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Enlightenment GUI Graphics Open Source

Enlightenment DR 0.18: Improved Compositing, Wayland Support 62

Posted by timothy from the now-that's-some-conservative-versioning dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Enlightenment DR 0.18 window manager has been released one year after E17. Enlightenment 0.18 provides many new features, with demanding compositing, Wayland client support, improved systemd integration, new Enlightenment modules, and stability fixes."
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Enlightenment DR 0.18: Improved Compositing, Wayland Support More

Enlightenment DR 0.18: Improved Compositing, Wayland Support

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  • Compare to the release of 0.17, this is *FAST* ! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Taco Cowboy ( 5327 ) on Sunday December 22, 2013 @07:43AM (#45759115) Journal

    How many years did the 0.17 release took ?

    This release only take one year !!

    Wow ! Congrats !!

    • Re:Compare to the release of 0.17, this is *FAST* (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chas ( 5144 ) on Sunday December 22, 2013 @07:57AM (#45759133) Homepage Journal

      The thing is, from E16 to E17, you had a complete rewrite of the entire project that redefined what it did and how it worked.
      So yeah, it took a while.
      While I'm not denigrating what E18 has accomplished, it's building off a lot of the foundations that were already laid.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        True but KDE went through two entire major versions in that twelve or so years (with 3 getting ported to Qt 4 before being scrapped and rewritten for some reason). Windows went from ME to 8. Apple went from Arabic to Roman numerals while also switching to BSD.

        E needs more contributors and for someone to clean up the config UI.

  • lol (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 22, 2013 @08:04AM (#45759155)

    User experience while crashing improved; some users have reported over a 200% improvement here.

    • Re:lol (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 22, 2013 @08:41AM (#45759255)

      Enlightenment user here. The devs are not kidding, I can confirm there is a roughly 200% improvement when segfaulting.

      In E17 when it recovered from a crash all the minimized windows would un-minimize, most would move to the first desktop, and a few others would somehow go to random desktops. In E18 all the windows go back to their original desktop and conserve their iconified status. An E18 segfault doesn't really interrupt your workflow in any meaningful way, it's quite pleasant.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mvar ( 1386987 )
        I tried enlightenment when 0.17 came out and stuck with it since then. Had a few random crashes in the past but never thought to go back to xfce etc. The only headache is fixing some missing application icons but after a point I stopped bothering
      • Does it really segfault that often, that that's part of the 'experience'. That's quite bad. Last time I tried enlightenment (486dx, with 24MB ram), at least it was fairly stable.

        • Unfortunately, yes - it really does segfault so often that improving the behaviour during crashing is a Big Deal.

          I tried running E17 (Debian jessie packages) for about a month but I eventually got fed up with the general buginess and missing features that I consider to be important. I switched to GNOME flashback a few days ago... it has a number of really frustrating bugs but in my view it is still way more usable than E17.

          Here are my thoughts on E17:

          The good:

          • Great eyecandy
          • Highly tweakable

          The bad:

          • I

    • Pun aside, i had E17 segfaulting a couple times (i've been using me as my DE of choice for over a year now) and it handles crashes surprisingly nice. The screen goes black for a second while the windows manager restarts and you get all your applications back, running as if nothing happened, along a "Sorry, i've crashed" dialog.

  • I sincerely hope that I will be able to use Enlightenment at some point in the future. I like the idea of a desktop full of eye-candy exhuberance, but every time I tried to use E, I ended up annoyed by the bugs.

    It seems I'll try again after christmas, and I hope it is better this time.

    • If on the other hand you want to take a look at a productive minimalist desktop, I suggest you try evilwm [6809.org.uk], which I think is the best [usenix.org.uk]. If you like GNU Screen you may also like Ratpoison.
    • Or you could just try Bodhi [bodhilinux.com].

  • fosdem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    There will be a talk about enlightenment at FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels (Belgium). Look in the Desktops DevRoom.

  • Desktop is so 2011 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Aren't desktop computers basically dying ? They keep on trying to replicate something that users already no longer use. Pretty sad

    Edit: even the captcha agrees with me: sadists

  • Now correct me if I'm wrong - but isn't Enlightenment supposed to be a light weight WM - hence the pun in the name? Why is it trying to go the way of KDE and Gnome by throwing in bells and whistles that require compositing in the first place? Not everyone needs flashy graphics, some of us just want a WM that manages windows and stays out the way, but also doesn't require learning strange arcane incantations to modify .rc files just to add a program to a menu.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by srobert ( 4099 )

      I thought that true transparency was just eye-candy, until I started using it on my laptop. I can type into a terminal while still reading the application below it. That's very useful on a small screen. Even with the tiling wm that I use, XMonad, I still float my terminal windows, and have them about half transparent.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mvar ( 1386987 )
      on the contrary i think that enlightenment is supposed to be an eye-candy WM not a light weight one

    • Now correct me if I'm wrong - but isn't Enlightenment supposed to be a light weight WM - hence the pun in the name? Why is it trying to go the way of KDE and Gnome by throwing in bells and whistles that require compositing in the first place? Not everyone needs flashy graphics, some of us just want a WM that manages windows and stays out the way, but also doesn't require learning strange arcane incantations to modify .rc files just to add a program to a menu.

      Doesn't Enlightenment need X11 to run on, or does it run directly on top of the kernel? If it needs X11, and other DEs are already adopting Wayland (aside from Unity which is going Mir), then it makes sense for Enlightenment not to be stuck on X11

  • So do we call Enlightenment a "window manager" or a "desktop environment"? How many features you can add to a WM before you have to officially declare that it is a DE?

  • Why I don't use Enlightenment. (Score:3)

    by MouseTheLuckyDog ( 2752443 ) on Sunday December 22, 2013 @05:05PM (#45762031)

    One day something went wrong during a routine upgrade and I lost KDE. Since it would take a while to fix, I decided that this would be the perfect time to try out E17.
    I started my laptop since my desktop was down for other reasons.

    I got this big mess of white on black stuff, I couldn't tell which windows were which and could get barely anything to work. Obviously someone had chosen a really horrid theme. So I went to freenode, caught a couple of E17 developers in their channel. Instead of getting advice on how to change thde theme to something more usable, I get berated because I was using debian stable. What was I to expect from a distro that uses such old packages.

    With advice like that I decided I would be better off with KDE.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yebyen ( 59663 )

      You really are at fault here, how can you expect the Leading Edge windowmanager to have a viable release at all, for the Two Years Ago is New Enough debian stable?

      When I learned to use Enlightenment, the first step was ./autogen.sh

      Go back to KDE :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bug1 ( 96678 )

        Socially retarded attitudes such as this are why normal people throw rocks at you.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Yebyen ( 59663 )

          I was joking, but I can tell you, since E16 stopped being a thing that people cared about, E17 was either not viable or not ever included in any Debian Stable release. Maybe things have changed in Wheezy. I don't think so.

          Now that you called me out, I call bunk on the GP's whole story though, I just checked and Debian Stable still today does not package Enlightenment 0.17x, it's only available in Jessie (testing) and Sid (unstable). MouseTheLuckyDog either tried compiling from source and missed some (imp

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