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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."
Font settings -> Advanced -> Hinting.
There's an option for everything.
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!!
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.