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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/
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
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]
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.
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.
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.
You sir are missing the point completely.
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.
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...