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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."

11 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Very Cool... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Funny

    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..."
  2. Re:Software fallback? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  3. Great job Rasterman and team by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Very Cool... by 0racle · · Score: 5, Informative

    Right here from February 2012.

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
  5. Re:Software fallback? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. See it to believe it by water-and-sewer · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  7. Re:Elightenment is nice but also terrible by Thud457 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

  8. Re:Elightenment is nice but also terrible by jd2112 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  9. Re:GNOME by gamanimatron · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wow. It's rare that you can actually see sarcasm dipping from a comment.

    --
    cogito ergo dubito
  10. Re:LOL by Superdarion · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:GNOME by raster · · Score: 4, Informative

    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" --------------------