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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."
I thought the command line was the fastest desktop interface ;)
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
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Maybe EDE is a better GUI for OLPC. Starting the GUI instantly would be nice (takes about 10 seconds to restart sugar).
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.
I still like xfce for over this. It looks alot like windows 9x for some reason. http://www.xfce.org/ I dunno. I'm the enlightenment/fluxbox type, but if I want a DE so i can use compiz as the window manager, I always got lost in deciding Gnome or KDE, but as soon as I found xfce I decided its the best. The number of tray plugins are sortof limited, but all it needs is more developers willing to help out with that end.
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 nauseamWhy not just make your own desktop environment?
I used to use Gnome, but then it got too bloated so I moved to XFCE. Now XFCE is bloated (memory leaks in the panel app don't help either), so I made my own "desktop environment".
I use fbpanel as a panel, Sawfish as a window manager, ImageMagick's "display" program to set the wallpaper, the Gnome settings daemon/screensaver applications, and a quick little Bash script I wrote to launch a Nautilus window without taking over the desktop.
Sawfish has more features than Metacity, and pretty close to the same number of themes.
The whole thing takes less than 40mb. I realize something like this isn't for everyone, but for me it does just what I want without using that much memory.
It tried but was snubbed by the Exherbo developers. True story:
EDT - Exherbo Dev Team, EDE - Equinox Desktop Environment
EDT: Exherbo is one bad ass muthafucking distro! Seriously!
EDE: Cool! I wan to run on Exherbo.
EDT: No, you don't.
EDE: No really, I do.
EDT: OK. But we will have to break you since our distro is so badass that it does everything badly.
EDE: eeep
7) Confusing the idiot who comes to install your Cable Modem.
Me to Confused Techie: "What are you looking for?".
Techie: "My Network Places".
Me: "Arf!".
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
If someone could please tell me wtf was so funny about that, I'd be much obliged. None of it seemed particularly funny to me while living it.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There have been so many great UI innovations in the last decade, this seems pretty niche to me...
Better that than copying Windows 3.1. Seriously, this may have been meant as humorous but I'm starting to get frustrated. Windows 95 is one of the very few times that Microsoft got things indisputably right. Yet despite that, it seems that everyone is determined to redesign this classic formula in an attempt to making things more usable, only I haven't seen anyone actually get it right. I'm using KDE right now, since it seems they're the ones least infected with this "Let's change everything for the sake of seeming fresh and original!" virus (seems to have started with Microsoft and spread out from there), but I'm sceptical about KDE 4. I know I'll probably use it someday, but I'm scared that they're going to fuck it up and the best desktop environment will end up losing a lot of its lead.
I'm sure there's a user interface revolution on the scale of Windows 95 out there somewhere, I'm just hoping we don't have to wade through too much more crap before someone finds it.