7 ms·

This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment. I used to run Enlightenment in the late ninet

by wvh 6mo ago

This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment. I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.

avereveard 6mo ago
same, especially compiz era after good drivers and accelerated compositing became ubiquitous was wild
pino83 6mo ago
Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to KDE or Gnome. It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.
- mackman 6mo ago
  E13 was a great, simple, good looking WM I used for years. Eventually moved to Fluxbox then back to macOS when it went Unixy.
  - pino83 6mo ago
    In my personal experience - as far as I can remember - it always stopped to be good looking when it wasn't a screenshot anymore but a running process on my machine. In motion, all the eye-candy became ugly and foolish and visibly hobbyist, and as soon as I began using some applications outside of the E-ecosystem, the last sparks of fanciness went away anyways. But that was... idk... E16 or so?! I really cannot remember. Maybe it had better times earlier, or maybe (surely) people are different and have different criteria for choosing such things. Was E13 before they started trying to be a klingon starship UI?
- antisol 6mo ago
  Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion floating point operations just to open a menu. And if you're using a current version they're responsive to bug reports and whatnot. It does most everything you could want. And it looks damn fine while it's doing it. Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images! Right there in the terminal! Wow! I was compelled to point out that terminology has had that (and video playback, too) for a LONG time. One of my favourite features of enlightenment is that it has this thing from back in the day called "configurability", where behaviours tend to be optional and you can decide for yourself whether you want them enabled or not. I know it's not fashionable anymore and maybe not for everyone but personally I think it's a better approach than the gnome-style "You'll take what we give you and be happy about it" approach which is in vogue these days.
  - pino83 6mo ago
    In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. So you could turn it on and live with its defects, or you turned it off and live without the feature. Linux Desktop was always full of that. But yeah, I also do not like Gnome, because they more and more just removed the switches, but without spending effort to make things fine for everyone. Plasma is so configurable, I've never seen anything more configurable. On any OS that I've seen. My personal experience: Yes, you can also build your own environment out of blocks. And then you configure a lot. But not in order to customize it better, but in order to somehow glue these components together in a way that somehow remotely makes sense. :-/ And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? E is a graphical desktop, no? Based on X11 or Wayland. There are actual media players!! A lot. Not a single one is really great, but most will be better than the terminal, I guess. VLC is that bad?
    - rasterman 6mo ago
      well why video in a terminal? 1. it's "free" because the toolkit already offers video objects - feature is there... why not expose it. you just call 2 lines of code or so and and tell it to play. it's similar amount of code for an image, so it's basically free really. why do still images and NOT video? why stop there when video is only a little more code. sure. if you want a movie as a background: probably a bad choice, but if it's one of those zen videos with just trees swaying in the breeze as a background or a mountain lake rippling in the wind with very little motion but enough to make it "come to life", why not? but ok - for real usability? example: you're browsing through your dirs. cd ~/xxx/yyy; ls; cd zz; ls ... oh there's cat-sunning.mp4 there... i have 87 videos of cats sunning themselves.. which was that? tycat cat-sunning.jpg -> boom. video appears in terminal - you cat'd it.. it plays (tycat is just a tiny cmdline tool that emits the right escapes to terminology. you could make it a shell alias or script too and not use tycat. escapes are documented in the readme. this works even in a dumb framebuffer without wayland or x display systems (because the toolkit handles auto-detecting its environment and if in just a tty/vt it'll fall back to fbcon or kms/drm and render there). so you get a mouse and a full-screen graphical terminal that can do splits/tiles/tabs and so on with no windowing system and you can happily still explore all your files there even if they are videos... you aren't forced to use the feature... but it's there if you need it or want it.
- prmoustache 6mo ago
  I used E17 for a while and the killer feature for me were independent virtual desktops accross monitors, meaning switching virtual desktop would only switch it on the monitor your focus was on. I ultimately switched back to KDE despite that ergonomic advantage because it crashed too often and then to Gnome because KDE also crashed too often. Gnome has been rock solid ever since.
  - TD-Linux 6mo ago
    Funnily enough, KDE got this feature yesterday: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8602 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8602
    - prmoustache 6mo ago
      Awesome! I might try it again, tbh I have KDE on one computer but I don't use it much as my muscle memory is very gnomy and I haven't taken the time to tried to switch back in long term and I admit until hearing about that very little strong incentive to do so.
  - pino83 6mo ago
    I know that people never want to hear such remarks... At least I never want... But I risk being the idiot anyways: KDE/Plasma doesn't crash here so often. I've seen it actually happening in the last years. Unfortunately!!!! Maybe two or three times... And then, it just restarted in a matter of a second. It did not affect anything. No running apps crashed. Just the task bar and the desktop went away for a second. How long have you tried, and how long are you now trying Gnome?
    - prmoustache 6mo ago
      That experience was almost 20years ago, between 2006 and 2009 (I had to check linkedin because I only remember which employer I was working for) so based on wikipedia it was still KDE 4 wich was very unstable. I tried a few times KDE 5 over the years out of curiosity then more recently KDE6. I have it on one computer but I rarely use it as it is the gaming machine and I very rarely play videogames. The thing is I got so used to the ergonomy and shortcuts of gnome and i3/sway that whenever I use KDE I need either a lot of time to get used to the default keyboard shortcuts and layout and/or I need to take time to modify/configure it. But since I have been fairly happy with gnome and sway I don't really have much insentive to switch again. No hater really.
- mghackerlady 6mo ago
  I actually use my riced setups. Part of a good rice (at least for me) is it being ergonomic and usable. It should, of course, look good
- wink 6mo ago
  People have different tastes and opinions, and I don't remember how GNOME looked in 1998, but KDE 1? 2? wasn't so great imho (saying that as a huge fan of plasma, and intermittent KDE user for the last 25y). I used enlightenment for a bit and was very happy with it - just like some things on a desktop at home don't matter, but do on a laptop. I've more than once mangled i3 and gnome or xfce or kde together to have the "desktop environment" things like wifi and power management and so on.. whereas in the 90s on a desktop I cared about neither of these things. And while this was all very much a long time ago, I don't see how enlightenment would have changed - it's just a bit barebones compared to a DE, just like i3.
  - pino83 6mo ago
    > KDE 1? Yeah, compared to Win 95 at least, it looked interesting in a positive way... Problem was: Whenever you clicked on something, some message box appeared, with some one-line error message that contained the word "unknown" or "unexpected"... :)
    - badsectoracula 6mo ago
      With KDE1 is was most likely "Not yet implemented" :-) I never used KDE2, KDE3.x was rock solid though. It wasn't until KDE4 where things took a massive nosedive and everything was crashing if you looked at it wrong - something that lasted until most of KDE5's lifetime, though by late KDE5 and now KDE6 it seems to be fine. Well, "fine", for some reason Wayland sessions crash and restart the entire session whenever i press any key (doesn't happen with Xorg sessions), so i guess there are still some minor bugs to be fixed :-P
      - pino83 6mo ago
        No no, it always tried to do something, with a lot of self-confidence, but then constantly failed. I can spontaneously remember k3b (CD burning tool) constantly failing because the CLI tools behind it (cdrecord, mkisofs, ...) replied in some way that k3b hasn't expected (e.g. because the locale was non-english, or the CLI tool devs changed the strings slightly, or there was a pointless warning text that k3b did not expect, ..., ...). Admittedly, k3b was later... KDE3 era? But this is exactly how KDE1 felt... And in very bad days it still does today... You click on something, the developers assumed that the file manager can deal with it, but instead you just see the file manager saying "Unknown protocol" or similar. All the problems that arise when your system is very modular, but every module is a separate hobby project with no coordination. I definitely loved KDE3 and was sooo excited about KDE4. And it was a pretty terrible disappointment. Nowadays I'm again fine with Plasma. Since mid KDE5 days. > for some reason Wayland sessions crash That's definitely a mess, too. I'm not fundamentally against Wayland. I'm using it right now. Even if it is still slightly broken today (yes, Wayland is a protocol; here I mean: the biggest implementations). But the entire Wayland story is very very sad. It took ages before it was at least usable for five minutes. And then everywhere the X11 support already gets disabled, while Wayland is still in a somewhat immature state. Sure, I somewhat understand what the devs say, and I can't force them anyways. But it's really not a success story for the Linux desktop.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  > Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots Yea, this was my memory of it, too. I remember installing it, and making a theme that looked all "elite" and cool. I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time. Took a few screenshots, basked in how cool I was, and then just switched back to whatever I was using before (I think Gnome).
  - kdhaskjdhadjk 6mo ago
    Lots of teenagers were using it back then judging by the old themes, 95% of which suck. As an adult I made a simple, attractive theme, enabled only the most basic and useful eye candy, and just use it. None of the other alternatives interest me, and I've tried them all.
  - slater 6mo ago
    > I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time i always thought that "stone hand on desert island" was the #1 requirement for Linux desktop backgrounds of the time? ofc i can't find a pic of it now edit: found it https://i.ibb.co/bgpRF6Y7/image.png https://i.ibb.co/bgpRF6Y7/image.png
    - pino83 6mo ago
      Ohh, I've never seen that wallpaper before... Looks so year 2000-ish... :) And then you start some actual (non-E) applications... Which look completely different (i.e. not like something that MS Frontpage has desperately assembled out of Java Applets and weird color choices)... And then, even if you liked the original look, you'll not be satisfied at all anymore, will you? Yeah, okay, on the other hand, you could probably find Qt and GTK themes that somehow looked similar enough...
  - jasomill 6mo ago
    It worked, at least 25+ years ago when I last used it; early versions weren't a model of stability, but that wasn't nearly as important as an X server or a Wayland compositor not crashing, since you can simply restart an X window manager when it crashes (from a terminal window, virtual terminal, automatically from a script, etc.).

by wvh 6mo ago

avereveard 6mo ago

same, especially compiz era after good drivers and accelerated compositing became ubiquitous was wild

pino83 6mo ago

Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to KDE or Gnome. It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.

mackman 6mo ago
E13 was a great, simple, good looking WM I used for years. Eventually moved to Fluxbox then back to macOS when it went Unixy.
- pino83 6mo ago
  In my personal experience - as far as I can remember - it always stopped to be good looking when it wasn't a screenshot anymore but a running process on my machine. In motion, all the eye-candy became ugly and foolish and visibly hobbyist, and as soon as I began using some applications outside of the E-ecosystem, the last sparks of fanciness went away anyways. But that was... idk... E16 or so?! I really cannot remember. Maybe it had better times earlier, or maybe (surely) people are different and have different criteria for choosing such things. Was E13 before they started trying to be a klingon starship UI?
antisol 6mo ago
Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion floating point operations just to open a menu. And if you're using a current version they're responsive to bug reports and whatnot. It does most everything you could want. And it looks damn fine while it's doing it. Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images! Right there in the terminal! Wow! I was compelled to point out that terminology has had that (and video playback, too) for a LONG time. One of my favourite features of enlightenment is that it has this thing from back in the day called "configurability", where behaviours tend to be optional and you can decide for yourself whether you want them enabled or not. I know it's not fashionable anymore and maybe not for everyone but personally I think it's a better approach than the gnome-style "You'll take what we give you and be happy about it" approach which is in vogue these days.
- pino83 6mo ago
  In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. So you could turn it on and live with its defects, or you turned it off and live without the feature. Linux Desktop was always full of that. But yeah, I also do not like Gnome, because they more and more just removed the switches, but without spending effort to make things fine for everyone. Plasma is so configurable, I've never seen anything more configurable. On any OS that I've seen. My personal experience: Yes, you can also build your own environment out of blocks. And then you configure a lot. But not in order to customize it better, but in order to somehow glue these components together in a way that somehow remotely makes sense. :-/ And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? E is a graphical desktop, no? Based on X11 or Wayland. There are actual media players!! A lot. Not a single one is really great, but most will be better than the terminal, I guess. VLC is that bad?
  - rasterman 6mo ago
    well why video in a terminal? 1. it's "free" because the toolkit already offers video objects - feature is there... why not expose it. you just call 2 lines of code or so and and tell it to play. it's similar amount of code for an image, so it's basically free really. why do still images and NOT video? why stop there when video is only a little more code. sure. if you want a movie as a background: probably a bad choice, but if it's one of those zen videos with just trees swaying in the breeze as a background or a mountain lake rippling in the wind with very little motion but enough to make it "come to life", why not? but ok - for real usability? example: you're browsing through your dirs. cd ~/xxx/yyy; ls; cd zz; ls ... oh there's cat-sunning.mp4 there... i have 87 videos of cats sunning themselves.. which was that? tycat cat-sunning.jpg -> boom. video appears in terminal - you cat'd it.. it plays (tycat is just a tiny cmdline tool that emits the right escapes to terminology. you could make it a shell alias or script too and not use tycat. escapes are documented in the readme. this works even in a dumb framebuffer without wayland or x display systems (because the toolkit handles auto-detecting its environment and if in just a tty/vt it'll fall back to fbcon or kms/drm and render there). so you get a mouse and a full-screen graphical terminal that can do splits/tiles/tabs and so on with no windowing system and you can happily still explore all your files there even if they are videos... you aren't forced to use the feature... but it's there if you need it or want it.
prmoustache 6mo ago
I used E17 for a while and the killer feature for me were independent virtual desktops accross monitors, meaning switching virtual desktop would only switch it on the monitor your focus was on. I ultimately switched back to KDE despite that ergonomic advantage because it crashed too often and then to Gnome because KDE also crashed too often. Gnome has been rock solid ever since.
- TD-Linux 6mo ago
  Funnily enough, KDE got this feature yesterday: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8602 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8602
  - prmoustache 6mo ago
    Awesome! I might try it again, tbh I have KDE on one computer but I don't use it much as my muscle memory is very gnomy and I haven't taken the time to tried to switch back in long term and I admit until hearing about that very little strong incentive to do so.
- pino83 6mo ago
  I know that people never want to hear such remarks... At least I never want... But I risk being the idiot anyways: KDE/Plasma doesn't crash here so often. I've seen it actually happening in the last years. Unfortunately!!!! Maybe two or three times... And then, it just restarted in a matter of a second. It did not affect anything. No running apps crashed. Just the task bar and the desktop went away for a second. How long have you tried, and how long are you now trying Gnome?
  - prmoustache 6mo ago
    That experience was almost 20years ago, between 2006 and 2009 (I had to check linkedin because I only remember which employer I was working for) so based on wikipedia it was still KDE 4 wich was very unstable. I tried a few times KDE 5 over the years out of curiosity then more recently KDE6. I have it on one computer but I rarely use it as it is the gaming machine and I very rarely play videogames. The thing is I got so used to the ergonomy and shortcuts of gnome and i3/sway that whenever I use KDE I need either a lot of time to get used to the default keyboard shortcuts and layout and/or I need to take time to modify/configure it. But since I have been fairly happy with gnome and sway I don't really have much insentive to switch again. No hater really.
mghackerlady 6mo ago
I actually use my riced setups. Part of a good rice (at least for me) is it being ergonomic and usable. It should, of course, look good
wink 6mo ago
People have different tastes and opinions, and I don't remember how GNOME looked in 1998, but KDE 1? 2? wasn't so great imho (saying that as a huge fan of plasma, and intermittent KDE user for the last 25y). I used enlightenment for a bit and was very happy with it - just like some things on a desktop at home don't matter, but do on a laptop. I've more than once mangled i3 and gnome or xfce or kde together to have the "desktop environment" things like wifi and power management and so on.. whereas in the 90s on a desktop I cared about neither of these things. And while this was all very much a long time ago, I don't see how enlightenment would have changed - it's just a bit barebones compared to a DE, just like i3.
- pino83 6mo ago
  > KDE 1? Yeah, compared to Win 95 at least, it looked interesting in a positive way... Problem was: Whenever you clicked on something, some message box appeared, with some one-line error message that contained the word "unknown" or "unexpected"... :)
  - badsectoracula 6mo ago
    With KDE1 is was most likely "Not yet implemented" :-) I never used KDE2, KDE3.x was rock solid though. It wasn't until KDE4 where things took a massive nosedive and everything was crashing if you looked at it wrong - something that lasted until most of KDE5's lifetime, though by late KDE5 and now KDE6 it seems to be fine. Well, "fine", for some reason Wayland sessions crash and restart the entire session whenever i press any key (doesn't happen with Xorg sessions), so i guess there are still some minor bugs to be fixed :-P
    - pino83 6mo ago
      No no, it always tried to do something, with a lot of self-confidence, but then constantly failed. I can spontaneously remember k3b (CD burning tool) constantly failing because the CLI tools behind it (cdrecord, mkisofs, ...) replied in some way that k3b hasn't expected (e.g. because the locale was non-english, or the CLI tool devs changed the strings slightly, or there was a pointless warning text that k3b did not expect, ..., ...). Admittedly, k3b was later... KDE3 era? But this is exactly how KDE1 felt... And in very bad days it still does today... You click on something, the developers assumed that the file manager can deal with it, but instead you just see the file manager saying "Unknown protocol" or similar. All the problems that arise when your system is very modular, but every module is a separate hobby project with no coordination. I definitely loved KDE3 and was sooo excited about KDE4. And it was a pretty terrible disappointment. Nowadays I'm again fine with Plasma. Since mid KDE5 days. > for some reason Wayland sessions crash That's definitely a mess, too. I'm not fundamentally against Wayland. I'm using it right now. Even if it is still slightly broken today (yes, Wayland is a protocol; here I mean: the biggest implementations). But the entire Wayland story is very very sad. It took ages before it was at least usable for five minutes. And then everywhere the X11 support already gets disabled, while Wayland is still in a somewhat immature state. Sure, I somewhat understand what the devs say, and I can't force them anyways. But it's really not a success story for the Linux desktop.
ryandrake 6mo ago
> Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots Yea, this was my memory of it, too. I remember installing it, and making a theme that looked all "elite" and cool. I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time. Took a few screenshots, basked in how cool I was, and then just switched back to whatever I was using before (I think Gnome).
- kdhaskjdhadjk 6mo ago
  Lots of teenagers were using it back then judging by the old themes, 95% of which suck. As an adult I made a simple, attractive theme, enabled only the most basic and useful eye candy, and just use it. None of the other alternatives interest me, and I've tried them all.
- slater 6mo ago
  > I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time i always thought that "stone hand on desert island" was the #1 requirement for Linux desktop backgrounds of the time? ofc i can't find a pic of it now edit: found it https://i.ibb.co/bgpRF6Y7/image.png https://i.ibb.co/bgpRF6Y7/image.png
  - pino83 6mo ago
    Ohh, I've never seen that wallpaper before... Looks so year 2000-ish... :) And then you start some actual (non-E) applications... Which look completely different (i.e. not like something that MS Frontpage has desperately assembled out of Java Applets and weird color choices)... And then, even if you liked the original look, you'll not be satisfied at all anymore, will you? Yeah, okay, on the other hand, you could probably find Qt and GTK themes that somehow looked similar enough...
- jasomill 6mo ago
  It worked, at least 25+ years ago when I last used it; early versions weren't a model of stability, but that wasn't nearly as important as an X server or a Wayland compositor not crashing, since you can simply restart an X window manager when it crashes (from a terminal window, virtual terminal, automatically from a script, etc.).