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Enlightenment DR17 is coming - eventually (NewsForge)
Remember the Enlightenment window manager? Here's a NewsForge article stating that it's Not Dead Yet; the article provides a rather uncritical look at the upcoming DR17 release. "Now, after years of work, and years of work yet to come, we can expect DR17 to be a fully functional desktop environment with fantastic eye candy to augment its configurable and user-friendly interface. It will be fit to run on the hardware of yesterday (and even PDAs), scalable to any resolution, and be unprecedentedly easy to develop for."
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Why Not Posted Apr 6, 2005 18:56 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link] E developers don't seem to be obsessed with meeting everyone's needs or taking over the world...a little variety can't hurt. At the very least it keeps pushing and inspiring other developers. E seems to occupy some sort of niche between fluxbox and KDE/Gnome...even if it is a very small niche.
Why Not Posted Apr 6, 2005 19:53 UTC (Wed) by euvitudo (guest, #98) [Link] Is the niche really that small? I've used E since RH6--with Gnome, but then Gnome decided to dump E as their default WM; I immediately dumped Gnome for standalone E. Of course, I've long since moved away from RH.
I still use E. There is no substitute.
Why Not Posted Apr 7, 2005 12:42 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] Exactly... I'm the same way... I love Enlightenment, and have been runningE16 for ages now, without complaint... I used to run Gnome, but Gnome became too bloated, and I actually dumped it for stand-alone E before Gnome dumped E... I can't stand most of the bloated junk in Gnome and KDE, and they're just too unusably cluttered for me... E is just perfect... It does everything I need, doesn't get in my way, and still looks damn good, too... I just can't fathom what people see in these bloated, obnoxious "desktop environments", which remind me all too much of a certain Microsoft OS... That's definitely not MY idea of a useful and productive desktop... (And, I hope E17 doesn't follow in their footsteps on its road to becoming a full-fledged "desktop environment", itself... Because, that would be a real shame... But, if it DOES, I see no reason why I can't continue running E16 forever, either... I have no real problems with it... Why does it really need replacing?)
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 1:58 UTC (Fri) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link] I think the really good thing about the next Enlightenment is that you're not forced into the extra DE-like features. If you don't need them, simply don't apply them in your configuration. They're doing a really good job of modularising everything so that the E desktop is capable of appealing to a wide range of people - from the minimal approach to the maximal.
When I last looked its even smaller on disk and in memory than E16 so you'll probably be very happy.
Its also good to see someone still working on a revolutionary desktop. That whole market used to be the big thing in the mid-90's but now its stagnated to the M$ clones (gnome/kde, icewm), the missed-the-boat opportunities (GNUstep/WindowMaker) and the niche/hobby/maintenance projects (AfterStep,fvwm,E16).
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 9:57 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Its also good to see someone still working on a revolutionary desktop. Looking Glass seems quite a bit more revolutionary than E. Credit where it's due: I don't think the Linux desktop is the best platform for self-indulgence. (It seems we are quite close to beating Sun in the datacenter though, where real men still write their own drivers, remember. ;-)
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 9:42 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] NOTE NOTE NOTE: I don't want to start a flamewar!Last time I looked at E I thought it was rather the other way around: eyecandy that didn't add anything to my productivity, while Gnome presented a functional desktop (this must have been late nineties). I did run E for quite some time, never got anything out of it, except the occasional kneejerk. It's just so weird. (Which is why I still have a soft spot for it, but I won't use it nowadays.) Looking at the upcoming release I must say I'm a bit disappointed. Talk about bloat! It looks the same as five years ago, except that now you have even more boxes and slides whose only purpose seems to be that you can drag your application from virtual desktop number 34 to 98! Ugh. I'll just stick with Gnome, 2 xterms and 1 gigabyte memory. ;-) Until, perhaps, E amazes me again, that is.
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 10:31 UTC (Fri) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] E certainly has a lot of eye-candy, if you want it, yes... But, it neverreally gets in the way of using the system, though... Whereas, I always found Gnome and KDE to be cluttered, bloated, and nearly unusable... It wasn't eye-candy that was their problem, but merely too much junk on screen, too many memory-hog apps loaded into memory (often mysterious background tasks, needed for unclear reasons; eg., what's with this "gconfd" junk that most Gnome apps force to be loaded when run??), and an interface seemingly designed to appeal to Windoze-philes... And, I can't think of a worse UI to emulate, myself... If my only choice of GUIs were Gnome and KDE, I think I'd stick to a plain text console, personally... It'd be far more usable and productive, I think...
But, you know, to each their own... People work best in different
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 11:46 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] If anything, Gnome and KDE resemble a desktop like CDE much much more than any Microsoft desktop (and, yes, I've used every desktop under the sun). Really, the fixation on Redmond is in *your* head. Every Linux desktop competes with the Windows desktop in its own way, I'll give you that, but it's not like E is any different in that respect.Don't let your disdain for functional desktops cloud your technical judgement. You might as well argue that your favourite OS is getting extremely bloated, what with all those kernel threads that don't add anything visible to your viewing experience. I was extremely pleased to find -- only this morning! -- that I can now just put a blank cdrom in the tray, Nautilus pops up very discretely, I drag an iso image into it and voila! it burns! I am not a demanding desktop user, but Gnome is definitely not in my way and there are tasks that I really don't want to do at the prompt anymore.. (Other KDE or Gnome users have probably been doing these things for ages, I wasn't kidding about the 2 xterms. ;-) But yeah, I'm glad too we have plenty of choice. Like I said, if E actually gets anywhere I wouldn't mind giving it a shot again in favour of the dumbed down Gnome window manager. (By the way: both Gnome and KDE are miles ahead of the Windows desktop, I think. It may not mean much to you, but some of this bloat might actually get us on the corporate desktop!)
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 12:55 UTC (Fri) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] > Every Linux desktop competes with the Windows desktop in its own way, I'll> give you that, but it's not like E is any different in that respect.
I don't know about that... I'll admit, I haven't really touched Gnome or
Oh, and your comment about the auto-mounting and file-managing of an
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 16:09 UTC (Fri) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] But, it HAS also been ages since I've touched any Microsoft product, as well, so perhaps things are different?Not much has changed. There's still no way to lower a window in the stacking order, click-to-focus is the only focus policy, and double-clicking a titlebar still maximizes the window, despite the fact that there's a button for that on the titlebar and no way to "shade" a window at all. So yeah, Windows is still a butter knife in the hands of a skilled user. And, there's no silly "Start"-style menu in the bottom left corner, which is so Windoze-like it pains me to see anyone emulate... This has been moved to the top panel in Gnome by default. Oh, and your comment about the auto-mounting and file-managing of an inserted CD is precisely the sort of thing I absolutely despise! I really hate it when my OS/desktop/whatever thinks it's smarter than I am, and tries to do things I didn't tell it to do... Amen brother! '-) I have a cheap VCR that thinks it's Windows; whenever I put a video in it automatically starts playing it, which 90% of the time is not what I want. The disease is spreading. At least my car doesn't start when I close the door...
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 20:06 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Believe me, I feel your agony. ;-) There is, however, a very important aspect of desktops that you might be overlooking.I agree with you that desktops like Gnome and KDE behave and look more or less like a Windows desktop -- but it has nothing to do with emulation. It has to do with user interaction: people *expect* their desktop to behave in a certain way -- you do, and I do too. This is partly why I find E weird, and you find it attractive. Think about cars. Nobody would seriously accuse CommonBrandX of emulating or copying CommonBrandY because the cars look and behave more or less the same: the doors open sideways, the steering wheel is in the front, the seats are adjustable, the colour palettes are roughly the same -- the works. A car whose doors open the other way around is thought of as peculiar -- it's not something most people would expect -- which some people find attractive in its own right, while other people find it more useful. I think it's exactly the same with desktops. Now, *you* might be offended by a system that does a lot of "thinking" for you, but for other people it's exactly the other way around. Me, I'm actually with you. I hate icons, I am equally baffled by the double-click and I don't want my system to automatically mount a cdrom every time. But as long as these things are configurable, I can live with it. (All of these preferences -- regarding the exact points you mention -- used to be very easy to enforce in Gnome through the ehh Preferences dialog, nowadays it seems a bit harder because they have dumbed it down somewhat, which I really don't like.) However, I do like it when my system recognizes an empty writable cdrom and launches a non-intruding cd-creator -- this is always what I want when I insert a blank cdrom. I turn off the automounting of data cdroms. The reason I despise the Windows desktop -- and everything behind it -- is that it is continuously pestering me with features I don't want and have no control over (I run it at work, of course). The important thing is: all succesfull and useful desktops live up to the expectations of their users. It's just that the expectations differ. (I feel the blood rushing to my head every time Windows points out to me that I have "unused icons" on my desktop, and whether I would like to clean them up. You are one lucky guy, you should realize that. ;-)
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 21:06 UTC (Fri) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] > The important thing is: all succesfull and useful desktops live up to the> expectations of their users. It's just that the expectations differ.
Exactly... Which was sort of my point in earlier saying "to each their own",
> (I feel the blood rushing to my head every time Windows points out to me
Heh. Oh, I do, believe me... Windoze (it must've been Win95, at the time,
Why Not Posted Apr 8, 2005 16:16 UTC (Fri) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] I'm cautiously optimistic. I've been a disatisfied Gnome user for years now, ever since 2.0 came out. I'm still using sawfish, despite the fact that it's not well maintained. At the very least I hope I can replace sawfish with E17, and if I can ditch Gnome completely, so much the better.
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