A Look At the Lightweight Equinox Desktop Environment

Linux.com (who share Slashdot's corporate overlords) takes a look at the Equinox Desktop Environment and why, even though it is extremely lightweight, it may still lack the ability for widespread appeal. "the Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is the fastest desktop environment I know of -- but its lack of standards support and a few missing features may be troubling to some users. [...] EDE feels as light as a window manager but also offers the features mentioned above. The speed advantage of EDE most likely lies in its foundation, a modified version of the Fast Light ToolKit GUI library. EDE started almost instantly on the 500MHz machine I tested it on, whereas the other environments needed at least a few seconds. EDE provides a coherent and simple interface that requires little effort to learn."

Comments

Yucky

[jberryman]

It looks like a Windows 98 clone; even that graphic with the computer and keyboard looks like it was stolen from a MS time capsule.

"Missing Features"

[Darundal]

I wonder if those missing features were not included for speeds sake or because the developers of EDE didn't think that they were important.

Re:I thought ...

[gnugnugnu]

The command line is an interface but it isn't a Desktop interface.

Plenty of choices

[markdavis]

There are also plenty of great uses for lightweight window managers:

1) New low-power machines with slower CPU's
2) Older machines being brought back to life
3) Lock-down environments were you want grant a little as possible to the user. Kiosks, single-purpose machines, etc
4) Thin client environments where you want to push as little eye candy as possible through the network
5) Smaller virtual machines where you want to use a little space as possible
6) Live distros that you want to load quicky

We have used IceWM for over a decade. Fast, stable, controllable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icewm
Looks like EDE is just another to add to the mix of blackbox, fluxbox, twm, etc.

the cycle of lightweight software

[speculatrix]

yet another light-weight desktop. fluxbox, xfce, ratpoison, etc etc. why so many?

herewith my theory of the cycle of lightweight software.

• program $Z is bloated and slow, lets write a small, streamlined, lightweight replacement
• 0.0 - the program runs, does something but not much
• 0.1 - it's beginning to be useful
• 0.2 - it's not bad, you don't miss program $Z so much now
• 0.3 - 0.9 - hey, where's my fave feature $F, you can't be seriously missing that out, ok, we'll add that in
• release 1.0 - quite good, not too bloated, fairly quick, has its serious fanboys, but most people would rather stick with $Z and buy a faster computer to keep the missing features
• 1.1 to 2.0 - adding all the features that made $Z great, gaining bloat and bugs, losing speed all the way
• release 2.0 - a direct replacement for $Z and runs 20% faster
• release 2.1 - fixing all the bugs discovered now the code base is too big to audit, making it much less secure than the now quite mature $Z
• Hey, your new program is a bit bloated and slow, I'm going to write a replacement for it and it's going to be a small, streamlined, lightweight replacemen

and repeat ad nauseam

Re:the cycle of lightweight software

[The Master Control P]

Your description is a good summary of "not invented here syndrome." Rather than fix/optimize slow, bloated program $Z they try to reinvent it from scratch and not suprisingly make most of the same mistakes by the time it's comparable to $Z.

But seriously - Given 3 or 4 desktops (Gnome, KDE, some lightweights), are any of you going to seriously claim you can't find or custom configure at least /one/ of them to be what you want? There comes some point as which we need a benevolent dictator to knock people's heads together; Splitting efforts over N projects to do the same thing is bad as N grows (assuming any kind of even distribution of effort, which there rarely actually is), if there are less than N sets of users with genuinely distinct needs/wants.

Re:the cycle of lightweight software

[value_added]

yet another light-weight desktop. fluxbox, xfce, ratpoison, etc etc. why so many?
herewith my theory of the cycle of lightweight software.

A better theory may be that people are simply looking for different feature sets. This ain't Windows, so you can do things any which way you please.

To use your example of fluxbox, xfce and ratpoison, I doubt you'd find anyone who would say any of them is even remotely similar to the other, other than to characterise all of them as "lightweight", and that's only in the context of Gnome and KDE. Similarly, I doubt you'd find anyone using ratpoison, for example, who would even consider xfce.

Me, I use fluxbox. It looks and behaves exactly like I want. That's not to say I wouldn't drop it in a heartbeat if someone wrote Yet Another Lightweight Window Manager that was similar to fluxbox, but offered some trivial features that fluxbox lacks but are found elsewhere.

There's merit to the "cycle of lightweight software" argument, but I really don't see it being very meaningful or useful here.

Re:the cycle of lightweight software

[lekikui]

No, doesn't work.

Just for the hell of it, let's take an example. The killer feature I need is tiling of some sort. I don't want to have to hand-manage all my windows.

Anyway, take Gnome, KDE, and a couple of the more mainstream lightweights --- for example, fluxbox and aewm. They can do a lot of stuff, but not one of those does tiling. So maybe add Ion to the list. Except that also doesn't behave the way I like. Possibly quark, which is nice, but not so usable on such a tiny screen. Maybe the way to go would be tinywm and whaw or something similar.

Anyway, I've ended up with wmii. But the real point is that there are dozens or hundreds of window managers for a reason. A lot of the minor ones are just trying to do similar things to the big ones, but in a smaller way. However, a lot more of them are exploring all sorts of interesting other ideas --- there's whole families of tiling window managers which do various things with that metaphor. There's stuff like matchbox, which exist for a very particular niche. There's ones that add tabbing, or do unusual things with window borders, or look for replacements to the idea of workspaces (flux, wmx, wmii, in that order).

So yeah. There's a bunch which are just out there reinventing the wheel. Sometimes this isn't a bad thing --- fvwm is still a floating window manager, but horrendously and scarily configurable. WindowMaker and Afterstep and the like are borrowing a different idea, and doing a lot of nifty stuff with it. IceWM is just a standard floating window manager, taskbar, etc, but very lightweight and quite nice to tweak. But there's also a load that are doing all sorts of other stuff, often in ways that other projects simply can't match. Or the projects that are working on doing some integrated stuff with new widget toolkits, and produce all sorts of nifty eye candy as a result (Enlightenment is the big one here).

But yeah, the diversity is good. The whole tiling idea would be very hard to originate and develop in something like Gnome, because it's such a different method. However, with little minor projects that develop this, dozens of approaches can be tested and tried out in parallel, making sure that basically everyone has a system they like using.

Re:I thought ...

[hedwards]

I just loaded it up on my freebsd 6.3 box, and so far it's quite snappy. As surprising as it is too me, this seems to be significantly faster that fluxbox. Running firefox via wine on it is quite a bit faster than just a minute ago.

Theme isn't great, but I'm personally far more interested in stability and performance. A GUI really is just a means to an ends, if it's taking up a whole lot of resources, that's just broken. The main reason I run fbsd is that I can get away with keeping a computer for several years without suffering a whole lot from performance.

It also happens to have one of the features which I miss from vista, the ability to cruise through to a folder via a convenient start menu option is nice, and the ability to launch the file or open the folder as well. Can't imagine how often I'll be using it, but it's kind of slick.

Perhaps I'm weird, but I personally think that I paid for the performance of this computer, and I want that to be available to the programs and applications that I'm using.

Re:Make your own desktop

[Jorophose]

Alternatively you could drop nautilus and imagemagick's utility for ROX-filer. Excellent little file manager, just needs a menu bar IMHO for those of us who plan not to use it with ROX... Or it wouldn't even be too hard to write in yourself, would it? It's nice the way it is normally anyway, just looks a bit odd.

Handles desktop items too. Running with IceWM it generally sits on ~50MB/60MB of RAM, but as we know wasted RAM is wasted RAM so I'm thinking they suck up as much as they can.

Re:Windows 95 called....

[coaxial]

You can be lightweight without being a clone of clunk.

Re:Windows 95 called....

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing my point. You don't have to look exactly like windows 95 to be lean and fast.

Missing it

[93 Escort Wagon]

Linux.com ... takes a look at the Equinox Desktop Environment and why, even though it is extremely lightweight, it may still lack the ability for widespread appeal. Perhaps because "extremely lightweight" isn't the factor most users base their decisions on?

Re:Ugly as Windows 95

[Darkness404]

Round corners are in. Grey is out.

Exactly. Many non-technical users judge the quality of Linux by what the DE looks like. If it has a black bar on the bottom it is futuristic and "vista-like", if it has a brightly colored bar on the bottom it is automatically XP-like and seems to be as familiar to them as XP, if it has a bar at the top and the bottom it becomes OS X-like, however if it is grey on the bottom and uses a rectangle as a applications menu, it is automatically thought as Windows 95/98/ME and old and obsolete. Now, all this could be avoided by using say, black or another color on the bottom, but grey will always make the non-technical users think that Linux is as current as Windows 98. Ubuntu with the brown color scheme seems to avoid this as brown hasn't been used much in any default Windows theme yet.

Re:I thought ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot needs a "disturbing" tag

Re:Windows 95 called....

[glwtta]

Windows 95 is one of the very few times that Microsoft got things indisputably right.

You keep using that word... etc, etc...