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Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

"Sadly, the hang was deterministic"

No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for.

I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bling desktop environment is considered lightweight.

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Back in the early 2000's, I used Enlightenment. I wouldn't have called it "lightweight", but it definitely was not heavy. It ran smoothly on my not-so-great-hardware. And definitely lighter than DEs like KDE/Gnome.

I stopped using it for other WMs. I remember how it was taking forever to release E17 and totally forgot about it. E16 was definitely awesome in those days.

I remember trying to use it and getting constant segfaults.

> because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed.

And where is fun in that? Where are now the nights in trying to reproduce it? Where are the doubts in the moments of rest "have i really fixed it, or is it still there"? Boring.

The author is 21 (which I find incredibly impressive) and is using a DE that was written when they were a baby.

It _is_ lightweight in that context. I also love the fact that XaoS knowledge is useful in the context of "real software" programming!

As someone who remembers E making the rounds among the BSD and Linux users in my college dorm when it first came out, there's no way he's only 21 if he was a baby in the late '90s.

From her "Short CV"

"Hello! I’m Kamila Szewczyk (iczelia). I am 21 years old. I’m an expert programmer and aspiring mathematician, primarily interested in compiler construction, data compression, esoteric languages, statistics and numerical algorithms. ... Currently I am a full-time student based in Germany." [1]

And the start of the post:

"The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily."

[1] https://iczelia.net/cv/

edit: added the [1] at the end of the first quote

The author's name is Kamilla. She was born in 2004 (according to the article).

I guess they wanted to keep working on their slides (at least for the moment) and not be forced to go debugging. Sadly, the hang was deterministic, so they didn't have another option.

But it is light weight. Fabulously so. The "bling" just comes from the ability to write theme files to customize the appearance of window decorations and menus. IIRC it was a fork of fvwm from way back in the day, and similarities can still be seen in the config files. I use it on everything including old 32-bit systems, and it's snappy and responsive everywhere.

GP means that 25 years ago, it was definitely not lightweight compared to many of the alternatives (GNOME and KDE being notable exceptions; I wouldn't have called them "light" back then either). Toady it's certainly light.

Enlightenment up to e16 always was light weight. There was eye candy that could be enabled like transparent/wobbly windows and whatnot, which could drag down a weak system, along with the ability to add high resolution wallpaper that took up a lot of memory, etc, but the core of the window manager doesn't have any kind of bloat or slowness. It was always configurable to be snappy and low resource. Just like fvwm.

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