Rasterman On The Impending Release of Enlightenment 17 117
In development for the better part of the last decade, the 0.17 release of the Enlightenment window manager is slated for November 5th. Leading up to this, the H has an enlightening interview with project lead Rasterman on what to expect. From the article: "Today Enlightenment offers most of what you get from GNOME and KDE, and probably the same if not a bit more than XFCE. It just doesn't try and ship a suite of apps with it. It is the desktop (Window manager, settings, file manager, application launching and management) minus the apps. ... The biggest thing E17 brings to the table is universal compositing. This means you can use a composited desktop without any GPU acceleration at all, and use it nicely. We don't rely on software fallback implementations of OpenGL. We literally have a specific software engine that is so fast that some developers spent weeks using it accidentally, not realizing they had software compositing on their setup."
Re:Software fallback? (Score:5, Informative)
How is that not a software fallback?
They didn't say it's not a software fallback, they say it isn't a software fallback implementation of OpenGL.
Re:Very Cool... (Score:5, Informative)
See it to believe it (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who wonders if it's going to be a dud, needs to get over to http://www.bodhilinux.com/ [bodhilinux.com] immediately to check out a distro that showcases E17 beautifully (it's Ubuntu underneath). I had some issues on a 64bit desktop but it runs wonderfully on my Core Duo netbook, and it's fast.
Likes: gorgeous, responsive desktop, fast, low memory usage, and it's easy to bend it into whatever shape you like. It offers a pretty standard desktop for anybody sick of Unity/Gnome3 but you can also have some radical interfaces too, like a tiling interface that looks like it would work great on a tablet (in fact I wish I had a Linux tablet I could try it on but am scared to nuke my Google Nexus 7 trying it). The "run anything" gizmo - kind of like Alt-F2 - is fantastic; I think it works better than Gnome_Do and Krunner and even Apple's Quicksilver (which is damned good). Their Terminology terminal is pretty sweet; I increasingly spend 90% of my linux day in it.
Dislikes: it takes a bit of getting used to, and the distinction between modules, shelves, modes, and extensions has taken some time to figure out. My version of E7 (Bodhi 2.0.0) also occasionally segfaults, so there must be some remaining bugs to work out.
But this netbook came with Ubuntu/Gnome and I find Bodhi running E17 to be a huge improvement. I love it. If you want to see what E17 is like, what it does, and what it *can* do, there's no better way to start.
Re:GNOME (Score:4, Informative)
Yep (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Very Cool... (Score:4, Informative)
So. Slashdot will die, as it began - with dev update news on the Enlightenment project. :-)
Where's my Windowmaker submission?
Grr... I'm still looking for WindowMaker features in some of my "modern" WMs...
* Desktop naming. It had a great effect where you could name each desktop with a task or whatever (mine were usually "Main", "Web", "Graphics", and "Root") and they would flash and fade briefly onscreen whenever you switched desktops. Haven't seen any other desktop manager try to do that. I faked something like that using xosd, but that's kinda clunky and persists too long when jumping over multiple desktops.
* Clip : a desktop-sensitive dock. This is a great idea... it worked a lot like the Windows 7 taskbar does now, where an app would appear there when you're using it, and you have the option of permanently attaching it to the clip on that desktop. I'm annoyed with most docks / taskbars that get cluttered up with everything... but it makes sense to have one for each desktop, so you could have all your graphics programs in your toolchain on one desktop clip, web tools on another, admin tools on another. etc.
* WM dockapps : These little monitors were great! I mostly just using gkrellm and its plugins now, though, which is probably more efficient and flexible.
* Awesome skinability : it was ridiculously simple to create themes, for the most part it was just a background, a handful of titlebar textures, and some color selections, and it would do the rest of the work. Done!
Only reason I stopped using WM was because it didn't do compositing... I needs me my transparent xterms :P
Re:Very Cool... (Score:4, Informative)
Desktop naming: E17 does this. :) it flashes not just the name but a full preview of all desktops in a "larger size" with their contents etc.
Clip: e17 shelf. can be customized per desktop.
WM dockapps: e17 modules+gadgets. not separate processes but plug-ins so they hare generally lighter weight - you CAN implement them as a module "glue" plus slave process if u like.
Awesome skinability: we have a whole toolset for it. edje_cc compiles them and after that just select the output edj file from the theme browser. the theme though is complex, but insanely powerful.
Compositing: yeah. E17 dos that too. it also solve world peace and hunger. :)
Re:GNOME (Score:5, Informative)
bwahahahaha. love the FUD man. i suggest you school up on history.
*I* quit doing gnome stuff because redhat was not paying me anymore indicating that i must work on gnome, thus i had the freedom to choose, and i CHOSE not to, because i hated the direction it was going and my CHOICE was to veer away and e stopped bending to gnome's will and thus it became hard for gnome to use e because it conflicted with what they wanted to do.
early on before gnome was known about, redhat caught wind of gnome and wanted me to help. i offered to tailor e for gnome at the start. miguel (hi!) stated that gnome needed no wm and would work with all and any wm just fine. i disagreed. since i wrote wm's i kind of had an idea of what would be needed. a year later it was "oh halp! we need a wm! we can't do x, y, z without one". too late. i was tailoring e to be independent of any desktop like gnome. gnome wanted to have a virtual desktop set up totally incompatible with e's because gnomes concept of desktops was too simple. it wanted to take over pager desktop switching and task switching. it wanted to be master and wm be a dumb slave and take over a lot of the functionality of e. i disagreed and by now it was too late as i wasn't going to kill all the features already now in e because gnome didn't want them. i ultimately put in some support for gnome, ability to disable such features in configuration, and it happened to be one of the first wm's with gnome support but it was limited and i had no plans to extend it or integrate it more in gnome and that is why gnome stopped using e because they wanted a wm that JUST is a wm and doesn't do anything more that a very limited set of things.
you need to get your history right.
Re:Selective recall? (Score:4, Informative)
actually better opportunity was not in my home country... it was in california (vs north carolian)... it was a good move at the time. :)