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.
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
Can somebody explain to me the reasoning behind WHY they use such a strange numbering methodology for Enlightenment?
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.
I've been running E17 from that repository for a while now (On FC3) and I really like it. I still use E16 as my primary window manager because E17 is missing a few things I use (like remembering where windows go and a few other things) but it is really nice.
It's also fun running E17 inside a nested X server under E16. I had to pick up my Mac-loving graphic-artist friend after I showed him what a fully eye-candy E17 (animated background, animated menus, animated titlebars, etc) looks like without shutting down my X session.
... And so it comes to this.
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.
It seems like everyone is stuck on the similarities between osx and enlightenment. Yes, enlightenment has had a dock panel for years. Engage's interface does resemble osx's docker for the pure fact that it is both eye candy and functonal. One thing I have not seen you guys mention is that even though they look the same the libs and everything else behind engage are meant for it to be fast, pretty and functional all at the same time.
Most of you that have never looked at enlightenment probably think it is just another windows manager. However, as others have stated under this topic, enlightenment is built on top of libs that are meant to increase speed, stability and useablitly. Yes, e17 is lacking useablitly right now because it is still under heavy development and there are still changes being made to the libs themselves and the window manager will be the last thing being updated.