4 ms·

I remember being so excited by E17 back when development was first started on the EFL. Prior to all the Xgl/AIGLX jazz, it seemed like Enlightenment may have ha

I remember being so excited by E17 back when development was first started on the EFL. Prior to all the Xgl/AIGLX jazz, it seemed like Enlightenment may have had a bright future ahead of it, where it would outshine all the current offerings in terms of eye candy and customization. As much as I respect the project in general, to me it always seemed like the developers ended up down a rabbit hole where they lost touch with what should have been their ultimate goal; build an awesome desktop environment. It seemed like the platform libraries were in a constant state of rewrites, with each backend library being reworked and renamed every few months. This surely would confuse outside developers looking to build something based on EFL, unless they kept up with mailing lists and VCS commits. Imagine replacing Clutter or GTK every six months under a new name. Every time I checked in on their progress, or tested a new development release, not much had changed with the desktop shell itself. Outside of Samsung reportedly using parts of the EFL in some embedded and/or mobile devices, it seems like Enlightenment in general just missed the boat.

oblio 13y ago
http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
zafiro17 13y ago
You ought to give it another look then. I'd recommend Bodhi Linux, which is an Ubuntu foundation and E17 as desktop. It's stellar. (I'd tried E17 on opensuse and didn't like it as much just because opensuse hadn't packaged it as well). E17 is now "lightweight" compared to Gnome and KDE4 (maybe even KDE3, I don't know). It's super fast even on my Atom notebook, and despite being lightweight provides pretty gorgeous graphics and a very useable desktop. Enlightenment has also gone from being a "very alternative/really OUT there" environment to one that is more traditional (as Gnome3 has gone WAY out there an alienated most of its user base). A couple things I like about it: (1) Gorgeous graphic effects, but done in a way where the effects are useful/helpful and not just eye candy for the sake of looking fancy. (2) Very configurable with alternatives that work well on desktops, tablets, notebooks, and with options that would appeal to minimalists, or eye-candy hungry folks. But it comes with sensible defaults. (3) Very good performance, even on hardware that would be considered low-end by 2013 standards. Again, it flies on my netbook. (4) Some E17-specific apps, like the Terminology terminal emulator, are very pleasant. I'm not a huge fan of the E file manager, but you can use another one if you like. (5) A good approach to widgets. They allow you to do the "widgets swoop in on top of your desktop when you request them, and then disappear" thing like OSX. By contrast, I've never understood KDE4's approach to widgets. I think Enlightenment may have missed the commercial boat, but I'm not sure they care. Rasterman and team seem to be focused on doing interesting things because they're interesting and push the boundaries on how we interact with computers (without going psycho, like Gnome3). I can't comment on the state of libraries or APIs - I'm not a programmer - but I'm sold on Bodhi and E17 as a user/consumer and later today they're both going to get a little money from me for Christmas :)
- yebyen 13y ago
  I respectfully prefer Elive as a vehicle to show Enlightenment to a person who may or may not be a Linux newbie. The stable release is a bit old (lenny) but you don't have to use the stable release, and in fact if you don't, you are not harassed by the installer module to pay $5 or $15. The hard part these days isn't compiling, it's showing folks in a way that convinced them they should install, without leaving them in the dark about what that means, and not taking their $5. It's very easy to just take the $5 and do it for them, if they can stand to use Firefox 3.0.6. All of this is not germane to E18, since even current developer releases of Elive are still on E17.

oblio 13y ago

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

zafiro17 13y ago

You ought to give it another look then. I'd recommend Bodhi Linux, which is an Ubuntu foundation and E17 as desktop. It's stellar. (I'd tried E17 on opensuse and didn't like it as much just because opensuse hadn't packaged it as well). E17 is now "lightweight" compared to Gnome and KDE4 (maybe even KDE3, I don't know). It's super fast even on my Atom notebook, and despite being lightweight provides pretty gorgeous graphics and a very useable desktop. Enlightenment has also gone from being a "very alternative/really OUT there" environment to one that is more traditional (as Gnome3 has gone WAY out there an alienated most of its user base). A couple things I like about it: (1) Gorgeous graphic effects, but done in a way where the effects are useful/helpful and not just eye candy for the sake of looking fancy. (2) Very configurable with alternatives that work well on desktops, tablets, notebooks, and with options that would appeal to minimalists, or eye-candy hungry folks. But it comes with sensible defaults. (3) Very good performance, even on hardware that would be considered low-end by 2013 standards. Again, it flies on my netbook. (4) Some E17-specific apps, like the Terminology terminal emulator, are very pleasant. I'm not a huge fan of the E file manager, but you can use another one if you like. (5) A good approach to widgets. They allow you to do the "widgets swoop in on top of your desktop when you request them, and then disappear" thing like OSX. By contrast, I've never understood KDE4's approach to widgets. I think Enlightenment may have missed the commercial boat, but I'm not sure they care. Rasterman and team seem to be focused on doing interesting things because they're interesting and push the boundaries on how we interact with computers (without going psycho, like Gnome3). I can't comment on the state of libraries or APIs - I'm not a programmer - but I'm sold on Bodhi and E17 as a user/consumer and later today they're both going to get a little money from me for Christmas :)

yebyen 13y ago
I respectfully prefer Elive as a vehicle to show Enlightenment to a person who may or may not be a Linux newbie. The stable release is a bit old (lenny) but you don't have to use the stable release, and in fact if you don't, you are not harassed by the installer module to pay $5 or $15. The hard part these days isn't compiling, it's showing folks in a way that convinced them they should install, without leaving them in the dark about what that means, and not taking their $5. It's very easy to just take the $5 and do it for them, if they can stand to use Firefox 3.0.6. All of this is not germane to E18, since even current developer releases of Elive are still on E17.