Enlightenment E19 Pre-Alpha Released

An anonymous reader writes "While it took over a decade for E17 to come out, Enlightenment E19 is being readied for release just two months after E18's debut. The Enlightenment DR 0.19 update has a rewritten compositor that can fully act as its own Wayland compositor (not dependent upon Weston). The update integrates OpenGL canvas filters support, contains many bug-fixes, and has other improvements for both X11 and Wayland users. The 1.9.0 alpha1 pre-release was issued today as the initial testing version of the new window manager."

Comments

If only they'd bring back tvtwm I'd be happy.

[ron_ivi]

Guess I'm getting old; but I remember tweaking that til it was perfect for my workflow. Haven't seen a modern desktop that works as well for me.

Slashdot back to its roots

[linuxci]

As long as your not viewing this through the beta site, posts like these remind me of the early days of Slashdot.

CmdrTaco was a big fan of Enlightenment when /. was first launched and he had written some software for it so we always used to receive updates about new releases. I think that's how I first heard about Slashdot as I was searching for info on Enlightenment and found the site. I had a friend who was a big fan of Enlightenment but I ended up going with WindowMaker because I thought it was more efficient and fitted my working pattern better.

I also remember when Slashdot let you just type in a name, rather than registering ('Anonymous Coward' still existed but only if you didn't bother to enter something in the name box), once registration was introduced it took me a while to decide whether I really wanted to register, otherwise I'd have had a 3 digit UID.

Re:Slashdot back to its roots

[raster]

i don't remember pulling my rant... ? i'm very much in a habit of "what's done is done". i stick by my words. even to this day.

and yes - i agree. lost my way in hooking up with gnome. i did this because redhat asked me to. it was my job. what i didn't know is that enlightenment and gnome were total polar opposites in goals and design. the hookup was a result of a year+ saying "you need a wm for a desktop" and miguel saying "we don't need no wm for gnome. we can do everything without" and at the end of the year there being a "holy shit. we need a wm now!" and i was the person who could most easily deliver the things needed. so i did. it was my job.

but that process kind of required selling my soul to do so. gnome wanted a wm that dumbly emulated windows 95/98 as closely as possible, would give up all of its extra bits (desktop menus, pagers, wallpaper handling, etc. etc.) and hand over most of its soul and features to gnome and be as bland as possible. metacity was a much better fit for gnome. enlightenment wasn't. the majority of e as disabled for gnome. they just don't fit together. end of story. the idea that you can do a full desktop and not integrate a wm that does just what you need/want was the problem to begin with.

either way - after the divorce, e got e16 out and we started big bang planning for the future, imlib2 (much better imaging support), and then even started messing with opengl to render accelerated graphics with all the fanciness with imlib2 as fallback... and yes - the dot com bubble crashed and everyone - me included had to run for the hills and make a living and we lost a lot of time we used to have... it was some evenings and a weekend then. thus the slowdown. lots of big plans were underway and i was not in the mood for screwing with the plans and work.

these days that work has come to fruition. evas does all the opengl acceleration and has software backed rendering. both are fast. the compositor can use either. it does a lot more besides. e is modular yet a single unified process much like the kernel. we have even widget sets and a full ball of toolkit under it all. it took a while, bet we got there. and now we're reaping the benefits of the work and moving forward. thus e19. :)