Samsung Sponsors the Development of Enlightenment

An anonymous reader writes "The Enlightenment window manager project has shared on its website that it now has the backing of a major (top-five) electronics manufacturer that will be actively sponsoring the project and using Enlightenment on its devices. No manufacturer was named, but Phoronix has dug deeper and found out that Samsung is sponsoring Enlightenment. Phoronix provides independent confirmation along with citing a new Enlightenment program that Samsung sponsored and then released under the LGPL-3. They also have videos of some of the new work to this window manager that Samsung funded."

Comments

Videos show

[gr8_phk]

The linked videos show that E17 has some nice rotations going on. Then they try to do some 3D effects and it's apparent that they're only doing affine transformations, so the perspective texture mapping is wrong on the 3D stuff. It feels so much like 1992. Didn't they learn anything from ID? There are even simpler ways to get the perspective right for large polys too.

Very interesting

[Lemming Mark]

Enlightenment generally seems reckoned to be very nice technology. I've been repeatedly surprised to see Enlightenment popping up in commercial products here and there; Edje-based wallpapers can even be loaded in KDE now. Evidently it's a strong piece of work and it'll be really interesting to see where this sponsorship gets them. It certainly seems an enlightened approach.

Re:Windowmaker and GNUstep

[tweek]

Wow. I haven't thought about WindowMaker for years. I always enjoyed that wm. If I could be arsed to tear myself away from the joy of openbox + tint2 + conky, I would ;)

Re:Kill the X Boondoggle Already

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately for Linux users, we tend to listen to idiots like lobiusmoop FAR too often. Instead of keeping code that works and improving it, we end up throwing it away and starting from scratch. That is what causes situations like the OSS/ALSA/PulseAudio mess. So far we have mostly managed to ignore the morons calling for the death of X, hopefully that will continue.

Used E again recently....

[Picass0]

During my time on Fedora 11 I fell out of love with Gnome and switched over to KDE. During my transitional phase I played a bit with E. It was the window manager during the redhat 5.x days when I first started with Linux, and I was nostalgic to see how E had changed.

I liked E's speedy response. It's a lightweight WM without much bloat. Very quick and responsive load times.

On the other hand it needs updating. There's no support for compositing, and GL is software rendered. No acceleration. I'm a Blenderhead so this was not good. It doesn't have a good file manager. I found myself using MC whenever I was in E. No easy menu editing.

I very much would like to see E take it's place again as a viable desktop option. It has so much going for it, be clearly developer resources haven't been available like KDE and Gnome.

Some explain the Linux GUI thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have Window managers and desktops and whatnot. X-windows, gnome, enlightenment, etc. From my reading it seems x-windows and enlightenment do overlapping things. There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what to use, there is no consistency to this area.

Re:Samsung sponsering Enlightenment., but ...

[RAMMS EIN]

``What's in this for Samsung ? Are they going to run Enlightenment on their mobile phones ? Their TV's ?''

Possibly. Mobile phones are actually powerful enough these days to get pretty much all the flashy eye candy stuff you might want, but Enlightenment is one of the few products that _both_ run on such "low-end" hardware and provide the eye candy.

Besides mobiles phones and TVs, though, Samsung may also be thinking about notebooks.

Re:Kill the X Boondoggle Already

[neiras]

Instead of keeping code that works and improving it, we end up throwing it away and starting from scratch. That is what causes situations like the OSS/ALSA/PulseAudio mess. So far we have mostly managed to ignore the morons calling for the death of X, hopefully that will continue.

So far we have mostly managed to ignore the morons calling for the death of PulseAudio, hopefully that will continue as well.

Pulse is new code, not a rewrite of anything. Yes, ESD was a sound server too, but the similarity ends there.

Many of PulseAudio's problems are caused by "iffy" stuff in ALSA drivers, and the ALSA folks are working to fix the bugs Pulse exposes. Many more are caused by distro people making questionable decisions on how to set it up (see Ubuntu/rtkit).

I'm sure glad that PA isn't going anywhere, despite all the uninformed hate flying around.

Re:Windowmaker and GNUstep

[Qzukk]

I've been using Window Maker for nearly a decade now, and have to admit that it's very nice that it's stable (not crashing AND not changing). Sure, it'd be really neat to have compiz or whatever support, but honestly it does everything I want from window management: provides window dressing, an application menu (at the pointer, even!), and a place to dock and/or launch apps from.

Re:LGPL-3?

[plasticsquirrel]

Actually, I believe that the terms of the BSD license do not restrict a developer from adding another license such as the GPL, to a software project. This would not remove the BSD license, but still effectively change the terms of subsequent modifications. In the words of Theo de Raadt:

GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back.

Personally, I think this is one weakness of relying on "do whatever you want" licenses like BSD and MIT. Linux can always use BSD and GPL'd code, but the BSD devs want to stick with BSD for their kernels and other projects whenever possible.

Re:Kill the X Boondoggle Already

[Draek]

If I can't install X easily and have it run relatively efficiently without bloat and unresponsiveness, then X - or the package manager - needs to be fixed.

True, but the key word is "relatively". Relatively to OSX and Windows, X even at its most bloated is *still* a paradigm of efficiency. Its just that, once you're familiar with it, you can make it do even more with less.

I guess it's a bit like Emacs. For the uninitiated, it's an extremely capable editor. For those who have mastered it, however, it's God's greatest gift to Mankind.