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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."
That's pretty ambitious. ;-)
So, a Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor, and says "make me one with everything". :-P
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Samsung is awesome, so is enlightenment.
It's like Fluxbox in terms of resource use (and unfortunately on flashy little GUI indicators) but looks amazing!
Kudos on this! Let's get windows management handled! It's been so many years of updates on something that should have been handled by now!
Enlightment is BSD licensed. You can't just change it to LGPL-3.
Enlightenment already developed by Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire, among others.
This can only be considered a good thing - another well funded GUI to go against Gnome, KDE & XCFE. Myself I have been looking over OpenGEU for a while (even ran it for a week) and while I really like some of the features it's not ready for prime time. I partially blame the integration of GTK pieces into Enlightenment but I feel that is a necessity at this moment. If funding from Samsung can improve Enlightenment to where it has a stable, 100% native suite then only good things can happen.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I've been using it for months as my desktop at home and on my laptop. It is quite usable and I've had zero crashes for a while now. Rasterman has always had a focus on small-screen devices, so this development doesn't surprise me. But if you haven't checked it out in a while, you should.
Now maybe we'll see the final release of E17 before the 22nd century. Who knows, it may even come out before Duke Nukem Forever.
I used it back in the days of SuSE 6.3 and really liked it then. It had the most eye candy and "slickness" at the time (1999 or so), blowing other WMs and Win98 out the water, I mean who couldn't love the semi-transparent "eTerm" windows?
Other WMs have caught up now with the eye candy, but enlightenment is and was one of the few window managers that actually displayed innovation instead of simply tailing after windows and mac. It's nice to see it getting recognition.
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.
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.
I wish someone would do the same with Windowmaker and GNUstep, but I suspect the licensing has closed off that path.
Funny how this argument mostly comes from people who know virtually nothing about X. Most importantly, not the difference between the concept, the protocol and the implementation.
And just because it's 20 years old doesn't mean it sucks. How old is TCP/IP? The mouse? The binary system?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
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.
``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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
Sure, improvement is always possible and desirable. And with Google, Nokia, IBM, and other corps throwing big bucks at the UI problem certainly there will be progress in terms of making GUIs more efficient and easy for casual users. But with X I'm happy with what I have -- I can launch many terminal emulators in which to work, view/hear/produce multimedia, and entertain myself with a smidge of eyecandy -- all while remaining responsive and easy on resources. :)
Caveat Utilitor
The problem with PulseAudio isn't PulseAudio. The problem is that the presently known-to-be-unstable PulseAudio/ALSA/apps combo is pushed to "stable" desktop distros. It's like KDE 4.0 "stable beta" release, only it's taking longer, and people are understandingly getting more impatient.
Some guy out there simply knows that if he has PulseAudio, his sound is crap, and if he removes it using his package manager (which could well be Ubuntu "Add/Remove Software" or something similarly easy), it starts working.
If you want to replace X, the question you should be asking is, what does X do worse than Quartz? There's no point replacing X just for the sake of it - if you want people to think about replacing X, you need to explain what's wrong with X.
And just because it's 20 years old doesn't mean it sucks. How old is TCP/IP? The mouse? The binary system?
Would you believe my car still uses wheels?! You know how old that technology is? You would think by now we'd have something better for rolling on... XD
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
There are no more layers in the Linux GUI system than in Windows. X, which provides the basic graphics operations, is roughly equivalent to the Windows GDI; the window manager and the desktop environment provide the functions provided by the Windows shell; and the toolkits like GTK and QT are the equivalent of the standard controls in win32. The basic architecture is not very different - it's just that, on Linux, the separate pieces are independent and properly specified, so that you can use a variety of different options at each level.
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.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.