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Rasterman On The Impending Release of Enlightenment 17
In development for the better part of the last decade, the 0.17 release of the Enlightenment window manager is slated for November 5th. Leading up to this, the H has an enlightening interview with project lead Rasterman on what to expect. From the article: "Today Enlightenment offers most of what you get from GNOME and KDE, and probably the same if not a bit more than XFCE. It just doesn't try and ship a suite of apps with it. It is the desktop (Window manager, settings, file manager, application launching and management) minus the apps. ... The biggest thing E17 brings to the table is universal compositing. This means you can use a composited desktop without any GPU acceleration at all, and use it nicely. We don't rely on software fallback implementations of OpenGL. We literally have a specific software engine that is so fast that some developers spent weeks using it accidentally, not realizing they had software compositing on their setup."
Right here from February 2012.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Anyone who wonders if it's going to be a dud, needs to get over to http://www.bodhilinux.com/ immediately to check out a distro that showcases E17 beautifully (it's Ubuntu underneath). I had some issues on a 64bit desktop but it runs wonderfully on my Core Duo netbook, and it's fast.
Likes: gorgeous, responsive desktop, fast, low memory usage, and it's easy to bend it into whatever shape you like. It offers a pretty standard desktop for anybody sick of Unity/Gnome3 but you can also have some radical interfaces too, like a tiling interface that looks like it would work great on a tablet (in fact I wish I had a Linux tablet I could try it on but am scared to nuke my Google Nexus 7 trying it). The "run anything" gizmo - kind of like Alt-F2 - is fantastic; I think it works better than Gnome_Do and Krunner and even Apple's Quicksilver (which is damned good). Their Terminology terminal is pretty sweet; I increasingly spend 90% of my linux day in it.
Dislikes: it takes a bit of getting used to, and the distinction between modules, shelves, modes, and extensions has taken some time to figure out. My version of E7 (Bodhi 2.0.0) also occasionally segfaults, so there must be some remaining bugs to work out.
But this netbook came with Ubuntu/Gnome and I find Bodhi running E17 to be a huge improvement. I love it. If you want to see what E17 is like, what it does, and what it *can* do, there's no better way to start.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.