I've been interested in Enlightenment E17 for… seems like close to a decade now, periodically checking in on Carsten Haitzler's web page for updates on its progress.
This most recent time, I see this:
"Now why talk about this? Well I'm here at Samsung. I am a principal engineer, so I talk with some level of authority in saying that Samsung has been working on its own Linux based OS for a while now, with significantly less fanfare than Nokia and MeeGo. Not only is is solidly being worked on and not relegated to irrelevance, but as part of the work, Enlightenment and EFL have become a central focus. Samsung is putting real resources behind EFL and using it to make a production-ready OS. The OS not only is Linux based, It uses all the other infrastructure from Linux (DBus, Glibc, Xorg, and much much much more). It is also going to be Open Source (GPL, LGPL etc.) and with Opensource upstream gaining contributions back from Samsung."
Does anyone know if there's something to this? I disappointedly gave up on my Nokia N900 after the MSFT announcement and am now a proud owner of a Nexus S, but I would be thrilled to see another competitor out there. Especially one based on Enlightenment, as I've always been amazed at how responsive and eye-catching it was, even on lower end hardware.
I used E17 on a zaurus and on a laptop for a while -- and I got fed up with the project management. It's nothing against Raster, its the mindset that "Nothing From GNOME or KDE Should Ever Touch E17" (For the record, I was trying to get xdg-autostart items to show up)
I would love to see E17 mature as a desktop environment and see the whole development team go forward. However, until they are more open to seeing that most packagers aren't going to want to handle a metric shitton different frameworks, its completely screwed.
It is really happening. Just have a look at the commits or the mailing list: a lot of patches are provided by samsung employes. Some of them also have commit access.
As an enlightenment developer, I can assure you that samsung is working with enlightenment.
They even have released some code under the GPLv3 like http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/browser/trunk/editje/COPYING .
It's not bada, it's different. You can get a bit more information on this pdf: http://www.oss.kr/?module=file&act=procFileDownload&...
I can confirm this story, or at least I can confirm that I've heard the same thing from people who know Raster personally. According to the reports I've heard, the GUI runs incredibly smoothly.
Personally, I look forward to this because EFL can run on top of XCB, so this might allow a credible X environment without Xlib.
I've used Enlightenment off and on a number of times over the years. The underlying libraries always looked pretty cool compared to the standard Linux fare (GTK and Qt) but the end products (E16/E17) always have a goofy design and an unpleasant look and feel.
I hope they leave the graphics wizards to the code and get some real designers/ux experts to do the rest.
This is vaporware right now (there's videos on his site of Enlightenment on phones but they are old) so don't get your hopes up. Perhaps some day Samsung will spring some cool devices on us but for now there's no telling when, if ever, we will see this stuff.
The recent Samsung iPhone clone doesn't inspire a ton of confidence.
The media player Canola from Nokia's Brazilian labs uses EFL and Python to provide a friendly finger full-screen UI on old N8x0s (whose Maemo 4 UI with GTK+/Hildon and a stylus I find uncomfortable).
I find it highly plausible that EFL is a nice foundation for a mobile phone touch UI.
(Just sad that work on Canola seems to have stopped, and their Git server was permanently overloaded when I tried)
Modern phones are some of the most powerful devices to ever run X11. X11 is quite old, and phones these days are quite fast. The desktops that X11 was written on were orders of magnitude slower than the phone you use to check your twitter feed.
This most recent time, I see this:
"Now why talk about this? Well I'm here at Samsung. I am a principal engineer, so I talk with some level of authority in saying that Samsung has been working on its own Linux based OS for a while now, with significantly less fanfare than Nokia and MeeGo. Not only is is solidly being worked on and not relegated to irrelevance, but as part of the work, Enlightenment and EFL have become a central focus. Samsung is putting real resources behind EFL and using it to make a production-ready OS. The OS not only is Linux based, It uses all the other infrastructure from Linux (DBus, Glibc, Xorg, and much much much more). It is also going to be Open Source (GPL, LGPL etc.) and with Opensource upstream gaining contributions back from Samsung."
Does anyone know if there's something to this? I disappointedly gave up on my Nokia N900 after the MSFT announcement and am now a proud owner of a Nexus S, but I would be thrilled to see another competitor out there. Especially one based on Enlightenment, as I've always been amazed at how responsive and eye-catching it was, even on lower end hardware.