Enlightenment DR 0.18.0 Release | Hacker News Reader

Enlightenment DR 0.18.0 Release

phab.enlightenment.org

65 pointsconductor34 comments

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.

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

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 :)

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.

You people on my lawn might be too young to remember, but there was a time when Enlightenment developers were treated as rock stars in the open source USER community.

People like Rasterman and Mandrake. Or Mosfet, a KDE equivalent. Or Miguel De Icaza and the Eazel ("Nautilus") guys.

People were excited about the possibilities of the OSS desktop.

Those halcyon days, I remember them well.

I learned ruby as a result of epplets. Hell, I got into Linux due to a printout of a dr15 screenshot someone left lying around in a lab in '97. Rasterman has a lot to answer for.

I was one of those people proudly announcing the year of the linux desktop in 1999. Microsoft was the evil empire, and the linux rebel alliance was going to shoot down their outdated-at-release windows 98 OS, giving all PC users the freedom they deserved. All we needed was a way in, a PC manufacturer shipping linux by default. Once people used it they would see how much better it was.

It's amusing to realize that linux is now the dominant consumer OS by being at the heart of android, even while linux on the desktop never went anywhere.

>It's amusing to realize that linux is now the dominant consumer OS by being at the heart of android, even while linux on the desktop never went anywhere.

Yes, which also means that Linux is a dominant consumer OS, without even USING any of the work for linux of the desktop (no desktop enivoronments, graphic libraries, not even the X-server).

Yeah, they were rock stars for sure. I remember going to @lantacon in 2001 and seeing Rasterman do a demo of some of the e17/evas features they were working on. Everyone in the room was blown away and extremely excited. http://www.atlantacon.org/events_2001.html

Can't wait to setup e18 on my system later!

Once-upon-a-time, Enlightenment was the cool future...

What I remember though (from E16 and E17 snapshots), is that although the screen shots all looked really incredible, nothing ever looked that way for me when I ran it... I'd always get text not fitting in its bounding-box and getting clipped, widget graphics misaligned and often very strangely sized, text displayed as little boxes instead of characters, funny pixelization, etc.

I suppose it just never got the polish it needed... but that does make a difference.

Can anyone who uses enlightenment tell me what it provides, and doesn't provide, in comparision to say gnome? Is there a good reason to switch?

For me it was just a back-to-basics move. It displays windows and shows you the time, volume and the current WiFi connection. It also exposes lots of settings if you do want to tweak the behaviour. Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't care about anything more.

I don't think they're changing, or planning to change anything huge any time soon either. I like that.

> For me it was just a back-to-basics move.

Get of my lawn!

It used to be that anyone that wanted bling and shiny things on their desktop used Enlightenment.

Oh my, how things change...

I think that there's a constant mismatch between how people work and how what the DE provides (with the desktop environments lagging). Years ago people looked for better DEs and shells to manage their applications easier. Now that DEs provide it finally, I have two applications left: the terminal and the browser. I can manage them myself, so I'd like my DE to just get out of the way, thank-you-very-much.

(Gnome's / unity's launchers which merge the windows, windows < 8 with splittig tabs into pseudo-windows and windows 8 with... I don't even know what it is - they just do not help anymore - at least not me)

> I have two applications left: the terminal and the browser.

Or, to put it another way: all your applications now use either a CLI metaphor, or a hypertext-document metaphor, with none of them left that use a native-GUI metaphor. So you boot into a native-GUI application manager, just so you can run emulators for the other two metaphors.

In some sense, dwm gets out of the way. http://dwm.suckless.org

Back when I first used Linux on a 486, Enlightenment provided a fancy looking window manager with similarly-themed utility apps (like a pager). What it did in 1997, with the incredibly restricted resources available, was impressive. Even on a DX4 100, though, it was just sluggish enough that it got annoying when you were trying to get work done.

Future releases added more stuff to build on top of, so there was the tantalising prospect of writing e apps and having them hardware accelerated with OpenGL (I'm sure I remember something about that). Unfortunately, the API looked unfinished, the whole project seemed to constantly be pre-alpha, and the development platform just wasn't attractive to me. I'm not sure what others thought of it, but it certainly doesn't seem to have gathered pace.

I've found going from Gnome to E is like going from MS Paint to Photoshop -- the basics are largely the same, but the latter has a ton more power-user settings and features.

(The things that I personally can't live without being the treatment of multiple desktops on multiple monitors, and the vast variety of key bindings)

It's interesting to follow Enlightenment's history as it started out as a hacked fvwm-xpm that was slow and bloated to Enlightenment, which was slow and bloated for its time.

And through a combination of Moore's Law and Rasterman's perseverance it's now a modern, fast, and lightweight desktop.

It makes me wonder whether some day, Enlightenment, in some form, might end up a "household name" similar to what happened with NeXT: great technology, never made it big, people thought it was dead, the devs persisted, and now it's morphed into OS X and iOS some of the most popular OSes today.

I'm curious whether E will have its NeXT moment, as well.

Wheres the obligatory link to the screenshots? :(

I've heard enlightenment was used in some mobile OS ( i think it was tizen but i'm not sure) and that it didn't end very well, because the oS manufacturer ended up bloating the os to death. Anyone with more info on that ?

Samsung paid people to contribute to Enlightenment and I think some of the libraries might have ended up in Bada.

Rasterman loved demoing Enlightenment mobile and I think you could run it on some old-school OSS distributions like OpenEmbedded on Treo and on the Freerunner, but I don't think it ever shipped with a device.

Samsung merged Bada into Tizen. Bada development was stopped.

Tizen native apps are written using EFL. Qt supported as well.

There are already a couple of Samsung cameras using Tizen.

More devices are scheduled to 2014.

https://developer.tizen.org/dev-guide/2.2.0/

I don't think this is true bro. Android has taken over the world really means that Samsung has thrown 900 handsets at the market running Android. They want to home everything back in on themselves. Tizen is delayed but I seriously doubt that whatever new high-end Samsung phones drop, will have a hard time running whatever they've turned E into. I'm seriously looking forward to this.

I'd say your repeating a rumor. Impossible to tell until they release something, Samsung and Intel makes for one hell of a strong foundation for getting something besides Android off the ground.

Their phone is supposed to get shown at MWC 2014.

There's no real reason for Samsung's success, though, other than lucky timing, some good pricing, and more recently, name recognition. Samsung makes decent phones but they're not particularly better than anybody else, and there are tons of other good Android phone manufacturers; Samsung could very easily be supplanted.

Moreover, Samsung has never been great at software. If they take over the bulk of their OS development, that may not bode well for the quality of the result.

If Samsung decides to strike out on their own without the support of the Android ecosystem, they could be in for a very rude awakening...

Are retina-like HiDPI displays supported here?

I'm being reminded of this all over the place today, a MindVox pic of e running on Solaris from 2000 http://www.mindvox.com/pg/photos/view/2374/sun-sparc-y2k

I remember when Enlightenment was the bloated and slow eyecandy environment for only the latest and greatest. Now it's the minimal and lean environment for limited hardware. It's funny how the times change.

Wow you wait a gazillion years for a release, then two come along in a year !

> User experience while crashing improved; some users have reported over a 200% improvement here

lolwut?

> Directory listing is now more accurate

It was inaccurate before?

I don't know what they mean by 200%, but E has the best crash handling of any app I've ever seen -- where any other desktop environment crashing would send you back to the login screen, E pops up a menu allowing you to attach a debugger, or you can just click "continue" to re-launch the WM and have it pick up exactly where it left off (in particular, remembering which windows are attached to which virtual desktops and stuff like that)

Whatever happened to the cool looking "Hand of god" theme (terrible name) ?

I remember using this in the late 90s, it had the window controls on the side..

It never made it past DR0.14. Patches welcome.

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