8 ms·

E17 is out

179 points by zemanel 14y ago

dizzystar 14y ago
I was looking and Enlightenment when I was considering a desktop for my Arch Linux install. I think this iteration looks quite a bit nicer, but I'm concerned about adding bloat to my system. After building it, I am pretty unwilling to add stuff unless I really need to. The system is also running on VM. I'm currently running LXDE. What would Enlightenment offer me LXDE doesn't (aside from a nicer-looking interface)?
- nwmcsween 14y ago
  Enlightenment is designed to run on embedded devices so I don't understand where you get the idea it's bloated.
  - dizzystar 14y ago
    I don't mean "bloated" in the sense of size, but having things in there I don't really need. I sort of like having minimal UI and don't want to install it and think "oh my god! how do I uninstall that?". I'm asking this in all seriousness, as I was, and still am, half sold on using it.
    - pretoriusB 14y ago
      >I sort of like having minimal UI and don't want to install it and think "oh my god! how do I uninstall that?". You know you can install it in a directory and just remove that and it's gone, right?
      - dizzystar 14y ago
        Jeese ... What I'm saying is that I never ever want to experience something like other Linuxes I won't mention. Why the hell do I want their idea of a better UI, games, and other crap? The first thing I do when I buy a new machine is uninstall programs all day and installing a new OS, that I was not familiar with, practically made me forget the idea of ever using Linux. I'm simply asking how much "extra" stuff I would be stuck with, if any at all. Of course I know how to uninstall, I just don't feel like doing it. I already said it's an Arch Linux install, and it should be clear that I appreciate minimalism. I can take extras as long as they are well thought out. Thus I am attempting ask what extra features are included in Enlightenment that would make me want it over other desktop environments? There are other environments that I flatly refuse to use, but I was really on the fence about using Enlightenment, and now that there is something new, I am wondering if there are excellent reasons for moving over. I was hoping for a simple, brief, explanation of the reasoning for Enlightenment over X desktop. Perhaps I came off as trollish, and that was not my intention at all.
        buster 14y ago
        I have the feeling that you think Enlightenment compares more to KDE/Gnome then to, let's say, Blackbox. It's basically just a window manager. It doesn't come with it's own Office Suite or Email client, etc. If that's your definition of "bloated", you're good to go with Enlightenment. After first installation it's just a plain desktop.
        klibertp 14y ago
        I have been using E17 on FreeBSD for a couple of years now, but my answers to your questions might be still a bit wrong - I don't remember that well how I installed and customized it because I did it once and everything have been working perfectly since then. So, first of all, Enlightenment does come with a couple of apps - I seem to remember they have image viewer, file manager and... Well, probably some other apps, but I never installed any of them. They are completely optional and E17 is perfectly usable without them, provided that you have your favorite replacements for them (I use ROX as a GUI file manager and gqview for images). Without those apps E17 still is not quite as pure as fluxbox and friends - it has many "modules", essentially plugins, that are included with it. They are all loaded and started separately from enlightenment and are meant to do... almost everything. I mean, every menu, taskbar, notification area, pager (minimap of virtual desktops) is a plugin of it's own and can be disabled with single click. You can configure every module separately or group them and manipulate a few of them together. Sure, there are modules that are less than necessary, for example cpu frequency meter or battery status (and probably many more, I never explored them) but you can disable them easily. Basically, when you turn off all the modules you're left with something that does little more than the default XWM (but still looks much better;)). One thing I mentioned I think is E17 strong point is it's configurability. You can rearrange everything to your tastes, both in terms of position/size and workings - and it's easy to do, you don't need to write config files, just move some piece where you want it and it's done. Also, every single function of E17 can be assigned to a hotkey, which I found very convenient. The second is theming and eye candy: E17 community created many different themes that look very good and E17 provides very fast and beautiful animations which together makes it quite pretty. Of course it's not that much of a selling point now as it was a few years ago, but it's still good. The third: E17 tends to play well with others. Almost every app you run under Enlightenment works alright: it has correct icon, minifies to where you want it minified, displays notifications in selected area and so on. To summarize: the biggest feature of Enlightenment is it's ability to become exactly how you want it to be. It can be as slim or as bloated as you choose (defaults to something in the middle) - it gives you tools to customize it and then goes out of your way. Compared to fluxbox and others - it's prettier, as configurable as them and not much slower. Compared to KDE and others - it's much faster, much more configurable, and almost as complete as them (excluding office suite or games, which I think should not be a part of WM anyway). I would suggest you to give it a try for a few days, if you can configure it to do what you want it to do you'll be satisfied, if not - you can go back to your current WM easily.
- saurabh 14y ago
  No bloat at all. I installed the enlightenment17 package from the extras reposiroty on archlinux a few minutes ago to check it out. Installed it, tried it by having "exec start_enlightenment" in .xinitrc followed by the running the command startx. Uninstalled it using the command sudo pacman -Rns enligtenment17.
  - dizzystar 14y ago
    Why did you uninstall it?
    - saurabh 14y ago
      I use XFCE after having tried everything else. I use a low powered laptop and anything else feels slugish. I've tried Xmonad but I keep playing with it instead of working. Enlightenment is different, faster and definitely cool. I'll try it again some other time.
- grannyg00se 14y ago
  Have you tried no desktop at all, for even less bloat? I went from not installing X at all, to installing it with a desktop, then back down to X with just a simple window manager. I don't miss the desktop. I'd love to go completely sans graphics but it makes basic web application testing problematic. And in the end, the bloatphobia is not warranted - just a curious pastime.
  - ubernostrum 14y ago
    It's kind of funny to see comments like the one you're responding to. I remember when Enlightenment was considered "bloated"... and then it stayed the same for a while, and suddenly was considered "lightweight". Not sure if I'll actually try the new version though. I have E16 configs that haven't been touched since the last millennium, and still work. Would be tough to give up on that kind of track record.
- oelmekki 14y ago
  > After building it, I am pretty unwilling to add stuff unless I really need to. I was kind of thinking this way ten years ago, when I was building my first gentoo systems. I wanted them to be exactly adapted to my needs, the perfect match for my day to day usage. It was indeed great for educational purpose, one should always be able to build something perfectly fit, and I went that way for several years. But then, there was this pain of always lacking something, not to mention the fun my friends had when visiting me, wanting to do something I wasn't commonly doing and heard me saying : "oh wait, I've just have to compile a few softwares for that" (granted the compiling stuff is gentoo related, but you see the idea : there was always something I need that I didn't have). Today, I install kde-meta (which is a package that install everything in standard kde distribution) and I'm very happy with that. It's extremely rare that I want to do something desktop related and can't do it right away. Other people can use my computer without starring at me with blank face while I explain what wmii is (but I still have all my keyboard shortcuts and tweaks from wmii in kde) and I even don't feel the "bloated" aspect since I have now a very powerful system with huge storages.
ObjectiveSub 14y ago
"Also be aware that this page is large and is meant to provide a lot of important information. It is not for the tl;dr; (too long, didn't read) set of people with minimal attention span. It contains lots of that scary thing called "text" and "information". It is assumed that you can make use of the education you have been provided with that allows you to read and comprehend what has been written." I rolled my eyes at that one. This is an example of the pretentiousness and snark directed at users that people complain about in open-source projects; especially Linux-related ones.
- IheartApplesDix 14y ago
  There's always Apple stuff...
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  It is also an example of the stuff that these particular unpaid volunteers, working on their own project for fun for years on end, wanted to write. Open source projects are not always about marketing, adoption and being friendly to everyone. Heck, this particular project didn't even have a stable release for over 10 years...
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Heck, this particular project didn't even have a stable release for over 10 years... ...meaning the self-absorbed wank is even less justified. And I'm a fan of E.
  - streptomycin 14y ago
    The E17 developers are mainly paid by companies like Samsung.
    - bofussing 14y ago
      Samsung is backing the development of the EFL libraries behind E17 for the Tizen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen) initiative. Possibly a hedge against Android. Also note that E17/EFL is supporting Wayland (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html) - forward looking indeed. Bo
kleiba 14y ago
...and hell freezes over! :-) Congratulations to the E17 team!
syassami 14y ago
Their website looks nicer than their DE. I've always found blackbox/fluxbox/xfce a nicer minimal fit
sliverstorm 14y ago
Anyone have any idea if the tiling module supports arbitrary arrangement like i3wm, or is it stack-based like dwm? Edit: Ok, the tarball is 30MB, no way I'm going to be able to use this. My curiosity is purely academic now.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  For what it's worth, most of that bulk seems to be asset files and GNU gettext translation files.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    What's the size of the resulting binaries and libraries?
- billiob 14y ago
  It's stack-based. You can have up to 8 stacks, vertically or horizontally. You can find a presentation and a small demo of the features on that presentation: http://billiob.net/blog/20110717_etiling.html http://billiob.net/blog/20110717_etiling.html . E-Tiling is now the default tiling module.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    Blast. The programs that I usually work with really benefit from i3wm's model.
anigbrowl 14y ago
It's disappointing that there's no 'what's new' or introduction to E or even a proper gallery of screenshots. I actually know E fairly well having used versions 14-16, but it's been about a decade...maybe presenting it a bit better would result in a larger userbase?
- keithpeter 14y ago
  http://www.bodhilinux.com/e17guide/e17guideEN/ http://www.bodhilinux.com/e17guide/e17guideEN/ Nicely written tutorial guide from a distribution that relies on E17. Still no 'what's new' for previous users of Enlightenment based desktops. The Guide could be made more 'task oriented' as well - what you see when you get to the desktop and how to launch applications first then the detailed naming of things afterwards perhaps...
- tessellated 14y ago
  There seem to be somewhat unofficial screenshots. Unfortunately there is no obvious version information attached. http://enlightenment.org/ss/ http://enlightenment.org/ss/
- billiob 14y ago
  You may want to have a look at: http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    I did, that was what moved me to post.
- jejones3141 14y ago
  Check out the Bodhi Linux "desktop of the week" page, http://www.bodhilinux.com/about_dotw.php http://www.bodhilinux.com/about_dotw.php
zephjc 14y ago
The diagram in the Building Blocks section of http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en hurts my eyes. I had to zoom in to see if my eyes or the image was to blame.
- DanBC 14y ago
  I agree. On Chrome (on OS X Snow Leopard) the white text on the blue boxes is blurry.
ramses 14y ago
This is great news! I have been waiting for a very long time, and it is finally here. A month ago I installed it in Fedora and Ubuntu, to get rid of Gnome3 and Unity ... and guess what? Linux is once again an amazing workstation—beautiful, fast, and flexible.
billwilliams 14y ago
Opinionated software is tremendous. By removing bullet points and telling users to read 5 some odd pages of dogmatic documentation you're letting the passion ooze from your project. Its saying "if you don't care about your window manager, we don't care about you". Except in 13000 words instead of 13.
- philsnow 14y ago
  Enlightenment has been around since 1997, when "the internet" was still a dorky-sounding term (and it wasn't equated with "low attention-span theater"). Ever hear the old saw "Unix _is_ user friendly; it's just picky about who it's friends with." ? The E/EFL reflects this attitude, and you know what ? That's their prerogative. I don't think they're particularly worried about gaining huge adoption. Not every piece of software is written to pad a resume, or try to take over the world, or make millions of dollars, or to build up somebody's ego.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    If they weren't ego padding, they wouldn't take time to imagine and insult a hypothetical low-intelligence user base.
rasur 14y ago
E17: Codename "Walthamstow" <joke> Congrats to the E17 team!
rauar 14y ago
Kudos for bringing out a release after such a long time. Many projects don't make it this far.
j-kidd 14y ago
Just tried E17 for the first time. Kinda bummed that the control panel doesn't allow setting mouse acceleration threshold to 0. Also couldn't find a way to change keyboard repeat delay / rate. Looks like more thought was put into eye candy than input dev.
- jrogers65 14y ago
  It's trivially easy to change those with xset: > xset m <ACCELERATION> <THRESHOLD> and: > xset r rate <delay in milliseconds before auto repeat starts> <repeat rate per second> I'm of the opinion that it's not a window manager's job to deal with mouse acceleration or keyboard repeat rates in the first place.
  - j-kidd 14y ago
    I can change them trivially in KDE, so there is no need to stick the commands in .xinitrc. FYI, allowing mouse acceleration threshold to be set to 0 was added in year 2003 in KDE: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31189 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31189 Anyway, I certainly agree with your opinion. It is just that I think E17 is more than a window manager, and I would place it in the same category as XFCE.
ishbits 14y ago
Cool. E was my primary window manager from 1997->2001, at which point I switched to FVWM for about 10 years. Not being too happy with current Gnome (its not that bad), I may give this a shot.
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mtoddh 14y ago
Enlightenment has been around for quite a while now, and back in the day I used to think it looked so stunning. For a sense of perspective, here's what it used to look like back when it started as a hack of FVWM: http://www.cactii.net/~bb/linuxreal/grab.jpg http://www.cactii.net/~bb/linuxreal/grab.jpg Looks very dated now, but even in it's earliest days I thought looked so much cooler than FVWM. It's kind of amazing how far we've come in terms of visual aesthetics...
- ramses 14y ago
  Back then that was amazing. I remember showing my desktop with E14 (or 15?)—a later version than mtoddh's screenshot—to people that only knew about Windows, and they thought that I was a visitor from the future.
- nobleach 14y ago
  Yeah, I remember getting a massively awesome desktop in 1999 with Gnome underneath. And even though it had that 90's jaggy feel to it, it was my mp3 encoder desktop and I favored it above anything. I'd actually love to have it back. I wish I had screenshots to go along with yours. Your's brought back a great sense of nostalgia. Thanks!
adambyrtek 14y ago
Ten years ago Enlightenment was pretty but not particularly usable. Now it's not even pretty anymore.
sparx 14y ago
their site is down now.
sprash 14y ago
From a developer standpoint E17 is the best Desktop Environment you can dream of. Try to write a simple app with the Elementary toolkit and compare that with writing a Gnome app. You will immediately notice how much better E17 libraries are documented. With E17 it is fun again to write desktop apps.
- dysoco 14y ago
  Couple of questions. How is it compared to Qt ? Can you port your apps to other DE/OS if you use E17 libs?
  - sprash 14y ago
    Compared to QT much more rudimentary, simpler and way less features. Also it is written in C, not C++. However rendering should be much faster. As long as the E-libs are installed your apps should work just fine on any system/DE. I haven't tested it with Windows though.
postfuturist 14y ago
Quick Ubuntu Guide (tested with 12.10, should work with 12.04): sudo apt-add-repository ppa:efl/trunk sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install e17 libedje-bin Log out, select Enlightenment from menu, log in, enjoy!
postfuturist 14y ago
Quick Ubuntu Guide (tested with 12.10, should work with 12.04): sudo apt-add-repository ppa:efl/trunk sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install e17 libedje-bin Log out, select Enlightenment from menu, log in, enjoy!
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shelf 14y ago
The Duke Nukem Forever of window management, released at last.
tbe 14y ago
So now we finally know why the maya calendar ends on 21 dec 2012 - they were waiting for the E17 release just like the rest of us! End of the world speculations were just confusions with the phrase "when hell freezes over", which has also been used for E17.

179 points by zemanel 14y ago

I was looking and Enlightenment when I was considering a desktop for my Arch Linux install. I think this iteration looks quite a bit nicer, but I'm concerned about adding bloat to my system. After building it, I am pretty unwilling to add stuff unless I really need to. The system is also running on VM. I'm currently running LXDE. What would Enlightenment offer me LXDE doesn't (aside from a nicer-looking interface)?

nwmcsween 14y ago
Enlightenment is designed to run on embedded devices so I don't understand where you get the idea it's bloated.
- dizzystar 14y ago
  I don't mean "bloated" in the sense of size, but having things in there I don't really need. I sort of like having minimal UI and don't want to install it and think "oh my god! how do I uninstall that?". I'm asking this in all seriousness, as I was, and still am, half sold on using it.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    >I sort of like having minimal UI and don't want to install it and think "oh my god! how do I uninstall that?". You know you can install it in a directory and just remove that and it's gone, right?
    - dizzystar 14y ago
      Jeese ... What I'm saying is that I never ever want to experience something like other Linuxes I won't mention. Why the hell do I want their idea of a better UI, games, and other crap? The first thing I do when I buy a new machine is uninstall programs all day and installing a new OS, that I was not familiar with, practically made me forget the idea of ever using Linux. I'm simply asking how much "extra" stuff I would be stuck with, if any at all. Of course I know how to uninstall, I just don't feel like doing it. I already said it's an Arch Linux install, and it should be clear that I appreciate minimalism. I can take extras as long as they are well thought out. Thus I am attempting ask what extra features are included in Enlightenment that would make me want it over other desktop environments? There are other environments that I flatly refuse to use, but I was really on the fence about using Enlightenment, and now that there is something new, I am wondering if there are excellent reasons for moving over. I was hoping for a simple, brief, explanation of the reasoning for Enlightenment over X desktop. Perhaps I came off as trollish, and that was not my intention at all.
      - buster 14y ago
        I have the feeling that you think Enlightenment compares more to KDE/Gnome then to, let's say, Blackbox. It's basically just a window manager. It doesn't come with it's own Office Suite or Email client, etc. If that's your definition of "bloated", you're good to go with Enlightenment. After first installation it's just a plain desktop.
      - klibertp 14y ago
        I have been using E17 on FreeBSD for a couple of years now, but my answers to your questions might be still a bit wrong - I don't remember that well how I installed and customized it because I did it once and everything have been working perfectly since then. So, first of all, Enlightenment does come with a couple of apps - I seem to remember they have image viewer, file manager and... Well, probably some other apps, but I never installed any of them. They are completely optional and E17 is perfectly usable without them, provided that you have your favorite replacements for them (I use ROX as a GUI file manager and gqview for images). Without those apps E17 still is not quite as pure as fluxbox and friends - it has many "modules", essentially plugins, that are included with it. They are all loaded and started separately from enlightenment and are meant to do... almost everything. I mean, every menu, taskbar, notification area, pager (minimap of virtual desktops) is a plugin of it's own and can be disabled with single click. You can configure every module separately or group them and manipulate a few of them together. Sure, there are modules that are less than necessary, for example cpu frequency meter or battery status (and probably many more, I never explored them) but you can disable them easily. Basically, when you turn off all the modules you're left with something that does little more than the default XWM (but still looks much better;)). One thing I mentioned I think is E17 strong point is it's configurability. You can rearrange everything to your tastes, both in terms of position/size and workings - and it's easy to do, you don't need to write config files, just move some piece where you want it and it's done. Also, every single function of E17 can be assigned to a hotkey, which I found very convenient. The second is theming and eye candy: E17 community created many different themes that look very good and E17 provides very fast and beautiful animations which together makes it quite pretty. Of course it's not that much of a selling point now as it was a few years ago, but it's still good. The third: E17 tends to play well with others. Almost every app you run under Enlightenment works alright: it has correct icon, minifies to where you want it minified, displays notifications in selected area and so on. To summarize: the biggest feature of Enlightenment is it's ability to become exactly how you want it to be. It can be as slim or as bloated as you choose (defaults to something in the middle) - it gives you tools to customize it and then goes out of your way. Compared to fluxbox and others - it's prettier, as configurable as them and not much slower. Compared to KDE and others - it's much faster, much more configurable, and almost as complete as them (excluding office suite or games, which I think should not be a part of WM anyway). I would suggest you to give it a try for a few days, if you can configure it to do what you want it to do you'll be satisfied, if not - you can go back to your current WM easily.
saurabh 14y ago
No bloat at all. I installed the enlightenment17 package from the extras reposiroty on archlinux a few minutes ago to check it out. Installed it, tried it by having "exec start_enlightenment" in .xinitrc followed by the running the command startx. Uninstalled it using the command sudo pacman -Rns enligtenment17.
- dizzystar 14y ago
  Why did you uninstall it?
  - saurabh 14y ago
    I use XFCE after having tried everything else. I use a low powered laptop and anything else feels slugish. I've tried Xmonad but I keep playing with it instead of working. Enlightenment is different, faster and definitely cool. I'll try it again some other time.
grannyg00se 14y ago
Have you tried no desktop at all, for even less bloat? I went from not installing X at all, to installing it with a desktop, then back down to X with just a simple window manager. I don't miss the desktop. I'd love to go completely sans graphics but it makes basic web application testing problematic. And in the end, the bloatphobia is not warranted - just a curious pastime.
- ubernostrum 14y ago
  It's kind of funny to see comments like the one you're responding to. I remember when Enlightenment was considered "bloated"... and then it stayed the same for a while, and suddenly was considered "lightweight". Not sure if I'll actually try the new version though. I have E16 configs that haven't been touched since the last millennium, and still work. Would be tough to give up on that kind of track record.
oelmekki 14y ago
> After building it, I am pretty unwilling to add stuff unless I really need to. I was kind of thinking this way ten years ago, when I was building my first gentoo systems. I wanted them to be exactly adapted to my needs, the perfect match for my day to day usage. It was indeed great for educational purpose, one should always be able to build something perfectly fit, and I went that way for several years. But then, there was this pain of always lacking something, not to mention the fun my friends had when visiting me, wanting to do something I wasn't commonly doing and heard me saying : "oh wait, I've just have to compile a few softwares for that" (granted the compiling stuff is gentoo related, but you see the idea : there was always something I need that I didn't have). Today, I install kde-meta (which is a package that install everything in standard kde distribution) and I'm very happy with that. It's extremely rare that I want to do something desktop related and can't do it right away. Other people can use my computer without starring at me with blank face while I explain what wmii is (but I still have all my keyboard shortcuts and tweaks from wmii in kde) and I even don't feel the "bloated" aspect since I have now a very powerful system with huge storages.

ObjectiveSub 14y ago

"Also be aware that this page is large and is meant to provide a lot of important information. It is not for the tl;dr; (too long, didn't read) set of people with minimal attention span. It contains lots of that scary thing called "text" and "information". It is assumed that you can make use of the education you have been provided with that allows you to read and comprehend what has been written." I rolled my eyes at that one. This is an example of the pretentiousness and snark directed at users that people complain about in open-source projects; especially Linux-related ones.

IheartApplesDix 14y ago
There's always Apple stuff...
pretoriusB 14y ago
It is also an example of the stuff that these particular unpaid volunteers, working on their own project for fun for years on end, wanted to write. Open source projects are not always about marketing, adoption and being friendly to everyone. Heck, this particular project didn't even have a stable release for over 10 years...
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Heck, this particular project didn't even have a stable release for over 10 years... ...meaning the self-absorbed wank is even less justified. And I'm a fan of E.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  The E17 developers are mainly paid by companies like Samsung.
  - bofussing 14y ago
    Samsung is backing the development of the EFL libraries behind E17 for the Tizen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen) initiative. Possibly a hedge against Android. Also note that E17/EFL is supporting Wayland (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html) - forward looking indeed. Bo

kleiba 14y ago

...and hell freezes over! :-) Congratulations to the E17 team!

syassami 14y ago

Their website looks nicer than their DE. I've always found blackbox/fluxbox/xfce a nicer minimal fit

sliverstorm 14y ago

Anyone have any idea if the tiling module supports arbitrary arrangement like i3wm, or is it stack-based like dwm? Edit: Ok, the tarball is 30MB, no way I'm going to be able to use this. My curiosity is purely academic now.

jlgreco 14y ago
For what it's worth, most of that bulk seems to be asset files and GNU gettext translation files.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  What's the size of the resulting binaries and libraries?
billiob 14y ago
It's stack-based. You can have up to 8 stacks, vertically or horizontally. You can find a presentation and a small demo of the features on that presentation: http://billiob.net/blog/20110717_etiling.html http://billiob.net/blog/20110717_etiling.html . E-Tiling is now the default tiling module.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Blast. The programs that I usually work with really benefit from i3wm's model.

anigbrowl 14y ago

It's disappointing that there's no 'what's new' or introduction to E or even a proper gallery of screenshots. I actually know E fairly well having used versions 14-16, but it's been about a decade...maybe presenting it a bit better would result in a larger userbase?

keithpeter 14y ago
http://www.bodhilinux.com/e17guide/e17guideEN/ http://www.bodhilinux.com/e17guide/e17guideEN/ Nicely written tutorial guide from a distribution that relies on E17. Still no 'what's new' for previous users of Enlightenment based desktops. The Guide could be made more 'task oriented' as well - what you see when you get to the desktop and how to launch applications first then the detailed naming of things afterwards perhaps...
tessellated 14y ago
There seem to be somewhat unofficial screenshots. Unfortunately there is no obvious version information attached. http://enlightenment.org/ss/ http://enlightenment.org/ss/
billiob 14y ago
You may want to have a look at: http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  I did, that was what moved me to post.
jejones3141 14y ago
Check out the Bodhi Linux "desktop of the week" page, http://www.bodhilinux.com/about_dotw.php http://www.bodhilinux.com/about_dotw.php

zephjc 14y ago

The diagram in the Building Blocks section of http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en hurts my eyes. I had to zoom in to see if my eyes or the image was to blame.

DanBC 14y ago
I agree. On Chrome (on OS X Snow Leopard) the white text on the blue boxes is blurry.

ramses 14y ago

This is great news! I have been waiting for a very long time, and it is finally here. A month ago I installed it in Fedora and Ubuntu, to get rid of Gnome3 and Unity ... and guess what? Linux is once again an amazing workstation—beautiful, fast, and flexible.

billwilliams 14y ago

Opinionated software is tremendous. By removing bullet points and telling users to read 5 some odd pages of dogmatic documentation you're letting the passion ooze from your project. Its saying "if you don't care about your window manager, we don't care about you". Except in 13000 words instead of 13.

philsnow 14y ago
Enlightenment has been around since 1997, when "the internet" was still a dorky-sounding term (and it wasn't equated with "low attention-span theater"). Ever hear the old saw "Unix _is_ user friendly; it's just picky about who it's friends with." ? The E/EFL reflects this attitude, and you know what ? That's their prerogative. I don't think they're particularly worried about gaining huge adoption. Not every piece of software is written to pad a resume, or try to take over the world, or make millions of dollars, or to build up somebody's ego.
- Evbn 14y ago
  If they weren't ego padding, they wouldn't take time to imagine and insult a hypothetical low-intelligence user base.

rasur 14y ago

E17: Codename "Walthamstow" <joke> Congrats to the E17 team!

rauar 14y ago

Kudos for bringing out a release after such a long time. Many projects don't make it this far.

j-kidd 14y ago

Just tried E17 for the first time. Kinda bummed that the control panel doesn't allow setting mouse acceleration threshold to 0. Also couldn't find a way to change keyboard repeat delay / rate. Looks like more thought was put into eye candy than input dev.

jrogers65 14y ago
It's trivially easy to change those with xset: > xset m <ACCELERATION> <THRESHOLD> and: > xset r rate <delay in milliseconds before auto repeat starts> <repeat rate per second> I'm of the opinion that it's not a window manager's job to deal with mouse acceleration or keyboard repeat rates in the first place.
- j-kidd 14y ago
  I can change them trivially in KDE, so there is no need to stick the commands in .xinitrc. FYI, allowing mouse acceleration threshold to be set to 0 was added in year 2003 in KDE: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31189 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31189 Anyway, I certainly agree with your opinion. It is just that I think E17 is more than a window manager, and I would place it in the same category as XFCE.

ishbits 14y ago

Cool. E was my primary window manager from 1997->2001, at which point I switched to FVWM for about 10 years. Not being too happy with current Gnome (its not that bad), I may give this a shot.

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mtoddh 14y ago

Enlightenment has been around for quite a while now, and back in the day I used to think it looked so stunning. For a sense of perspective, here's what it used to look like back when it started as a hack of FVWM: http://www.cactii.net/~bb/linuxreal/grab.jpg http://www.cactii.net/~bb/linuxreal/grab.jpg Looks very dated now, but even in it's earliest days I thought looked so much cooler than FVWM. It's kind of amazing how far we've come in terms of visual aesthetics...

ramses 14y ago
Back then that was amazing. I remember showing my desktop with E14 (or 15?)—a later version than mtoddh's screenshot—to people that only knew about Windows, and they thought that I was a visitor from the future.
nobleach 14y ago
Yeah, I remember getting a massively awesome desktop in 1999 with Gnome underneath. And even though it had that 90's jaggy feel to it, it was my mp3 encoder desktop and I favored it above anything. I'd actually love to have it back. I wish I had screenshots to go along with yours. Your's brought back a great sense of nostalgia. Thanks!

adambyrtek 14y ago

Ten years ago Enlightenment was pretty but not particularly usable. Now it's not even pretty anymore.

sparx 14y ago

their site is down now.

sprash 14y ago

From a developer standpoint E17 is the best Desktop Environment you can dream of. Try to write a simple app with the Elementary toolkit and compare that with writing a Gnome app. You will immediately notice how much better E17 libraries are documented. With E17 it is fun again to write desktop apps.

dysoco 14y ago
Couple of questions. How is it compared to Qt ? Can you port your apps to other DE/OS if you use E17 libs?
- sprash 14y ago
  Compared to QT much more rudimentary, simpler and way less features. Also it is written in C, not C++. However rendering should be much faster. As long as the E-libs are installed your apps should work just fine on any system/DE. I haven't tested it with Windows though.

postfuturist 14y ago

Quick Ubuntu Guide (tested with 12.10, should work with 12.04): sudo apt-add-repository ppa:efl/trunk sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install e17 libedje-bin Log out, select Enlightenment from menu, log in, enjoy!

postfuturist 14y ago

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shelf 14y ago

The Duke Nukem Forever of window management, released at last.

tbe 14y ago

So now we finally know why the maya calendar ends on 21 dec 2012 - they were waiting for the E17 release just like the rest of us! End of the world speculations were just confusions with the phrase "when hell freezes over", which has also been used for E17.