

Enlightenment DR 0.18.0 Release - conductor
https://phab.enlightenment.org/phame/live/3/post/enlightenment_dr_0_18_0_release/

======
octotoad
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.

~~~
zafiro17
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 :)

~~~
yebyen
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.

------
coldtea
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.

~~~
Joeri
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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).

------
snogglethorpe
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.

------
CJefferson
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?

~~~
viraptor
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.

~~~
mverwijs
> 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...

~~~
viraptor
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)

~~~
derefr
> 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.

------
runjake
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.

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keeptrying
Wheres the obligatory link to the screenshots? :(

------
bsaul
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 ?

~~~
bri3d
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.

~~~
RamiK
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/](https://developer.tizen.org/dev-guide/2.2.0/)

------
fsqcds
Are retina-like HiDPI displays supported here?

------
burningkali
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](http://www.mindvox.com/pg/photos/view/2374/sun-sparc-y2k)

------
Millennium
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.

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

------
userbinator
> 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?

~~~
Shish2k
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)

------
stuaxo
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..

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

