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Call for Questions: Rasterman, Founder of the Enlightenment Project
Since before all other
interfaces, Enlightenment has been making computers look and feel like
they're from the future. On December 21, the decade long effort to
rewrite Enlightenment will see
the first officially stable release. With e17 a few days away, project
founder and master of X11 graphics hacking Carsten Haitzler (the Rasterman)
has agreed to answer your questions. Ask as many questions as you
like, but only one
per post please.
What keeps you motivated? You had a long release cycle, a few dubious quality releases, all the while an abysmally small fraction of linux machines actually run your software.
Enlightenment is always "about" to achieve something great but it never quite manages to actually do it. Why should I care about a point release of a WM that will probably be obsolete by the time its finished?
I know it's inappropriate to bring up death penalty arguments in a technical thread, but do NOT remove settings from software I use.
As a longtime Enlightenment user (since 0.9 I think!) I have seen a lot of changes to it's look and feel over the years. Has your design philosphy changed over time or is it more a matter of changes in technology?
but my calendar doesn't say the April 1 yet, what gives?
In all seriousness, you've been working on e17 since you were what? 25? How did you go from "I want to make a window manager" to "Everyone is doing this horribly wrong and I'm tired of being everyone" at that age?
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
When KDE made their big transition from 3->4, most of the followup releases were on stability and minor improvements on the paradigm.
With E17, it seems that the amount of time taken was to ensure that the 'final' release of E17 would be bug free.
Assuming that E17 release is stable and solid, where do you see the enlightenment project going from here?
Your work at Samsung involves making EFL a great library for designing touch-based interfaces for use in a future Linux-based smartphone platform, presumably Tizen. But every time I've heard about Tizen in the press Samsung has made a big deal about HTML5 being the development platform. How do these two development platforms play together? Also can you provide any information about when we can expect to see the first Tizen phones hitting the US?
Your thoughts on usability vs beauty... Must they always be opposed?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Back when i first heard about enlightenment - late 90's early 00's it was totally the best looking Window Manager / UI around.
I've just checked out some screenshots from e17 and I can help but think it looks really dated. Enlightenment used to stand out from the crowd
but now it seems to lag behind in this department.
What will you be doing to ensure that the new Enlightenment will once again showcase how slick and awesome a Desktop UI can look?
N.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
As one of the few non-minimal DE projects out there, what do you guys think of Wayland? From a leader's standpoint, is it relevant? From a designer standpoint, are you looking forward to working with a newer API? From a user standpoint, do you think it will be better enough than X to be justified?
How difficult has it been to keep working on the Enlightenment environment all this time and has the opensource community been supportive?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Every now and then I check out the enlightenment.org website, because I want to see screenshots of it in action. /anywhere/ to the screenshots. /are/ screenshots on the website; they are here:
For some reason, I don't think there is a link
In case anyone else is interested, there
http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/
I thought that the conventional wisdom in Open Source, was to engage users and coders by releasing early, and releasing often.
Given that software never really is ever "done"; please enlighten us (cough) about the thinking behind waiting so long to do a stable release. Was this a calculated risk, given the risk for erstwhile E fans to simply lose interest?
I've noted that while Enlightenment is BSD licensed, but some of the foundational libraries are licensed under *various* versions of the GPL. What gives? This would be confusing to most people who are looking to repackage E for use on various devices. Is there going to be a resolution for the licensing mess, or will development continue with multiple licenses that have to be negotiated by vendors and others interested in using this with their products? The issue isn't free beer vs free speech, the issue is how does one decide which license takes greatest precedence. Is the project going to go forward as GPLv3, v2, v1, or 2 clause BSD, or what?
I would like to know how you managed to convince Intel and Samsung to build yet another mobile framework on a technology that has been really difficult to use, and has a very small share of the UI framework "market?" Is it that Enlightenment is providing UIs of the future, or is everything better encumbered by their ownership or stakeholders?
Whats your view on the current trend of desktops to be more like their tablet/phone cousins? Do you see any features that can be brought over from either side without sacrificing usability? Also how do you feel about black turtleneck shirts?
When Enlightenment came out, it also included ESD, the Enlightened Sound Daemon. Window events could cause sounds, which was nice, but ESD was also a sound multiplexing and remote sound protocol that was way ahead of its time. Now, there are PulseAudio, Jack, Yiff, Phonon, etc. and many people say the whole thing's a big mess. What's your opinion on the current state of sound / mixing on Linux desktops.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Unfortunately, most of those screenshots look nothing like the default install. I just installed it on my Pi to see what it looked like, as it's been years since I ran it. It looks nice, but it's hard to get a good feel for what it's really like on such a weak system.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
You've done a lot of X programming, so as a user of that API, you must have strong opinions about it. What are the worst design decisions in X11? (The toughest things to get around/fix) What are the best? (Timesavers)
In the small-ish world of open-source & embedded graphics, toolkits, and SW / HW rendering implementors, there are few who have been at it as long and have such a breadth / depth of experience in so many areas as yourself.
As someone who has done a fair bit of searching for resources on the theory and practical design of such systems, I must say, that there are few books out there that concisely describe the "how" and "why" in a design-patterns kind of way tie in with immediately relevant topics (e.g. fbdev, widget & drawing libs, scene-graphs). Naturally, implementors often pick up the talent and ensure that trade secret is kept that way, but you are at a bit of an advantage I think, no?
You've been at E for a *long* time and you've done an insane amount of work making SW rendering almost as efficient as HW rendering - I'm sure there is no shortage of material.
Have you ever thought about writing a book - sharing some of your expertise with the world in a less formal language? Not something that's all-encompassing by any means but maybe with references for further reading. What about a techno-biography of E?