The Equinox Desktop Environment approaches version 2.0 [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
October 21, 2009

The Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is a lightweight alternative to GNOME and KDE that aims to be used on embedded systems and older desktop machines. Equinox shares the lightweight desktop environment space with FVWM, LXDE and Xfce. The project has been around since at least 2005 and the code is licensed under the GPLv2. Equinox is built on top of FLTK, the Fast Light ToolKit and follows the freedesktop.org standards. The EDE FAQ mentions that EDE had been using the eFLTK fork of the never-released FLTK 2.0, and has since switched back to using the stable FLTK 1.x series. From the about document:

EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is simple and fast desktop environment with familiar look and feel. EDE uses FLTK toolkit for GUI presentation and UNIX philosophy for it's design. With UNIX philosophy, EDE splits each component in separate executable entity that do one job and do it good. This makes EDE very easy to alter on user needs or requirements. EDE is light and fast. It uses C++ carefully yielding fast startup, low memory usage and great portability. Also, we care not only about how EDE runs, but how much time is needed to compile it. This facts makes EDE a perfect desktop environment for older computers and embedded devices. But, you can use it on your everyday hardware too.

Digging through the project's news listings shows that EDE has been ported to the Mandriva, Ubuntu, and STX live CD Linux distributions and also OpenBSD and Minix 3. EDE also runs on sXb, a Slackware distribution for the Xbox platform. The screenshots give a look at various versions of EDE on a number of platforms. The project's Recent Changes document shows that all of the current work is being performed by developer Sanel Zukan.

Version 2.0 Beta of EDE was announced on October 8, 2009. The release has been coming for around three years. The Change Log has an overview of what's new: "EDE 2.0 Beta is the latest release of EDE desktop. This release brings a lot of improvements and introduces some new cool features and programs. Please note how this release is still a beta, going toward brand new and redesigned 2.0 release." The release announcement also sheds some light on the structure of EDE, with the following components undergoing improvements: the EDE Library, Panel, Desktop, Dialog Helper, Bug Report Tool, Crash Handler, Mount notifier and Launcher.

Whether the Linux world needs another lightweight Linux desktop environment remains to be seen. The project's success will likely remain tied to the efforts of its main developer, and its adoption into widely-used Linux distributions and embedded projects.

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The Equinox Desktop Environment approaches version 2.0

Posted Oct 22, 2009 6:06 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913) [Link]

Naah. Give it a couple more years, some time in the hands of former Windows users demanding that every possible use case be covered by point, click, drag, and drop, and it will grow just as bloated as the others. Xfce is blazing the trail :-)

"Integrated desktop" - it's the idea that is wrong. Not the Microsoft implementation, nor the other implementations.

The Equinox Desktop Environment approaches version 2.0

Posted Oct 22, 2009 9:14 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

If that idea is so wrong, just use FLWM.

The Equinox Desktop Environment approaches version 2.0

Posted Oct 22, 2009 20:41 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I think what you are saying is the usual: "If it weren't for the users I could get my work done." In general people are going to want various things that will cause more memory/cpu usage. The only way to get around that is to use a dead-end code base no-one else is using.

The Equinox Desktop Environment approaches version 2.0

Posted Oct 24, 2009 6:21 UTC (Sat) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913) [Link]

Do I not count as a user just because I happen to be a programmer?