E17 is out
enlightenment.org
enlightenment.org
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.
There are direct quotes in comments sometimes and, sometimes, after reading them, I don't want to visit the site anymore.
This is not the case.
Whoever wrote what you're quoting made me feel like he wrote it especially for me. He managed to describe one of the worst problems that, in my opinion, Internet has and he promised that this problem won't be present on his site.
I'm grateful for this quote. Thanks to this visiting the site suddenly become my priority and I feel that I won't be disappointed.
However, having an abstract if you are going to present lots of information is definitely always good style. The scientific community require them on all papers - to help people decide if they should bother spending time to dig into the material or not. Not to make the material accessible for grandmothers.
That is exactly what a good tl;dr provides.
EDIT: Fix borked sentence.
"Nice try kid, but it's not actually 'text' unless you typed it on a proper Model M."
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...
...meaning the self-absorbed wank is even less justified. And I'm a fan of E.
There are two ways to deviate from a neutral, professional presentation. You can be snarky, mean, or just plain evil (negative), or you can be silly, colorful, and nice (positive). Each of them breeds more emotions of the same kind - excepting those who would wish for a professional presentation, regardless. I want to live in a world where everyone would wish only to breed positive emotions, or none at all.
Also note that E17/EFL is supporting Wayland (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html) - forward looking indeed.
Bo
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
Congratulations to the E17 team!
End of the world speculations were just confusions with the phrase "when hell freezes over", which has also been used for E17.
Looks like more thought was put into eye candy than input dev.
> 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.
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.
Edit: Ok, the tarball is 30MB, no way I'm going to be able to use this. My curiosity is purely academic now.
You can find a presentation and a small demo of the features on that presentation: http://billiob.net/blog/20110717_etiling.html .
E-Tiling is now the default tiling module.
Not being too happy with current Gnome (its not that bad), I may give this a shot.
I'm currently running LXDE. What would Enlightenment offer me LXDE doesn't (aside from a nicer-looking interface)?
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.
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.
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.
I'm asking this in all seriousness, as I was, and still am, half sold on using it.
You know you can install it in a directory and just remove that and it's gone, right?
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.
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.
Thanks.
Enlightenment is different, faster and definitely cool. I'll try it again some other time.
On Chrome (on OS X Snow Leopard) the white text on the blue boxes is blurry.
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.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:efl/trunk
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install e17 libedje-bin
<joke>
Congrats to the E17 team!