After 12 years of Development, E17 Is Out 259
The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."
Re:anti aliasing? (Score:5, Informative)
Font settings -> Advanced -> Hinting.
There's an option for everything.
Re:Does anyone really care any more? (Score:4, Informative)
It has grown way beyond "eyecandy", check it out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tILWKo1RUI [youtube.com]
Re:I gotta hand up over here... (Score:2, Informative)
Windows managers simply manage your windows. A desktop environment provides libraries, toolkits, services, applications, system configurations, etc. For instance GNOME and KDE are desktop environments that provide access to your hardware devices, network management, etc. Enlightenment is somewhere in-between since it offers some things like libraries to build applications with but I don't know of many native E applications out there. DE's focus on the whole user experience when using an operating system with a GUI while windows managers are mainly concerned with the user interaction with just the GUI and not the whole system.
E17 is the only genuinely free option. (Score:1, Informative)
E17 does not compete with KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, ROX, Razor-Qt, EDE, MATE, Cinnamon, etc. For people who care about software freedom, it leapfrogs them entirely, by the virtue of being the only copyfree [copyfree.org] alternative. All other full-scale desktop environments (DE's) are marred by GPL!
I for one was OK without a DE / widgets, using a light copyfree WM (ex wmii) + xterm + HTML5 (Opera, until the last remnants of gnushit are scraped off of WebKit). But for people who want both freedom and DE / widgets, E17 is now an option.
--libman
Re:Congrats (Score:2, Informative)
want me to google it for you too?
Nah, just go to the homepage and click download?
I recommend CentOS rpm.
I got a better idea. don't use it. you are probably to lazy to configure it as well, and will endlessly complain while staring at a blank desktop.
multi-screen win! (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using E17 for many years, and every time I try other WM/DE's I keep going back to E17 for one simple reason. The way E17 handles multi-monitors is such a vast improvement over others I don't know why everyone doesn't do it this way. Desktops on each monitor can be independantly switched!
Seriously, I don't know how anyone gets work done with multi-monitor any other way. Being able to switch the contents of a single monitor without switching everything on the other one is just what I always expected for desktop management, and can't understand a situation where I would want to switch both monitor virtual desktops simulaneously ALL the freaking time! This is very similar to getting use to virtual desktops on linux then trying to switch back to the single-desktop of ms windows systems.
Guess that point is not as imporant to most as to me, but I can't imagine doing it any other way without a feeling of something being wrong.
Congrats E17!!
Re:ESD? (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. Hasn't needed ESD for years. It works perfectly fine with ALSA or Pulseaudio.
Re:12 years to achieve..... (Score:5, Informative)
E17 conforms well enough to the freedesktop.org standards. Even though it's not really a standards body, freedesktop.org is readily used by modern window managers, and is becoming a defacto standard. E17 does still store its config in the $HOME/.e directory though, instead of $HOME/.config/e . Can't wait until all unix utils use the .config directory, clearing out the dotfile clutter in the home dir.
Games run perfectly well under E17. I have dozens of games, bought via Humble Bundle, and every one I've tried has worked fine with E17 (barring game bugs, of course). I had a problem once, with keyboard only games not getting focus when they run fullscreen. It's working fine now.
I use E17 on my work computer. Have done so for years. Any instability in my working environment has generally come from me, not the window manager. I think it's only ever crashed once in that time, and even then, I could press F1 to recover (as instructed by the crash dialog), and the window manager restarted itself with all windows intact.
The parent post was trolling. Probably best not to feed the troll.
Re:Congrats (Score:4, Informative)
http://bodhilinux.com/ [bodhilinux.com]
The lead dev is on xmas vacation at the moment, but Bodhi 2.2.0 is expected to be released before the new year, and it will come with this release. The current release has an earlier dev release, but it is still very stable and functional. I've been using it on my main system for more than a year.