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

Ah! Well sit down youngster and let me tell you a

[SmallFurryCreature]

Ah! Well sit down youngster and let me tell you a tale of when dinosaurs ruled the earth, the likes of which you do not see today. Ancient Behemoths as AOL, Compuserve and Yahoo. They lived in an eco system so rich in investment that web companies could grow to companies of unusual size in the swamp of private equity. They existed by new rules, profit was bad, you had to make losses but not any losses, you had to make losses per trade but promise you would make it up in bulk! The new companies traded in paper shares, showering them around and using them to buy each other up and make even bigger companies. Golden times that were never going to end.

But the power of the old economy could not be denied. Investors ran out of money and started to demand profits and when none was to be found, companies went up for sale and sold for a fraction of their worth, if at all. Infrastructures build on Sun crashed while Intel powered desktop servers took over. Those that had grown rich were now food for leaner faster moving predators who feasted on the remains of the behemoths that came before. It was the greatest economic collapse the world had ever seen. And a billions totally failed to notice any real impact as if the sudden collapse of the future of thousands of web companies had no real effect whatsoever.

It was called the crash... and man has grown wiser since then, long gone are the days that a company that has never made a profit, nor makes a product for which there is a need, nor has a business plan to make a profit before the next ice age can go to the stock market and collect a billion in investment at a cost of half a billion in money it doesn't have. No sir. Not possible! Because the market is wise and all seeing.

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. :)

Re:There used to be a buzz

[raster]

e17, 18 and 19 are really just like e16 - just with more bits thrown in. the filemanager is built in. it's not a separate app (like nautilus for example). it's really in the same vein/design just with a vastly more modular codebase and a small mountain of custom written toolkit behind it.

Re:Good for E!

[raster]

options are not for e- but for things like.. you are building an embedded device and you don't use gl.. but you want to cut down a few hundred kb of ram, so using xcb vs xlib is what you want. you can do that, BUT the xcb back-end is 99% complete and you still need xlib if you plan to use opengl due to the binary apis demanding an xlib display handle. you have to have an option. it's not for the wm - it's for the toolkit and special cases. there re lots of such special cases for special purposes. the problem is some smart-butt user thinks it's a great idea to fiddle with every option there with a "ooh i hear xcb is faster" (which is basically is not), and then discovered their fglrx or radeon drivers don't like xcb as the primary display connection and then things crash/hang/don't work... or something like that. this is not the DEFAULT config - it's an option, but it's turned on by people who want to tweak everything - even for packages. it's not bloat - it's features that can be switched for different back-ends, dependencies REMOVED and so on. you really should study up before making assumptions.