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After 12 years of Development, E17 Is Out
The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."
Congrats, rasterman. (sorry, wmaker user)
Is this a Ted Nelson gig, per chance?
E was left behind in the window manager wars but it was probably the one that first featured alot of the UI changes that sparked the UI revolution that was the last 12 years. Its good to see they are finally out with a new version and I hope it gains some ground but it would be hard at this point to become the #1 WM. Im sure many of the people who used E in the past will want to try it again but beyond that I dont see it being adopted much. I would probably rather E over Ubuntu's Unity any day (Although i'd take just about any WM over Unity)
http://interserver.net/
Can I turn off the antialiasing feature? Last time I looked into this, Mr Rasterman basically said "it looks perfect the way we do because we do it right". Yeah, until I can turn it off I'm not touching it with a 10 foot barge pole...
Am I the only one who interpreted "out" as meaning "abandoned" or "given up on?"
What's the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment?
Or was it "desktop manager" and "window environment"?
No, seriously, I don't know the difference.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Perfect match to run Duke Nukem forever!
Meh, it's a nicely performant well developed system but the interface is funky as shit and not really that nice to use. After the newness wears off you'll see what I mean.
10 years too late, I reckon. We've all moved on from this kind of "gratuitous eye candy above all else philosophy" and it's all about consistency, usability, integration, and last but not least, features now.
Your arguments seem pretty pointless to me. I've compared Enlightenment with all the other desktop environments, and E uses less resources, while doing a prettier and faster job. Run your own tests, against the major DE's. E beats them all.
Enlightenment doesn't compare as favorably against some of the older, lighter desktops, such as XFCE. But, those older lightweight interfaces don't offer quite the "experience" that the heavyweights offer, either.
Bloated eyecandy. Confuses everyone. Phhht. Nonsense. Violates standards? I never researched that - like most users, I'm not as interested in standards, as I am interested in results. Destabilizes the working environment? Needs citations - I've witnessed nothing like that. E is as stable as anything I've used.
Which games are incompatible with E? List them please.
My ONLY complaint with E17, is that it has taken so long. I've been fooling with it for years, impatiently waiting for this release.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Oh well, I still have three hours.
I'll stick with e16 - it does all that I need. Basically, I only use the e16 window manager, along with a GNOME desktop - kind of odd but it works. Even at that, the only features I rely on from e16 are edge-flip and "annihilate" - features that used to exist in Red Hat but were dumped long ago.
Obviously just waiting to see if December 21, 2012 was really the end of the world.
This ranks among many software-things that I never expected to see happen. (up there with a "new" BeOS (never happened *for real reals*))
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
i dunno.... version 1.0 ??
Just tried it, 15 minutes later I was back to my much more productive, elegant and less distracting XFCE. Animations for animation sake is not for me. That being said, people seeking eyecandy should give it a try. Thank god for gnu/linux flexibility!
Tomorrow is another day...
My only and major complaint regarding E17 is that it does not allow me to conquer a small country. Until such items are completed it should not be considered feature complete.
Does it still require the Enlightenment Sound Daemon?
Good that you tried it. I will note that people who find animations distracting can turn it off. Anything and everything is configurable. Of course, there is time involved in figuring out how to configure all that stuff. For my own personal tastes, there is a little to much eye candy enabled by default, but with a little effort I get things just the way I like them.
That said - no desktop can fit everyone's needs and preferences. Some people actually like Unity's out of the box configuration!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Users don't want options, don't these guys get it?
Yours Truly,
GNOME Development team
I'll stick with LXDE
So the product they just released is already 12 years behind? This is good, how?
E17 does not compete with KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, ROX, Razor-Qt, EDE, MATE, Cinnamon, etc. For people who care about software freedom, it leapfrogs them entirely, by the virtue of being the only copyfree alternative. All other full-scale desktop environments (DE's) are marred by GPL!
I for one was OK without a DE / widgets, using a light copyfree WM (ex wmii) + xterm + HTML5 (Opera, until the last remnants of gnushit are scraped off of WebKit). But for people who want both freedom and DE / widgets, E17 is now an option.
--libman
Some people actually like Unity's out of the box configuration!
[citation needed]
Thank god for gnu/linux flexibility!
Tomorrow is another day...
Can anyone explain why some open source* people have a fetish for tiny version numbers? If you are going to spend ten years developing a new version, is that REALLY not worth a primary version number? What is the attraction to having versions as near to zero as possible? In a dotted-decimal notation, why do some people think only the second decimal should be incremented, and at that only once per decade, and the first decimal should remain zero forever?
The primary decimal should be zero when the project is started and should be 1 when it reaches initial functional maturity. Major versions with substantial new features warrant primary-decimal increments. Minor features warrant secondary-decimal increments. Bug fixes warrant tertiary-decimal increments. Otherwise one of the main benefits of the dotted-decimal notation is lost.
* and not other open source cf. emacs
I've been using E17 for many years, and every time I try other WM/DE's I keep going back to E17 for one simple reason. The way E17 handles multi-monitors is such a vast improvement over others I don't know why everyone doesn't do it this way. Desktops on each monitor can be independantly switched!
Seriously, I don't know how anyone gets work done with multi-monitor any other way. Being able to switch the contents of a single monitor without switching everything on the other one is just what I always expected for desktop management, and can't understand a situation where I would want to switch both monitor virtual desktops simulaneously ALL the freaking time! This is very similar to getting use to virtual desktops on linux then trying to switch back to the single-desktop of ms windows systems.
Guess that point is not as imporant to most as to me, but I can't imagine doing it any other way without a feeling of something being wrong.
Congrats E17!!
More like squat in an abandoned house for 12 years.
Just in case anyone else is just about to give up. I tried to do the right thing and clean install the files but had broken dependencies. :)
Eventually, I decided to revert to my tried and true SVN clone and just update that. It worked fine
You can turn those off too. I use e17 at home mostly because the dual screen behaviour is a bit different to other WMs - you can page through multiple desktops on the left screen while keeping the right on the same desktop. You can also set it to change both at once if that's what you want.
I'm still on e16 at work with the same theme I've used since 1998 but I'll use e17 there sometime.
This is what the Mayans had in mind all this time.
I can't wait to install it on Hurd and see how it looks running Duke Nukem Forever.
Some people actually like Unity's out of the box configuration!
[citation needed]
Me. I have zero complaints. All I do is change the background screen and then move on with my life.
We're not impressed by people who don't know what a fucking package manager is, right.
And 15 Years Behind !
Oh Dear.
I have a 4.2Ghz quad core AMD cpu, 16 gigs of 2ghz ram and a pair of SSD's in raid
so do I really give a shit about a graphic tachometer telling me that a text editor will bump that needle up by a fraction of a pixel?
yea I know its just a thing, and it can be removed, but from the first screen shot, I get the impression that this software is STILL stuck in 1996, and I am 16 years old
I'm shocked. Have you ever used anything else to compare it with? Like... say, lxde or xfce or KDE or Cinnamon, or MacOs or Windows? Give them a try and come back and say you still like Unity.
against the major DE's there are a quarter dozen that do all you preach without being suck a decade behind
I aint using a 486 for a storage server, and my machine sure as shit a K6-2/500
that is what this instantly reminds me of, just smoother
Its time like these, that hopefully will change in 2020.
These stupid ass distros who are so hard up and anal, they should be the ones who find all these cool apps and programs, and re-package it up into their REPO servers ASAP, or on the day of the release.
If conical wants an app store, PUT all the damn cool shit on it. Not old shit, new shit.
Linux needs a none-distro specific Super Store.
Click download app - dont ask for what distro I am using, figure it out lame asses. Use a app store client that runs on 5 major distros. And can install app XYZ easily, that doesnt break other apps, and that wont stop and get stupid python errors, coz again some lame ass coded his scripts with 2.6, but fails in 2.7. Fix your shit, stop breaking old shit, stop removing old apis, you want to reduce bloat? then dont package up 167 languages that take 89 megs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
There are numerous free and opensourced replacement desktop shells for windows. Some are old linux ports.
They are good, because they work and run inside the free MS HyperVisor VM. Which boots into a cmd line plain gui, but no shell. Its easy to install these new shells, to create a working desktop thats linux like, but in windows.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-replacements-for-the-windows-7-desktop/1327
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I thought Bodhi Linux was already using E17? Was that a pre-release? Does anyone know when Bodhi Linux will get this new release? I'm curious because I'm about to install the new version of Bodhi, and I don't want to install it and then have to re-install it with the newest version in just a couple of weeks.
The G
E17 conforms well enough to the freedesktop.org standards. Even though it's not really a standards body, freedesktop.org is readily used by modern window managers, and is becoming a defacto standard. E17 does still store its config in the $HOME/.e directory though, instead of $HOME/.config/e . Can't wait until all unix utils use the .config directory, clearing out the dotfile clutter in the home dir.
Games run perfectly well under E17. I have dozens of games, bought via Humble Bundle, and every one I've tried has worked fine with E17 (barring game bugs, of course). I had a problem once, with keyboard only games not getting focus when they run fullscreen. It's working fine now.
I use E17 on my work computer. Have done so for years. Any instability in my working environment has generally come from me, not the window manager. I think it's only ever crashed once in that time, and even then, I could press F1 to recover (as instructed by the crash dialog), and the window manager restarted itself with all windows intact.
The parent post was trolling. Probably best not to feed the troll.
Then destroying the earth will take a lot longer than that.
Just sayin... destruction could be a slow long process taking decades...
On a side note, we could never predict an incoming super nova gamma ray burst, or have very little warning if someones watching Betelgeuse or something hourly!!!
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I think it's fine, really don't understand what ten people are complaining about, it's not buggy, it's not slow, looks fine (though I don't really give a fuck how it looks). I'm a keyboard shortcut whore and anything with "press Super -> type -> shit -> shit happens" works fine for me.
I seem to have added in an extra arrow accidentally.
Unless your an attention seeker and its pure marketing.... then
Then the only time to move the primary number up, is if you have intruduced enough incompatibility or broken lagacy functions, that it warrants an indicator number, to show, what works with what.
Keep calling it 1.758 (Release 2012)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Option removed in Gnome 3. 'May surprise users.'
Now port it to windows so we can replace metro!
Can I drag a file from a lower, unfocused folder to anywhere without either raising or focusing that folder? You know, like Windows and Mac users have been able to do almost as long as those have existed?
Yo dawg, I hear you like settings, so I put some settings in your settings, so you can set your settings while you set your settings.
This is a highly confusing, very inconsistent desktop environment like program. Items that deal with setting the user interface are all over the place, items that deal with power settings are all over the place, and so on. There are desk top icons/indicators for apparently random things, but for others there isn't one. I'm not comparing E17 to other Unix/Linux/Xwindows alternatives, but looking at this as it's own entity. It will take a ton of tweaking and rearranging menus to get an average user comfortable with it, if at all.
Making things configurable is great, but please make it consistent, because people are going to be looking all over to find things. I'm not an apple fan boy, but one of the things they sort of did right, is consistency, grouping and logical placement in the user interface. For E18, please focus on consistency and usability in the user interface and not new features, it has plenty.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Back with e15 it got a reputation for "bloat" because the default theme was there to show off all the whistles, bells, and a dozen desktops with a different background for each. The assumption from there is that you would load whichever one of a couple of hundred lighter themes that looks exactly the way you want and use that as your daily desktop (like the two Rob Malda had available for download before slashdot). Since then the default hasn't quite shown off everything but has "a little too much eye candy enabled by default" to show off a bit what it can do.
I don't think it's at the point of a couple of hundred themes for e17 yet but there are at least a couple of simple ones.
I haven't played with the tiling module for a while but it looks like you can even have an xmonad style desktop with e17.
It's ok that you gave two shits.
Personally I think it parses better that way. Press Super. Type. Have a Shit. Shit happens. I can't fault your logic.
I like Unity.
If some application is open and you want to be able to start it later, just go to the dock icon and say "keep it there" and it's kept there.
Per default the dock's almost empty, but if you want something, press Super and type what you want. Then a menu appears with the results and you launch which you want.
That's how a desktop environment is supposed to be: get the fuck out of the way but be there when I need it.
There has already been said how good the default settings in Ubuntu are: wireless AND 3G works out of the box and without mucking about in a terminal.
I don't like the multimonitor bugs, though.
I've been using linux from 1998 to 2005, with various windowmanager (wmaker, enlightenment etc.), but sorry, I really cannot see much progress here. There is still to much to configure (hey, I want to work with my system, not spend too much time on configurating), the windows don't look very nice and the handling still seems to be somehow circuitous (eg. moving stuff in the taskbar). Sorry, but in my view not a step forward to Linux on the Desktop.
Having used decimal version numbers myself on some project, version 1.0 to me meant "complete" and having all features I initially envisioned for it. That's was my reason anyway.
On the same note, I believe that many Unity-haters here have not either tried to actually get into it before judging it. They just robotically say that it sucks, because that's the trend. Or they test it with the attitude "remember, this is supposed to suck".
Unity isn't even that far from a standard Win7 / Mac interface, so I think a lot of the hate towards it is not warranted.
"press Super -> type -> shit -> shit happens"
There's a new meme there... ;)
You should have posted this comment in response to the fellow who professes not to be an Apple fanboy, but who does like the way they have managed to make things consistent. Consistency is a gridlock virtue. Some large gorilla at the top of the food chain guesses right often enough to successfully don the "father knows best hat" while receiving adulation rather than contempt from the sharp-thinking in-crowd.
Consistency is good for users who find themselves at the sweet spot of the golden profile, not so good for ecosystems or freedom.
I've been reading Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter. He argues that there's never been a natural language in history anywhere close to as internally consistent as grammar nazis would have us believe. Why shouldn't we split an infinitive in English? Because in Latin, the infinitive is a single word.
Here's what I would accept as a certification credential for father consistency, before allowing him to try his hand at desktop Unity: reform the French language so that all feminine things are feminine and all masculine things are masculine, so that no student of the French language ever again needs consult a dictionary to determine which gender applies.
I won't settle for mere consistency, I demand universal consistency. If not that, giving me the effing options to tweak myself, consistent or not. It would be nice if the default settings are minimally self-consistent as viewed by the elected torch-bearer of groupthink. It won't be my consistency, but any consistency is better than no consistency ... as a starting point.
I forgot my login to slashdot, they never gave it to me when I asked, it was around 1996 or so, so I am anonymous
e was great, e17 is impressive too I just checked it out, I've moved onto gnome 3 however
From the project FAQ:
"If you want a minimal interface, you can configure Enlightenment to be quite minimal, but it takes effort. Enlightenment leans towards providing eye candy where it can, and often comes by default that way. This is how we roll. We always have. Haters gonna hate. That's how we roll. Bring on the lollipops!"
I'm sorry, all the bling is a turnoff. Like this. Sometimes less is more. Shadow, glow, glass rendering, sparkles and pixie dust is a bit much for the mouse cursor.
If that what was meant it looks like the GP poster is using a different interpretation of the term "focus" to the rest of us in describing window management and has never heard of the term "sloppy focus".
My only complaint, after 12 or more years of use, compiling from src, svn, bhodi, etc.., is that is compiles everything releated to settings and is thus difficult to hand-roll in some dotfile.
As usual, simplicity up front courts complexity up the rear, i wish it had more config flexibility.
Also, just remembered; i with they would revert e remote back to the older version that had more controls. The later version stripped out much that i found highly desirable; beyond the wonderfull abiity to restart the DE
resist propaganda
Thank God at least some desktop developers and interaction designers are against the crippling, dumbing down, sluggishness and configuration-hiding of the unfortunately moronic Gnome3. I tried E17 years ago and was extremely impressed with its lightness and speed, even going so far as to recommend its use in the core of a commercial project in which I was involved. (I don't know what E17 is like now). Unfortunately, a senior person with deep connections in the Gnome world poured shit all over it and Rasterman (" ... that's just gtk anyway, isn't it? ...") and convinced the CEO otherwise. I know I was right; they all were wrong. Small satisfaction.
The E17 people can only blame themselves if it has no profile and no-one knows what it is. Twelve years in getting a stable release? Give me a break. OTOH the timing might be right in that Gnome3 has alienated much of the Gnome user base and many are ready to give it the flick forever.
The solution is to get e17 into one or two major distributions as the default UI environment. One would be enough if that distro is Ubuntu or Mint.
Can't wait until all unix utils use the .config directory, clearing out the dotfile clutter in the home dir.
Sadly this is so sensible and easy to implement that there is no glory in execution and it may never happen. Yes, I'm feeling cynical, it's Christmas after all. Simply have major distros agree to insist on this or else packages will not get accepted into repos.
Look, if you really want to see it, just put e16 (which I'm using now) or e17 (which I have at home) on a machine and give it a go - I think you'll find that behaviour that you are trying to describe there. Whether it was done with "baroque schemes" or not (a lot of work went into e initially so maybe it was complex) it still ended up being done.
When I called "bullshit" it wasn't on the behaviour, but instead your incomplete description of it, which as it stood appeared to make no sense. From your revised description the sloppy focus in e16 and e17 (and maybe even kwin) appears to match it
No, not by default, but you can conquer small countries as well as most of Europe. Just build with CFLAGS='-enable-blitzkrieg'.
| Unity isn't even that far from a standard Win7 / Mac interface, so I think a lot of the hate towards it is not warranted.
That's enough double-talk out of you.