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That was kind of the selling point, IMO. Enlightenment was the WM that focused on pure eye candy even at the expense of practicality. You had random graphical e

That was kind of the selling point, IMO. Enlightenment was the WM that focused on pure eye candy even at the expense of practicality. You had random graphical effects just because it looks cool, all sorts of overblown themes to emulate hacker movies, and a few actually useful features (like the virtual desktop display showing what windows were present on other virtual desktops) If you wanted to have a normal, usable desktop there were the typical choices like Gnome, KDE or IceWM. But if you wanted to show off, Enlightenment was hard to beat. Hilariously, as time went by hardware got so much better that it went from ridiculously wasteful to really lightweight.

beagle3 3y ago
There was a time (around 1999-2005 iirc) when Enlightenment’s graphics library Imlib was the tool for fast CPU raster ops, and was adopted by everyone else. Then accelerated graphics (and eventually GPUs) became the focus and the norm, and Imlib was mostly abandoned.
csdvrx 3y ago
> If you wanted to have a normal, usable desktop there were the typical choices like Gnome, KDE or IceWM. But if you wanted to show off, Enlightenment was hard to beat. Many people say the same thing about Hyprland. I think they don't understand that what you call eyecandy allows important usability feature. For example, Hyprland has very good animations and optimizations, so I can run all my windows fullscreen, without a titlebar, on several desktops. It's something I did before on Windows, but that was painful on Linux when the "eye candy" wasn't on par. Moving between desktops is done with just one key. I configure it to take about 200ms (so it's not intrusive) and I mapped it the ろ (ro) key, which is next to the right shift key on my 106 keys keyboard): the visual feedback helps me keep the context. Doing the same with Gnome was painful: slow, ugly and hard to get right (if working at all) > Hilariously, as time went by hardware got so much better that it went from ridiculously wasteful to really lightweight. I don't think it's hilarous but sad because Gnome is both slow, looks ugly and can't be configured
- rollcat 3y ago
  > Many people say the same thing about Hyprland. I think they don't understand that what you call eyecandy allows important usability feature. Bingo. Mac has had (crude, by today's standards) animations from very early on, because an animation helped convey the idea that e.g. a window opens "from" an icon you've clicked. You don't need the effects to be fancy, but a tiny bit of animation helps you orient yourself. No naturally occurring object (except lightning) can change as abruptly as the contents of a screen.

beagle3 3y ago

There was a time (around 1999-2005 iirc) when Enlightenment’s graphics library Imlib was the tool for fast CPU raster ops, and was adopted by everyone else. Then accelerated graphics (and eventually GPUs) became the focus and the norm, and Imlib was mostly abandoned.

csdvrx 3y ago

> If you wanted to have a normal, usable desktop there were the typical choices like Gnome, KDE or IceWM. But if you wanted to show off, Enlightenment was hard to beat. Many people say the same thing about Hyprland. I think they don't understand that what you call eyecandy allows important usability feature. For example, Hyprland has very good animations and optimizations, so I can run all my windows fullscreen, without a titlebar, on several desktops. It's something I did before on Windows, but that was painful on Linux when the "eye candy" wasn't on par. Moving between desktops is done with just one key. I configure it to take about 200ms (so it's not intrusive) and I mapped it the ろ (ro) key, which is next to the right shift key on my 106 keys keyboard): the visual feedback helps me keep the context. Doing the same with Gnome was painful: slow, ugly and hard to get right (if working at all) > Hilariously, as time went by hardware got so much better that it went from ridiculously wasteful to really lightweight. I don't think it's hilarous but sad because Gnome is both slow, looks ugly and can't be configured

rollcat 3y ago
> Many people say the same thing about Hyprland. I think they don't understand that what you call eyecandy allows important usability feature. Bingo. Mac has had (crude, by today's standards) animations from very early on, because an animation helped convey the idea that e.g. a window opens "from" an icon you've clicked. You don't need the effects to be fancy, but a tiny bit of animation helps you orient yourself. No naturally occurring object (except lightning) can change as abruptly as the contents of a screen.