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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 Microsoft was the evil empire, and the linux rebel alliance was going to shoot down their outdated-at-release windows 98 OS, giving all PC users the freedom they deserved.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!

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.

Those halcyon days, I remember them well.

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