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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."
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/
This was what first brought me to "Chips & Dips".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Font settings -> Advanced -> Hinting.
There's an option for everything.
Am I the only one who interpreted "out" as meaning "abandoned" or "given up on?"
No. Enlightenment was a really promising window manager. I used it from the late 90's until the early 2000's. It was pretty nice even with all of the warts. They kept scrapping it and starting over so many times that I kinda gave up on it. Honestly, I thought it was dead years ago. I figured they finally officially threw in the towel.
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
No. It means homosexual by confession. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
Windows managers simply manage your windows. A desktop environment provides libraries, toolkits, services, applications, system configurations, etc. For instance GNOME and KDE are desktop environments that provide access to your hardware devices, network management, etc. Enlightenment is somewhere in-between since it offers some things like libraries to build applications with but I don't know of many native E applications out there. DE's focus on the whole user experience when using an operating system with a GUI while windows managers are mainly concerned with the user interaction with just the GUI and not the whole system.
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...
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
Some people actually like Unity's out of the box configuration!
[citation needed]
want me to google it for you too?
Nah, just go to the homepage and click download?
I recommend CentOS rpm.
I got a better idea. don't use it. you are probably to lazy to configure it as well, and will endlessly complain while staring at a blank desktop.
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
There's an option for everything.
How do I turn on Clippy?
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!!
Nope. Hasn't needed ESD for years. It works perfectly fine with ALSA or Pulseaudio.
Go to Settings/Advanced/Mu and switch the Polish slider from 62% down to the radio box marked 14.89%, then a checkbox marked "Microsoft Experience" will automatically appear on the left. Select it and type Ctrl-Enter.
A dialog window appears: "Are you Sure?" [OK] [Cancel]. Press OK with the mouse.
A dialog window appears: "Really?" [OK] [Cancel]. Press OK again.
A dialog window appears: "I don't think so. I can't let you do that." [OK] [Cancel]. Press Cancel.
You should now see the familiar Start button at the bottom of the page. From now on, Clippy will appear every second time you click the left mouse button. There are two cases:
If this dialog appears: "ZenClippy. It looks like the grasshopper can handle Enlightenment" [OK] [Cancel] you must press Cancel to not return to the default E17 mode.
If this dialog appears (about %50 of cases): "ZenClippy. It looks like the grasshopper can't handle Enlightenment" [OK] [Cancel], then you must press OK to not return to the default E17 mode.
To return to the default E17 mode, just type Ctrl-Alt-Del.
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
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.
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.
'Cause people in stable need a gui? Yeah Right.
You sir are missing the point completely.
This should be at (Score:6, Epic)
I don't blame you. E17 looks promising but building it has been a real pain in the ass so far. First, I neeeded to d/l, build, and install the dependencies/core libraries (and their dependencies). Even when that part was done and I got through a successful ./configure for the main E17, I still ran into errors during the build (most recently, "No rule to make target `illume-keyboard/e-module-illume-keyboard.edj").
*sigh*
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Yes, I did notice. That's where I looked first. Unfortunately, those of us who use Debian Stable have no other option than to build from source, at least for the moment.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
A shell in Windows is not the same as a window manager in Linux. Not in any way. Replacing Windows' shell still leaves you with the exact same window management, it just changes your task bar and desktop shortcuts (and judging from the examples on there: into something far less useful). And Windowblinds isn't even a shell replacement at all!
Spoken like a Gentoo user.
I want packages because it makes it easy to update (or remove). If I go hybrid (using packages for everything else, source for this) I am asking for a maintenance nightmare.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
apt-get install alien
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Elive is Debian with Enlightnment E16 and regularly updated E17 builds. It's a live CD so you can test it out before deciding to install. If you install the leading edge Debian Wheezy, e17 is packaged too.
http://bodhilinux.com/
The lead dev is on xmas vacation at the moment, but Bodhi 2.2.0 is expected to be released before the new year, and it will come with this release. The current release has an earlier dev release, but it is still very stable and functional. I've been using it on my main system for more than a year.
The mostly install at night, mostly.
A desktop environment is just an extremely bloated window manager.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Aye it is, but only for one set of distros. What if I can't use RPMs? Building packages is not fun, and even if I did so, I'd still have to deal with all the separate libraries etc.
Just a nightmare for someone who's not a developer. Maybe it's easy enough if you're used to it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The usual: dinner, movie, light banter about how great a town Redmond is to live in, light stroking of Clippy's lower inner arch...
It appears you mean "sloppy focus" from what another poster has written. If that's the case it's been in various window managers for X longer than MS Windows has existed, even if it's not the default in most now.
If you can select something you have "focus" on the window the thing you are selecting is in by definition (thus your statement above as written makes zero sense unless you have some different definition that you have not yet outlined to us). Whether it is raised or not when it gets focus is typically a different option to choose.
If you meant something other than what you wrote then please explain more clearly.