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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."
So. Slashdot will die, as it began - with dev update news on the Enlightenment project. :-)
Where's my Windowmaker submission?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
How is that not a software fallback?
They didn't say it's not a software fallback, they say it isn't a software fallback implementation of OpenGL.
Ezekiel 23:20
Been using e17 for the better part of the last decade. It might not have been released, but CVS head (now SVN head) has usually been completely stable to run.
I hope more folks adopt EFL (Enlightenment foundation libraries) for their projects too. It would be great to just have to re-theme an app to use it on a phone, or a desktop with keyboard as EFL allows you to do.
Again, congrats on coming through with a full featured, fast, lightweight, with all the eye candy you could want, and limitless customization allowing, window manager/desktop.
Right here from February 2012.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
We don't rely on software fallback implementations of OpenGL.
How is that not a software fallback?
They're not using a software fallback implementation of OpenGL. Since compositing windows doesn't require 3D mesh rendering, etc. this can be faster and more purpose-tuned than a generic software OpenGL.
Did they mean to say that they wrote their own software fallback?
I suspect what they *meant* is for you to use your reading comprehension skills, which the taxpayer worked hard to provide for you.
E17 is not just landing. I have been using it for 7 years now. There have been some bugs and occasionally configuration broke on upgrade, but it has been usable. It is just approaching official release.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
the year of Linux on the desktop!
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.
Then you are going to utterly LOVE Windows 8. It's built on wierd.
No, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere (/., probably) that Windows 8 was built on a old Indian burial ground.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I doubt it's going to win prizes for performance against a proper GPU especially for playing games but it should be adequate for running GNOME or Unity on a semi modern setup.
Wrong, it was built in the pit of Hell by sadistic demons for the purpose of punishing mankind for Comcast throttling Satan's Internet connection.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I seem to recall that he worked for Red Hat and the relationship went sour. I expect Red Hat wanted a professional, functional and clean desktop and GNOME was going the direction they wanted and E wasn't.
> Didn't Enlightenment (and Raster himself) get purged from the
> GNOME project because the community turned on him because
> of the poor quality of his code?
I think it was more that the Gnome people were (at that time)
determined to have multiple possible Gnome-compliant window
managers so the user would have a choice. (This was _before_
the anti-choice jihad that brought us Gnome 2.) Their plan, at
the time, was to feature a different default window manager in
each release. After Enlightenment, the next one was Sawfish,
which I still use, on account of the fact that it's much better
than the current default Gnome window manager at doing
what I want a window manager to do and staying out of my
way otherwise.
I experimented with going back to Enlightenment, but the
old version had not been maintained sufficiently to really
work on a modern system (e.g. it does not interact as it
should with modern versions of gnome-panel; sawfish on
the other hand does that just fine and thus can be used
as a drop-in replacement for metacity or whatever the new
default wm is in Gnome), and the new Enlightenment,
besides still being in alpha, was also trying to be an entire
desktop environment, one with a new organizational
paradigm to replace traditional overlapping windows,
and that wasn't really what I was looking for, personally.
So I stuck with Sawfish. It works for me. It does what
I want a window manager to do, and it stays out of my
way apart from that.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Wow. It's rare that you can actually see sarcasm dipping from a comment.
cogito ergo dubito
I use Enlightenment on Bodhi Linux for my older machines and it performs wonderfully! It's fast and lean and, once it's all configured, very productive. The community forums are active and helpful, you'll even get a reply from Rasterman himself on occasion. Kudos for keeping this project alive for all those years, it keeps getting better!
Back when both Rasterman and Alan Cox worked at Red Hat, Alan had mentioned doing a security audit of Raster's code and made a comment that it was rather spagghetti-like.
After the big news of Raster angrily quitting Red Hat, rumours circlated and Alan came out and posted on Slashdot apologizng to Raster stating that he didn't mean to offend him if that's what it was. It wasn't Alan, but an unnamed middle manager that caused Raster to quit.
LOL
What? I wish Microsoft was as forthcoming with their faults as these guys. At least you know they're trying to fix the crashes.
Enlighenment will work with Wayland and will be getting better in the future. Bummer they think they need to extend Wayland itself though.
So. Slashdot will die, as it began - with dev update news on the Enlightenment project. :-)
Where's my Windowmaker submission?
Grr... I'm still looking for WindowMaker features in some of my "modern" WMs...
* Desktop naming. It had a great effect where you could name each desktop with a task or whatever (mine were usually "Main", "Web", "Graphics", and "Root") and they would flash and fade briefly onscreen whenever you switched desktops. Haven't seen any other desktop manager try to do that. I faked something like that using xosd, but that's kinda clunky and persists too long when jumping over multiple desktops.
* Clip : a desktop-sensitive dock. This is a great idea... it worked a lot like the Windows 7 taskbar does now, where an app would appear there when you're using it, and you have the option of permanently attaching it to the clip on that desktop. I'm annoyed with most docks / taskbars that get cluttered up with everything... but it makes sense to have one for each desktop, so you could have all your graphics programs in your toolchain on one desktop clip, web tools on another, admin tools on another. etc.
* WM dockapps : These little monitors were great! I mostly just using gkrellm and its plugins now, though, which is probably more efficient and flexible.
* Awesome skinability : it was ridiculously simple to create themes, for the most part it was just a background, a handful of titlebar textures, and some color selections, and it would do the rest of the work. Done!
Only reason I stopped using WM was because it didn't do compositing... I needs me my transparent xterms :P
Wow. It's rare that you can actually see sarcasm dipping from a comment.
And all this time I've been waiting for the drip.
Yeah I used EFL components on the openmoko. It was loaded with ifs and buts. Only some components would nest inside other components for example. In swing you can put anything you want inside a ScrollPane. In EFL, only what the developers needed when they wrote it.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So I stuck with Sawfish. It works for me. It does what
I want a window manager to do, and it stays out of my
way apart from that.
You should see what you can do about those spurious carriage returns.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Considering that the email insults that rasters manager cced to all of redhat ended up on the net your expectations could have been easily replaced with fact. Broken promises, an idiot manager that didn't last much longer than raster before being fired outright and a better paid offer in his home country filled out the story. What would you do in that situation? I know I would walk and take my project with me.
Desktop naming: E17 does this. :) it flashes not just the name but a full preview of all desktops in a "larger size" with their contents etc.
Clip: e17 shelf. can be customized per desktop.
WM dockapps: e17 modules+gadgets. not separate processes but plug-ins so they hare generally lighter weight - you CAN implement them as a module "glue" plus slave process if u like.
Awesome skinability: we have a whole toolset for it. edje_cc compiles them and after that just select the output edj file from the theme browser. the theme though is complex, but insanely powerful.
Compositing: yeah. E17 dos that too. it also solve world peace and hunger. :)
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
Now it may be that some desktops throw in eye candy on top, but that doesn't detract from what compositing desktops offer. Even desktops not traditionally known for their looks such as xfce will make use of it if its present.
Actually it doesn't pre-date it. it came after GL started to work on Linux, but when GL still was way too immature to use for 2D. in fact it was GL beginning to work on linux back in the earl 2000's that pushed EFL's current design- to plan for a future where GL will be a primary rendering path, but provide a software version for when that doesn't pan out to be the best idea. it was all DESIGNED to abstract between back-end from the ground up and one of the design goals was to use both GL and software back-ends highly efficiently. and it's paid off handsomely now that it's being used for compositing.
E has the best of both worlds. full GL accelerated compositing (if you have the drivers/hardware) or a software version for when you don't. we don't drop features, we just switch which part of your machine is doing the work, and we made sure if it's on a CPU, it'd done fast enough to be totally usable, which it is.
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
llvmpipe vs evas's software rendering is like comparing a penitum1 and a modern desktop. really llvmpipe is better than swrast but it's still like 10-30fps on a high end modern desktop for the same workload when evas pulls in 60fps+ (it gets limited to 60fps or whatever your refresh/animation rate is, but on the same machine it can pull in 200-300fps for the same workload). that's the point. it's a significantly better software fallback that makes compositing usable.
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
bwahahahaha. love the FUD man. i suggest you school up on history.
*I* quit doing gnome stuff because redhat was not paying me anymore indicating that i must work on gnome, thus i had the freedom to choose, and i CHOSE not to, because i hated the direction it was going and my CHOICE was to veer away and e stopped bending to gnome's will and thus it became hard for gnome to use e because it conflicted with what they wanted to do.
early on before gnome was known about, redhat caught wind of gnome and wanted me to help. i offered to tailor e for gnome at the start. miguel (hi!) stated that gnome needed no wm and would work with all and any wm just fine. i disagreed. since i wrote wm's i kind of had an idea of what would be needed. a year later it was "oh halp! we need a wm! we can't do x, y, z without one". too late. i was tailoring e to be independent of any desktop like gnome. gnome wanted to have a virtual desktop set up totally incompatible with e's because gnomes concept of desktops was too simple. it wanted to take over pager desktop switching and task switching. it wanted to be master and wm be a dumb slave and take over a lot of the functionality of e. i disagreed and by now it was too late as i wasn't going to kill all the features already now in e because gnome didn't want them. i ultimately put in some support for gnome, ability to disable such features in configuration, and it happened to be one of the first wm's with gnome support but it was limited and i had no plans to extend it or integrate it more in gnome and that is why gnome stopped using e because they wanted a wm that JUST is a wm and doesn't do anything more that a very limited set of things.
you need to get your history right.
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
yeah. alan had nothing to do with that. alan is a great guy - i like him and yes - some of my code was a bit spaghetti-like at the time. other bits were clean and nice. it depends which bit you look at. current EFL code is much better. everyone learns as they go along and improves their code. i did too.
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------