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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..."
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.
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.