9 ms·

E17 (Enlightenment) enters alpha after 12 years

151 points by stock_toaster 14y ago

syassami 14y ago
I never understood the allure of enlightenment, I always thought XFCE, Fluxbox/blackbox/openbox was a much more aesthetic minimal de. Everytime I saw an enlightenment desktop I thought I was being sent back in the past
- w0utert 14y ago
  Enlightenment was never supposed to be aesthetically minimal, quite the contrary in fact. When every other WM still had flat menu bars and Windows 95 style start menu's, Enlightenment was full of chrome, graphical effects and elaborate theming facilities. It was really a showcase for making your desktop look good, with minimal hardware requirements.
  - buster 14y ago
    Indeed.. i remember when i was so proud to have a nice looking desktop manager with really old hardware running, it was awesome. Nowadays i am not sure.. i will try E17 again and see how it compares today :) (p.s.: i even did a screencast of my "wunderful" E17 Desktop 5 years ago and it still has effects and a look and feel that is ahead of gnome/unity/xfce with a laptop that was over 5 years old back then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOa8o1tgIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOa8o1tgIU )
    - adam-a 14y ago
      Oh my, I'd almost forgotten about all the gold. Lot's of excessive shimmering too. It's clearly a technically very impressive desktop environment, but I always thought they needed better design for the actual themes.
      - buster 14y ago
        That's why i used the black alternative scheme, that was muuuuch better. :)
stock_toaster 14y ago
Oh man. I remember using e16 for a while way back in the day. The "water effect" desktop thing always turned heads. aside: Interesting, but brief, interview with the project lead (Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler): http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Seeking-Enlightenment-1739812.html http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Seeking-Enlightenment-...
anigbrowl 14y ago
Rasterman is kinda rushing into this, no? Seems like just last millenium I was installing DR16. I would love for it to catch on again, but I wonder if/how it can build an audience after such a long hiatus (notwithstanding EFL etc.).
- protomyth 14y ago
  Well, given that nothing else became a standard and their are a tad bit of people unhappy with Gnome 3, it still has a pretty good chance. It does seem to be ok on the BSDs and the libraries are quite nice to use elsewhere so that is a bonus
  - tom9729 14y ago
    I think for the most part, the people that are unhappy with Gnome 3 aren't looking for something new: they just want Gnome 2.
    - lloeki 14y ago
      I sure don't. Various areas like the GNOME panel were visibly crutchy and full of historical assumptions/design. This was fixed with GNOME 3 but other areas were/are suffering various levels of undue abuse. If I were looking for GNOME 2 I'd be using XFCE instead (as many people around me are). In place I use OSX — both a more solid foundation and more configurable than GNOME3 — and Awesome/Arch — striving to drop all/most GTK and QT dependencies.
    - sp332 14y ago
      I don't think so. There are a lot of problems with Gnome 3, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of problems with Gnome 2 as well.
  - codewright 14y ago
    >Well, given that nothing else became a standard and their are a tad bit of people unhappy with Gnome 3, Nah, that flag has flown. The time has passed where I would've moved to E17. I've since gone past that on to XMonad.
abuzzooz 14y ago
At one point, my favorite desktop by far. As it happens, a few weeks ago I decided to take E16 for a spin after many many years of neglect. It still felt great and snappy. I'll be trying this latest alpha for sure.
- danudey 14y ago
  That's not really impressive, considering it was designed for computers from 15 years ago. I'd be pretty surprised if it weren't snappy. Still a nice environment though, and ridiculously customizable.
dschiptsov 14y ago
Yeah, I also remember E16.. Seems like Rasterman was the first one who made icons, that represent the content of file, and those transparent window titles and other decorations. And pseudo-transparent ETerm. Now we have all that in Gnome, but back then it was a feeling of going into the right direction. Nowadays it must be a great product, because it was made with vision, for themselves, re-implementing cleanly and consistently all the layers from the very foundation, with attention to every detail. These are landmarks of a remarkable opensource product. Someday I will replace my Gnome.)
- simcop2387 14y ago
  Heck from what I remember, half of the compsiting stuff that's done now with compiz/kwin in modern desktops was pioneered with E17 development, they used Xgl before the accelerated compositing was possible with GLX_texture_from_pixmap and the like.
leadholder 14y ago
I took E16, newly installed on my laptop, to a work presentation once. I was really excited to turn the thing on and see everyone's eyes bug out. But I plugged the projector in and it turned out there was some strange compatibility problem. One step forward, two back.
CJefferson 14y ago
Does anyone have a good guide, or set of packages, to get this going in Ubuntu? I have tried a couple of guides and packages already, so please only suggest something if you know it works, I know how to google!
- limpangel 14y ago
  You can install it from this ppa https://launchpad.net/~hannes-janetzek/+archive/enlightenment-svn https://launchpad.net/~hannes-janetzek/+archive/enlightenmen... . $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hannes-janetzek/enlightenment-svn $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install e17 Logout and choose Enlightenment before login. Have fun!
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - buster 14y ago
    Also try out terminology, the new E17 terminal. It has an awesome look and feel. Once it supports tabs i'll use it fulltime :)
    - billiob 14y ago
      Thank you. It's on my TODO-list but not on top priority. I'm mostly working on compatibility issues these days. If you found some, please open a bug report or contact me about them.
      - buster 14y ago
        Oh great, one thing i noticed weeks ago (and apparently it's still behaving that way): When you maximise the terminal and mark everything with the mouse the CPU goes crazy. efreet_icon_cache is taking up 100% CPU and the laptop becomes very noisy.. I guess it's not supposed to take up all CPU for that good looking marked text thingy :)
        14y ago
zeruch 14y ago
As someone who has known Carsten (Raster) for well over a dozen years, and has given him a never-ending stream of invective for being slower than George W. Bush doing calculus...its about bloody time.
Bjoern 14y ago
I know its yet another useless comment, but back in the day of E16 and beginnings of E17 I was a really big fan. Its great to see it finally being Alpha! Congratulations to the Enlightenment team!
10098 14y ago
wish this could be the answer to all the gnome mess that has been going on lately...
aditya 14y ago
Would love to see screenshots if anyone got it built and running?
- klibertp 14y ago
  Few examples (many, many people got this "built and running"): http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/95258-2.jpeg http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/100923-2.jpeg http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/110281-2.jpeg http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/115796-2.jpeg And I use heavily customized bohdi theme, which originally looked like this: http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/119928-2.jpeg http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/119928-2.jpeg Unfortunately, I'm sick and not going to work this week, so no screenshots of my desktop today :(
- tvon 14y ago
  Nothing fancy, but freshly built: http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/e-509c4a7ebd7ef3.90681957.jpg http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/e-509c4a7ebd7ef3.90681957.jp... That's 'efm' on the left and 'terminology' on the right... I'm not normally a fan of the dark themes, but I figured I'd stick with the default for a bit to see how it felt. It's pretty nice.
DrinkWater 14y ago
i still remember me hacking through all the configuration files of E16, yeeeeears ago. If i hadn't shifted from Linux to MacOSX, it would probably still be my window manager of choice. But boy, this e17 thing is taking a ridiculous long time!
urza 14y ago
What are the key features? Why should I wanna try use it? Where is it better then other window managers? I cant find these information on the website. Just that it is "lean, fast, modular and very extensible window manager" which tells me nothing. I see that it is also for Mac and Windows. What does it have that these OSes dont have? What would be the benefint of using E17 ond windows 7?
- klibertp 14y ago
  EDIT: for you, urza, there are probably no benefits in using E17 - or any other environment you're not familiar with. That being said, I'm explaining what benefits it gives me. > I see that it is also for Mac and Windows Seriously? Don't know about Mac, but do you really consider Windows to be "extensible" or customizable? Out of the box, Enlightenment supports full scripting capabilities (think AutoHotKey - everything you do can be done by sending a command to E17 server from terminal) and theming with which you can make it look as you wish (http://e17-stuff.org/ http://e17-stuff.org/). It's built-in. On Windows you need expensive Stardock Window Blinds (IIRC) and clumsy AutoHotKey to get the same functionality - and then it gets slow, while E17 remains lightning fast. As for "fast"... Well, take a look at this quote: "For full functionality 64MB or more is suggested. As little as a 200Mhz ARM core will provide sufficient processing power (depending on needs)" (http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en) Now try and use Windows 7 on a machine with 64MB of RAM :) I actually use E17 as my only WM at work (on FreeBSD at that). I almost never touch the mouse for WM related tasks; combine with VIM as an editor and Vrome in Chromium and I almost never touch the mouse, period. It's fast (starts up in 3-4 seconds), responsive (changing virtual desktops while CPU is being fully used by gcc is as fast as on standby) and in the past year I didn't encounter even a single bug (I remember in the past when something went wrong and E crashed, it used to display a message in the console: "Bad programmer! Naughty programmer! SPANK, SPANK, SPANK! Now go and fix your code!" - but I didn't have a chance to see if it's still the case). Customizable to ridiculous extent and looks quite a lot better than ratpoison. The only thing I'd like to see is a smart tiling manager extension. Preferably turned on/off on per virtual desktop basis. It probably will be done in the future. In the meantime E17 remains the only WM that is both fast and pretty, and which goes out of your way without imposing anything on you while providing sane defaults. Ok, that's just my opinion; fans of XFCE, Black/Busy/etcbox, Xmonad and others can argue. Fans of Gnome and KDE, Windows and Mac - please don't bother :)
jejones3141 14y ago
e17 has been pretty darned useful and, from my user's viewpoint, stable for pre-alpha software... and the anti-user, customization is evil attitude of the GNOME 3 developers has pushed me to switch to e17. I seriously recommend Bodhi Linux.
antihero 14y ago
The design seems to feel like they were designed by someone with no aesthetic taste but has just made things they think will look bling. I'm sure that it does something very impressive, but I can't see why everyone raves about it.
- gnarbarian 14y ago
  Well, back 10 years ago when Gentoo worked like Ubuntu does now except it was n^2 slower and came with 3 difficulty modes for installation, e16 was the bee's knees window manager. You could edit your own GUI menus by configuring a text file! everything was infinitely customizable. EVERYTHING. not to mention having transparent eterms with really cool backgrounds. In this context, e17 was the shang-ri-la of desktop environments and also perpetual vaporware. I looked forward to e17 for years but they never seemed to make progress. Just a screenshot here and there, tantalizing us. then Compiz came out and I forgot about it completely. The allure has to do with the fact that it had great potential and it was being made by uncompromising perfectionists. Like the novel that the fans were begging to be released but the Author refused because it wasn't quite perfect yet. Well now, after so many years, the progenitor is ready to reveal the creation. I am ready to see the vision.
  - 0x09 14y ago
    Well, you say that, but really it's had rather stable and public development, and it was my main desktop for a long time in 2005 and 6. I think part of the reason it became so drawn out was that it was already more or less a release product without the release numbers.
  - nacker 14y ago
    I wasn't seriously tempted to try it again until I read this post. Poetic nostalgia! Somewhere deep down inside I'm also a-yearning for the Hurd...
zemanel 14y ago
As a Gnome fan, i used E16 as a replacement for Metacity (i believe?) and it was great. This one time at a former employer, my boss was touring a visitor around the office while i was flipping the windows just because and it got their attention for a 5m talk ("oh shiny what is that ?") :-)
89a 14y ago
Remember BlueSteel? Remember installing linux for the first time to try it out? Remember discovering what a winmodem was…
- stuaxo 14y ago
  Hey, there was the ridiculously named 'Hand of god' theme with the titlebar on the side ! Good days ... running the ripple effect on the bottom ... bring me bling !
  - stinos 14y ago
    yes yes, the ripple effect. In those days people could hardly believe what they were seeing and all went like 'is THAT linux?'
    - balakk 14y ago
      And that sweet dramatic unveiling of the desktop, swishing across virtual desktops, funky pager, widgets... Linux was so much fun and personal those days.
      - hk_kh 14y ago
        And still is. The thing is, either you are used to it, or you just feel ok with the defaults. I understand why Unity or GNOME are following the "simplicity, you stupid" path. It gets mom, dad and girlfriend to use the system without putting much effort into it. However, I stick to fluxbox, I have got my widgets, my funky pager, my switching, and it feels personal, and fun.
      - fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
        That was before we tried to make Linux a mass market OS.
- recursive 14y ago
  > Remember installing linux for the first time to try it out? I am starting to think this will happen soon.
yankcrime 14y ago
I was a huge fan / dedicated user of E16 back in the day. Someone needs to prod Garrett LeSage, tigert, et al and get them to update their old themes (SpiffE17 please Garrett!).
Jach 14y ago
Ran it, wasn't able to get my second monitor to rotate to the proper orientation within 5 minutes, switched back to Gnome2. (I hear the MATE fork is doing well on distros that took away Gnome2.) It didn't seem much prettier than stock Xfce4, but it's good to have competition and congrats on the project for lasting this long.
dmm 14y ago
The EFL are amazing! E17 is a compositing WM with great software rendering. The software rendering is so fast that you can mistake it for hardware accelerated. http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/efl http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/efl
losvedir 14y ago
Wow! I still have "rasterman.com" memorized because I'd check in once every year or two for the past decade it feels like, to see how it was going. Something about E17 always seemed cool, but I've never used Linux as my primary desktop so I haven't played around with it much. Congrats to the team!
- struppi 14y ago
  Some years ago (in 2005 or 2006) I always ran the latest E17 builds as my primary desktop environment. I really liked it! Some things about it were awesome, but OTOH it always was a little bit incomplete. It just took too long, because in 2006 I bought a mac and moved away from Linux. On my current laptop I had Linux installed for a couple of months, but I didn't try E17 anymore. It just was too late, I didn't want to go through the checkout/build/install stuff again. And now I have removed Linux completely (again), because an Ubuntu update took four days, and after that my mouse didn't work anymore. Anyway, congrats to the E17 team! I still think you have a great piece of software there.
  - dfc 14y ago
    It is too bad that you gave up on Linux and Enlightenment. e17 has been in Debian for a while now, you do not have to manually build it anymore. Why did the update take you 4 days? Are you bandwidth limited? Dialup?
lloeki 14y ago
From the about page [0]: > Free.fr is shipping millions of set top boxes in France, powered by EFL Free is a major ISP here (and a major proponent of FOSS and net neutrality) and I was really surprised at that. It's apparently part of a SDK. The box GUI looks like a variant of XBMC[0]. [0]: http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en [1]: http://www.mac4ever.com/images-v3-actu/59410_352_la_freebox_revolution_disponible_le_3_janvier_merite_son_nom.jpg http://www.mac4ever.com/images-v3-actu/59410_352_la_freebox_... [2]: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(Freebox) http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(Freebox)
ricardobeat 14y ago
I wanted to see a screenshot. I clicked the image on the home page, it took me to the "About" page. I clicked the image on the about page, it took me to the wiki. I still can't find a single full-size image. BTW, if you're interested in a modern Linux desktop, you should look at ElementaryOS (http://elementaryos.org/discover http://elementaryos.org/discover). It's built on Ubuntu, so has great hardware support.

151 points by stock_toaster 14y ago

I never understood the allure of enlightenment, I always thought XFCE, Fluxbox/blackbox/openbox was a much more aesthetic minimal de. Everytime I saw an enlightenment desktop I thought I was being sent back in the past

w0utert 14y ago
Enlightenment was never supposed to be aesthetically minimal, quite the contrary in fact. When every other WM still had flat menu bars and Windows 95 style start menu's, Enlightenment was full of chrome, graphical effects and elaborate theming facilities. It was really a showcase for making your desktop look good, with minimal hardware requirements.
- buster 14y ago
  Indeed.. i remember when i was so proud to have a nice looking desktop manager with really old hardware running, it was awesome. Nowadays i am not sure.. i will try E17 again and see how it compares today :) (p.s.: i even did a screencast of my "wunderful" E17 Desktop 5 years ago and it still has effects and a look and feel that is ahead of gnome/unity/xfce with a laptop that was over 5 years old back then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOa8o1tgIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOa8o1tgIU )
  - adam-a 14y ago
    Oh my, I'd almost forgotten about all the gold. Lot's of excessive shimmering too. It's clearly a technically very impressive desktop environment, but I always thought they needed better design for the actual themes.
    - buster 14y ago
      That's why i used the black alternative scheme, that was muuuuch better. :)

stock_toaster 14y ago

Oh man. I remember using e16 for a while way back in the day. The "water effect" desktop thing always turned heads. aside: Interesting, but brief, interview with the project lead (Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler): http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Seeking-Enlightenment-1739812.html http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Seeking-Enlightenment-...

anigbrowl 14y ago

Rasterman is kinda rushing into this, no? Seems like just last millenium I was installing DR16. I would love for it to catch on again, but I wonder if/how it can build an audience after such a long hiatus (notwithstanding EFL etc.).

protomyth 14y ago
Well, given that nothing else became a standard and their are a tad bit of people unhappy with Gnome 3, it still has a pretty good chance. It does seem to be ok on the BSDs and the libraries are quite nice to use elsewhere so that is a bonus
- tom9729 14y ago
  I think for the most part, the people that are unhappy with Gnome 3 aren't looking for something new: they just want Gnome 2.
  - lloeki 14y ago
    I sure don't. Various areas like the GNOME panel were visibly crutchy and full of historical assumptions/design. This was fixed with GNOME 3 but other areas were/are suffering various levels of undue abuse. If I were looking for GNOME 2 I'd be using XFCE instead (as many people around me are). In place I use OSX — both a more solid foundation and more configurable than GNOME3 — and Awesome/Arch — striving to drop all/most GTK and QT dependencies.
  - sp332 14y ago
    I don't think so. There are a lot of problems with Gnome 3, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of problems with Gnome 2 as well.
- codewright 14y ago
  >Well, given that nothing else became a standard and their are a tad bit of people unhappy with Gnome 3, Nah, that flag has flown. The time has passed where I would've moved to E17. I've since gone past that on to XMonad.

abuzzooz 14y ago

At one point, my favorite desktop by far. As it happens, a few weeks ago I decided to take E16 for a spin after many many years of neglect. It still felt great and snappy. I'll be trying this latest alpha for sure.

danudey 14y ago
That's not really impressive, considering it was designed for computers from 15 years ago. I'd be pretty surprised if it weren't snappy. Still a nice environment though, and ridiculously customizable.

dschiptsov 14y ago

Yeah, I also remember E16.. Seems like Rasterman was the first one who made icons, that represent the content of file, and those transparent window titles and other decorations. And pseudo-transparent ETerm. Now we have all that in Gnome, but back then it was a feeling of going into the right direction. Nowadays it must be a great product, because it was made with vision, for themselves, re-implementing cleanly and consistently all the layers from the very foundation, with attention to every detail. These are landmarks of a remarkable opensource product. Someday I will replace my Gnome.)

simcop2387 14y ago
Heck from what I remember, half of the compsiting stuff that's done now with compiz/kwin in modern desktops was pioneered with E17 development, they used Xgl before the accelerated compositing was possible with GLX_texture_from_pixmap and the like.

leadholder 14y ago

I took E16, newly installed on my laptop, to a work presentation once. I was really excited to turn the thing on and see everyone's eyes bug out. But I plugged the projector in and it turned out there was some strange compatibility problem. One step forward, two back.

CJefferson 14y ago

Does anyone have a good guide, or set of packages, to get this going in Ubuntu? I have tried a couple of guides and packages already, so please only suggest something if you know it works, I know how to google!

limpangel 14y ago
You can install it from this ppa https://launchpad.net/~hannes-janetzek/+archive/enlightenment-svn https://launchpad.net/~hannes-janetzek/+archive/enlightenmen... . $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hannes-janetzek/enlightenment-svn $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install e17 Logout and choose Enlightenment before login. Have fun!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- buster 14y ago
  Also try out terminology, the new E17 terminal. It has an awesome look and feel. Once it supports tabs i'll use it fulltime :)
  - billiob 14y ago
    Thank you. It's on my TODO-list but not on top priority. I'm mostly working on compatibility issues these days. If you found some, please open a bug report or contact me about them.
    - buster 14y ago
      Oh great, one thing i noticed weeks ago (and apparently it's still behaving that way): When you maximise the terminal and mark everything with the mouse the CPU goes crazy. efreet_icon_cache is taking up 100% CPU and the laptop becomes very noisy.. I guess it's not supposed to take up all CPU for that good looking marked text thingy :)
      - 14y ago

zeruch 14y ago

As someone who has known Carsten (Raster) for well over a dozen years, and has given him a never-ending stream of invective for being slower than George W. Bush doing calculus...its about bloody time.

Bjoern 14y ago

I know its yet another useless comment, but back in the day of E16 and beginnings of E17 I was a really big fan. Its great to see it finally being Alpha! Congratulations to the Enlightenment team!

10098 14y ago

wish this could be the answer to all the gnome mess that has been going on lately...

aditya 14y ago

Would love to see screenshots if anyone got it built and running?

klibertp 14y ago
Few examples (many, many people got this "built and running"): http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/95258-2.jpeg http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/100923-2.jpeg http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/110281-2.jpeg http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/115796-2.jpeg And I use heavily customized bohdi theme, which originally looked like this: http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/119928-2.jpeg http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/119928-2.jpeg Unfortunately, I'm sick and not going to work this week, so no screenshots of my desktop today :(
tvon 14y ago
Nothing fancy, but freshly built: http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/e-509c4a7ebd7ef3.90681957.jpg http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/e-509c4a7ebd7ef3.90681957.jp... That's 'efm' on the left and 'terminology' on the right... I'm not normally a fan of the dark themes, but I figured I'd stick with the default for a bit to see how it felt. It's pretty nice.

DrinkWater 14y ago

i still remember me hacking through all the configuration files of E16, yeeeeears ago. If i hadn't shifted from Linux to MacOSX, it would probably still be my window manager of choice. But boy, this e17 thing is taking a ridiculous long time!

urza 14y ago

What are the key features? Why should I wanna try use it? Where is it better then other window managers? I cant find these information on the website. Just that it is "lean, fast, modular and very extensible window manager" which tells me nothing. I see that it is also for Mac and Windows. What does it have that these OSes dont have? What would be the benefint of using E17 ond windows 7?

klibertp 14y ago
EDIT: for you, urza, there are probably no benefits in using E17 - or any other environment you're not familiar with. That being said, I'm explaining what benefits it gives me. > I see that it is also for Mac and Windows Seriously? Don't know about Mac, but do you really consider Windows to be "extensible" or customizable? Out of the box, Enlightenment supports full scripting capabilities (think AutoHotKey - everything you do can be done by sending a command to E17 server from terminal) and theming with which you can make it look as you wish (http://e17-stuff.org/ http://e17-stuff.org/). It's built-in. On Windows you need expensive Stardock Window Blinds (IIRC) and clumsy AutoHotKey to get the same functionality - and then it gets slow, while E17 remains lightning fast. As for "fast"... Well, take a look at this quote: "For full functionality 64MB or more is suggested. As little as a 200Mhz ARM core will provide sufficient processing power (depending on needs)" (http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en) Now try and use Windows 7 on a machine with 64MB of RAM :) I actually use E17 as my only WM at work (on FreeBSD at that). I almost never touch the mouse for WM related tasks; combine with VIM as an editor and Vrome in Chromium and I almost never touch the mouse, period. It's fast (starts up in 3-4 seconds), responsive (changing virtual desktops while CPU is being fully used by gcc is as fast as on standby) and in the past year I didn't encounter even a single bug (I remember in the past when something went wrong and E crashed, it used to display a message in the console: "Bad programmer! Naughty programmer! SPANK, SPANK, SPANK! Now go and fix your code!" - but I didn't have a chance to see if it's still the case). Customizable to ridiculous extent and looks quite a lot better than ratpoison. The only thing I'd like to see is a smart tiling manager extension. Preferably turned on/off on per virtual desktop basis. It probably will be done in the future. In the meantime E17 remains the only WM that is both fast and pretty, and which goes out of your way without imposing anything on you while providing sane defaults. Ok, that's just my opinion; fans of XFCE, Black/Busy/etcbox, Xmonad and others can argue. Fans of Gnome and KDE, Windows and Mac - please don't bother :)

jejones3141 14y ago

e17 has been pretty darned useful and, from my user's viewpoint, stable for pre-alpha software... and the anti-user, customization is evil attitude of the GNOME 3 developers has pushed me to switch to e17. I seriously recommend Bodhi Linux.

antihero 14y ago

The design seems to feel like they were designed by someone with no aesthetic taste but has just made things they think will look bling. I'm sure that it does something very impressive, but I can't see why everyone raves about it.

gnarbarian 14y ago
Well, back 10 years ago when Gentoo worked like Ubuntu does now except it was n^2 slower and came with 3 difficulty modes for installation, e16 was the bee's knees window manager. You could edit your own GUI menus by configuring a text file! everything was infinitely customizable. EVERYTHING. not to mention having transparent eterms with really cool backgrounds. In this context, e17 was the shang-ri-la of desktop environments and also perpetual vaporware. I looked forward to e17 for years but they never seemed to make progress. Just a screenshot here and there, tantalizing us. then Compiz came out and I forgot about it completely. The allure has to do with the fact that it had great potential and it was being made by uncompromising perfectionists. Like the novel that the fans were begging to be released but the Author refused because it wasn't quite perfect yet. Well now, after so many years, the progenitor is ready to reveal the creation. I am ready to see the vision.
- 0x09 14y ago
  Well, you say that, but really it's had rather stable and public development, and it was my main desktop for a long time in 2005 and 6. I think part of the reason it became so drawn out was that it was already more or less a release product without the release numbers.
- nacker 14y ago
  I wasn't seriously tempted to try it again until I read this post. Poetic nostalgia! Somewhere deep down inside I'm also a-yearning for the Hurd...

zemanel 14y ago

As a Gnome fan, i used E16 as a replacement for Metacity (i believe?) and it was great. This one time at a former employer, my boss was touring a visitor around the office while i was flipping the windows just because and it got their attention for a 5m talk ("oh shiny what is that ?") :-)

89a 14y ago

Remember BlueSteel? Remember installing linux for the first time to try it out? Remember discovering what a winmodem was…

stuaxo 14y ago
Hey, there was the ridiculously named 'Hand of god' theme with the titlebar on the side ! Good days ... running the ripple effect on the bottom ... bring me bling !
- stinos 14y ago
  yes yes, the ripple effect. In those days people could hardly believe what they were seeing and all went like 'is THAT linux?'
  - balakk 14y ago
    And that sweet dramatic unveiling of the desktop, swishing across virtual desktops, funky pager, widgets... Linux was so much fun and personal those days.
    - hk_kh 14y ago
      And still is. The thing is, either you are used to it, or you just feel ok with the defaults. I understand why Unity or GNOME are following the "simplicity, you stupid" path. It gets mom, dad and girlfriend to use the system without putting much effort into it. However, I stick to fluxbox, I have got my widgets, my funky pager, my switching, and it feels personal, and fun.
    - fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
      That was before we tried to make Linux a mass market OS.
recursive 14y ago
> Remember installing linux for the first time to try it out? I am starting to think this will happen soon.

yankcrime 14y ago

I was a huge fan / dedicated user of E16 back in the day. Someone needs to prod Garrett LeSage, tigert, et al and get them to update their old themes (SpiffE17 please Garrett!).

Jach 14y ago

Ran it, wasn't able to get my second monitor to rotate to the proper orientation within 5 minutes, switched back to Gnome2. (I hear the MATE fork is doing well on distros that took away Gnome2.) It didn't seem much prettier than stock Xfce4, but it's good to have competition and congrats on the project for lasting this long.

dmm 14y ago

The EFL are amazing! E17 is a compositing WM with great software rendering. The software rendering is so fast that you can mistake it for hardware accelerated. http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/efl http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/efl

losvedir 14y ago

Wow! I still have "rasterman.com" memorized because I'd check in once every year or two for the past decade it feels like, to see how it was going. Something about E17 always seemed cool, but I've never used Linux as my primary desktop so I haven't played around with it much. Congrats to the team!

struppi 14y ago
Some years ago (in 2005 or 2006) I always ran the latest E17 builds as my primary desktop environment. I really liked it! Some things about it were awesome, but OTOH it always was a little bit incomplete. It just took too long, because in 2006 I bought a mac and moved away from Linux. On my current laptop I had Linux installed for a couple of months, but I didn't try E17 anymore. It just was too late, I didn't want to go through the checkout/build/install stuff again. And now I have removed Linux completely (again), because an Ubuntu update took four days, and after that my mouse didn't work anymore. Anyway, congrats to the E17 team! I still think you have a great piece of software there.
- dfc 14y ago
  It is too bad that you gave up on Linux and Enlightenment. e17 has been in Debian for a while now, you do not have to manually build it anymore. Why did the update take you 4 days? Are you bandwidth limited? Dialup?

lloeki 14y ago

From the about page [0]: > Free.fr is shipping millions of set top boxes in France, powered by EFL Free is a major ISP here (and a major proponent of FOSS and net neutrality) and I was really surprised at that. It's apparently part of a SDK. The box GUI looks like a variant of XBMC[0]. [0]: http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en [1]: http://www.mac4ever.com/images-v3-actu/59410_352_la_freebox_revolution_disponible_le_3_janvier_merite_son_nom.jpg http://www.mac4ever.com/images-v3-actu/59410_352_la_freebox_... [2]: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(Freebox) http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(Freebox)

ricardobeat 14y ago

I wanted to see a screenshot. I clicked the image on the home page, it took me to the "About" page. I clicked the image on the about page, it took me to the wiki. I still can't find a single full-size image. BTW, if you're interested in a modern Linux desktop, you should look at ElementaryOS (http://elementaryos.org/discover http://elementaryos.org/discover). It's built on Ubuntu, so has great hardware support.