse instead. It still have few glitches, but generally it works. I wouldn't use windows without it.
AccountKiller
I haven't had it crash on me, but I certainly wouldn't suggest people rush out to start using it as their main WM. It's just not ready yet. There are tons of features that still need to be implemented before it's usuable full time.
I remember hearing this around release 12 or 13.. several years ago.
One thing I also remember is the first time I saw E - it was running on a sparc box of some type, I assume locally - and my jaw hit the floor, as all I'd seen previously would have been windows 98 or Slowaris.
I -do- hope Raster sticks with it and puts a stamp on something that could be a platform, because there is a lot of good stuff in there.
..don't panic
It doesn't run on SuSE 9.1 without a lot of work.
Whoever who finds E17 cool and usable should be forced to use ratpoison for a while.
Oh boy, these days I'm so fed up with eye candy I sometimes find myself missing the Athena toolkit. And that is serious...
we discovered a new way to think.
e17 has been in Cooker for quite a while, and thus will be in Mandriva 2006 (in contrib), which will be out in less than a month.
Which distro gets the newest version of particular software first depends more on how their release cycle matches the release of the software in question, than how quickly they can package new software.
So that's it? Those are the three big things that makes KDE a Windows clone? Panel on bottom, lots of icons on desktop, lots of items in menus?
No, you have to have tried out a few releases of KDE to understand what he was talking about. To me, the three big things that made all my alarms go off and turned me OFF from KDE (for being too Windows-like) were:
OK - Apply - Cancel
It was too much of a Windows clone; why did they have to bring in all the annoying bits like that? I haven't tried out the latest version, though, I could be wrong now. I still have it installed (for my root profile) just in case I want to use Koffice. Which is rarely.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Linux developers ARE the users. See, I've been thinking about this whole dichotomy that some people seem to want to enforce on the world by categorizing everything and putting people in their place (so to speak). For example:
Open source doesn't work like that. In open source, the users are the developers and the developers are the users. There's no difference. Wouldn't it be nice if the rest of the world was like that? Wouldn't it be nice if people took on not only their Rights but also their Responsibilities? Wouldn't it be nice if there was true equality and egalitarianism and people weren't segregated into consumers and producers?
Maybe I'm just a dreamer, but I refuse to be categorized, and I refuse to be forced to live the way you choose to live. And yes, that includes ignoring your whining about what "rights" you have as a user and why open source citizens (developer-users) should kowtow to you.
Nathan's blog
OK - Apply - Cancel
Huh? That's it?!?!
While there is legitimate debate on the usability of verbs versus nouns and left cancel versus right cancel and other dialog buttons stuff, this is woefully insufficient to make KDE the Windows clone everyone says it is.
I'm looking at CDE under Solaris. Its dialogs have "OK", "Apply", and "Close". So why isn't KDE accused of being a CDE clone? It would make sense because it actually started out that way once upon a time. And now I'm looking at Windowmaker. Holy shit! It has "Apply" and "Close" buttons too! Is Windowmaker a clone of Windows instead of NeXT as I've been led to believe?
Maybe Apple has a clue. I don't have a Mac handy, but I do have Apple's Quicktime player. Let's take a look at its preferences dialog. OMFG! It has "OK" and "Cancel"! Aaaargh! Is nothing sacred! Bill Gates must have Steve Jobs under his Mind Control Ray!
Come on people! Stop parroting the GNOME lies. If you're going to claim that KDE is a fcuking Windows clone, at least provide some evidence that would take more than two brain cells to refute.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
How is this elitist?
I do not understand why you should have the right to tell someone whom you do not pay what program they should or should not work on?
Now if you had bought a copy of Red Hat I could where you might have the write to say they should Drop Gnome and work on KDE... Or at least you have the right to buy Suse or the distro formerly called Mandrake instead.
Why should the goal of an open source developer be to have people use their software?
Why shouldn't it be to write what they want to write? If anything I am being anti elitist. I am saying that if you have a better idea for a desktop nothing should get in the way of you creating it except limits of your talent.
I am also saying that you do not have the right to tell someone else what work on when you are not paying for that work.
What OSS is really supposed to be about is freedom. If you do like KDE use GNOME. If you do not like GNOME use Enlightenment. If you do not like any of your options you can create a new one. If you do not Linux buy a Mac or WindowsXP. That is what freedom is all about.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
-500mb download (for a friken demo)
-nvidia gpus wont work
-nvidia driver in next few days?
I was looking at Mac OSX Server 1.0, which came out in March of 1999, the same month as Gnome 1.0.
Mac OSX link
Don't make me laugh. The virtual desktop power toy is shit.
Hey! I started the fight.
The GP hit the nail. Ok/Apply/Cancel.
That was ok in the nineties.
Lots of books were written in the nineties, and lots before, that show you how Ok/Apply/Cancel buttons don't belong in human-computer dialogs.
When I am in Gedit, and want to overwrite a text file, I am asked if I can to Cancel the operation, or Replace the file. If I want to leave without saving, it asks: don't save/cancel/save. A Yes/No/Cancel button, like in kedit is very difficult to understand for a user whose locus of attention is leaving the application. Of course, you can argue that it could be accomplished by a search and replace. But _I_ think it's a substantial difference.
And _I_ think they keep doing this wrong, because they don't want to lose the familiarity for users of Windows. That, and that it's easier to use Yes/No/Cancel buttons than actually thinking about the right names for the buttons, even is it implies long names.
Anyway, I am talking about two things.
1 - I think KDE has a sub-par user interface.
2 - I think they fail at the same spots as MSWindows
Of course, I understand that KDE has usually more functionality for the user, and more features, but I think that Gnome has a much better user interface, _including_ the default configuration, because the default configuration sets a standard, and actually has a meaning and a reason, and an effect in the actual usage of the software.
Linux Developers are NOT the only users ANYMORE. If Linux is to make headway on the Desktop, then this is the kind of attitude that needs to go.
For a example of how you can achieve a nice balance of things is Ubuntu. As long as you stick with the Gnome desktop and the regular packages, you probably won't have much of a user issue. The distro doesn't take things for granted.
Gorkman
If OSS is about freedom then I am free to choose a distro/window manage/program that does things the way I want. When I don't find that, then I have EVERY RIGHT to complain about it. Until Linux developers loose this crappy attitude(We're going to do it our way or else....unless you can provide a patch...), Linux will ALWAYS loose out to everything. To web designers who don't have the time to customize their site to Linux/Firefox(ie they use flash and other things more difficult to get going on all Linux platforms), to other commercial apps that can run on top of Linux(oh wait, I am a open source freak I don't ever run closed source apps) and basically just lose.
Now, not every Open Source programmer is like this. There are some that....care! I have e-mailed a couple developers and said hey this isn't working...they fixed it with in a day.
Sorry, working for free is not an excuse. Of course working for free, you don't have to care, but then neither do I. If you want to drive users away, continue being like this. If you want people to use your stuff, then be responsive.
Gorkman
Then maybe these non-developer-users should put up or shut up, ie pay for what they want or build it themselves (become true open source users).
Maybe some of us don't give a fuck whether Linux is to "make headway on the Desktop". And maybe some of us think this "gimme, gimme, gimme" attitude of useless lusers needs to go. I mean, who the fuck do you think you are telling these people who DONATED their hard work to you what they should do. I can understand constructive criticism, but this entitlement complex is part of the reason the US is heading down the path that Rome did.
Nathan's blog