
E17 is out - zemanel
http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=news/show&l=en&news_id=77
======
ObjectiveSub
"Also be aware that this page is large and is meant to provide a lot of
important information. It is not for the tl;dr; (too long, didn't read) set of
people with minimal attention span. It contains lots of that scary thing
called "text" and "information". It is assumed that you can make use of the
education you have been provided with that allows you to read and comprehend
what has been written."

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.

~~~
pretoriusB
It is also an example of the stuff that these particular unpaid volunteers,
working on their own project for fun for years on end, wanted to write.

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...

~~~
streptomycin
The E17 developers are mainly paid by companies like Samsung.

~~~
bofussing
Samsung is backing the development of the EFL libraries behind E17 for the
Tizen (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen>) initiative. Possibly a hedge
against Android.

Also note that E17/EFL is supporting Wayland
(<http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html>) - forward looking indeed.

Bo

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anigbrowl
It's disappointing that there's no 'what's new' or introduction to E or even a
proper gallery of screenshots. I actually know E fairly well having used
versions 14-16, but it's been about a decade...maybe presenting it a bit
better would result in a larger userbase?

~~~
billiob
You may want to have a look at:
[http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en](http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en)

~~~
anigbrowl
I did, that was what moved me to post.

------
billwilliams
Opinionated software is tremendous. By removing bullet points and telling
users to read 5 some odd pages of dogmatic documentation you're letting the
passion ooze from your project. Its saying "if you don't care about your
window manager, we don't care about you". Except in 13000 words instead of 13.

~~~
philsnow
Enlightenment has been around since 1997, when "the internet" was still a
dorky-sounding term (and it wasn't equated with "low attention-span theater").

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.

~~~
Evbn
If they weren't ego padding, they wouldn't take time to imagine and insult a
hypothetical low-intelligence user base.

------
mtoddh
Enlightenment has been around for quite a while now, and back in the day I
used to think it looked so stunning. For a sense of perspective, here's what
it used to look like back when it started as a hack of FVWM:

<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...

~~~
nobleach
Yeah, I remember getting a massively awesome desktop in 1999 with Gnome
underneath. And even though it had that 90's jaggy feel to it, it was my mp3
encoder desktop and I favored it above anything. I'd actually love to have it
back. I wish I had screenshots to go along with yours. Your's brought back a
great sense of nostalgia. Thanks!

------
sprash
From a developer standpoint E17 is the best Desktop Environment you can dream
of. Try to write a simple app with the Elementary toolkit and compare that
with writing a Gnome app. You will immediately notice how much better E17
libraries are documented. With E17 it is fun again to write desktop apps.

~~~
dysoco
Couple of questions. How is it compared to Qt ? Can you port your apps to
other DE/OS if you use E17 libs?

~~~
sprash
Compared to QT much more rudimentary, simpler and way less features. Also it
is written in C, not C++. However rendering should be much faster.

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.

------
kleiba
...and hell freezes over! :-)

Congratulations to the E17 team!

------
adambyrtek
Ten years ago Enlightenment was pretty but not particularly usable. Now it's
not even pretty anymore.

------
tbe
So now we finally know why the maya calendar ends on 21 dec 2012 - they were
waiting for the E17 release just like the rest of us!

End of the world speculations were just confusions with the phrase "when hell
freezes over", which has also been used for E17.

------
j-kidd
Just tried E17 for the first time. Kinda bummed that the control panel doesn't
allow setting mouse acceleration threshold to 0. Also couldn't find a way to
change keyboard repeat delay / rate.

Looks like more thought was put into eye candy than input dev.

~~~
jrogers65
It's trivially easy to change those with xset:

> 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.

~~~
j-kidd
I can change them trivially in KDE, so there is no need to stick the commands
in .xinitrc. FYI, allowing mouse acceleration threshold to be set to 0 was
added in year 2003 in KDE:

<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.

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sliverstorm
Anyone have any idea if the tiling module supports arbitrary arrangement like
i3wm, or is it stack-based like dwm?

Edit: Ok, the tarball is 30MB, no way I'm going to be able to use this. My
curiosity is purely academic now.

~~~
billiob
It's stack-based. You can have up to 8 stacks, vertically or horizontally.

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.

~~~
sliverstorm
Blast. The programs that I usually work with really benefit from i3wm's model.

------
ishbits
Cool. E was my primary window manager from 1997->2001, at which point I
switched to FVWM for about 10 years.

Not being too happy with current Gnome (its not that bad), I may give this a
shot.

------
dizzystar
I was looking and Enlightenment when I was considering a desktop for my Arch
Linux install. I think this iteration looks quite a bit nicer, but I'm
concerned about adding bloat to my system. After building it, I am pretty
unwilling to add stuff unless I really need to. The system is also running on
VM.

I'm currently running LXDE. What would Enlightenment offer me LXDE doesn't
(aside from a nicer-looking interface)?

~~~
grannyg00se
Have you tried no desktop at all, for even less bloat? I went from not
installing X at all, to installing it with a desktop, then back down to X with
just a simple window manager. I don't miss the desktop.

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.

~~~
ubernostrum
It's kind of funny to see comments like the one you're responding to. I
remember when Enlightenment _was_ considered "bloated"... and then it stayed
the same for a while, and suddenly was considered "lightweight".

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.

------
syassami
Their website looks nicer than their DE. I've always found
blackbox/fluxbox/xfce a nicer minimal fit

------
zephjc
The diagram in the Building Blocks section of
[http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en](http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en)
hurts my eyes. I had to zoom in to see if my eyes or the image was to blame.

~~~
DanBC
I agree.

On Chrome (on OS X Snow Leopard) the white text on the blue boxes is blurry.

------
ramses
This is great news! I have been waiting for a very long time, and it is
finally here.

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.

------
postfuturist
Quick Ubuntu Guide (tested with 12.10, should work with 12.04):

    
    
        sudo apt-add-repository ppa:efl/trunk
        sudo apt-get update
        sudo apt-get install e17 libedje-bin
    

Log out, select Enlightenment from menu, log in, enjoy!

------
shelf
The Duke Nukem Forever of window management, released at last.

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rauar
Kudos for bringing out a release after such a long time. Many projects don't
make it this far.

------
rasur
E17: Codename "Walthamstow"

<joke>

Congrats to the E17 team!

------
sparx
their site is down now.

