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A Look At the Lightweight Equinox Desktop Environment

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the feature-rich-is-still-important dept.

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."

13 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. I thought ... by jsnipy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:I thought ... by bsDaemon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I went through a phase back in 2002 where I only used console tools. I didn't log into X for 3 months.

      I did all my editing in vi, used epic for irc, naim (ncurses-based aim/icq client), w3m for web browser, etc.

      I'd just Alt+F(x) between my vtty's and do my business. Frankly, I think that was one of the happiest times I've had on a computer in a long while.

    2. Re:I thought ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      The ASCIIpr0n starts to get old after a while though

    3. Re:I thought ... by Ynot_82 · · Score: 5, Funny

      someone sent him a funny youtube link

    4. Re:I thought ... by bsDaemon · · Score: 5, Funny

      no, it was the summer before I left for college. I was working at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator facility as an intern in Instrumentation and Control of the Free Electron Laser. After spending all day staring at high-resolution monitors counting pixels because I was working on spotsize detection, the last thing I needed was bright lights and tiny print when I came home.

      When I went to school, I had to use X because I had to program in Java and do stupid Swing things.

      About half way into my first semester my girlfriend ditched me after 5 years and I had sort of a break down and ended up switching to the English department, where being a sad, whiny little bitch gets you bonus points.

      Then all I did was write papers. I never learned LaTeX, and even if I knew it, I'd have been too lazy to use it, so it was StarOffice and then OpenOffice.org - again, under X.

      I'm going back to get another degree in engineering though, so I'm getting out of "lazy mode."

      its not so much the images -- w3m can display them in frame buffer.

    5. Re:I thought ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      It turns out he really was reading Playboy for the articles.

    6. Re:I thought ... by palegray.net · · Score: 5, Informative

      Nonsense. Everyone knows you can view live ASCII video. Bash 4 life.

      --
      512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
  2. OLPC? by CustomDesigned · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Maybe EDE is a better GUI for OLPC. Starting the GUI instantly would be nice (takes about 10 seconds to restart sugar).

  3. xfce by nawcom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Make your own desktop by Tom9729 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why 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.

  5. Re:Plenty of choices - missing use by thewils · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  6. seriously... by bsDaemon · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:seriously... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      That statement pretty much sums up YouTube.