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Enlightenment

Enlightenment E19 To Have Full Wayland Support 140

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the brushed-metal dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Full Wayland support has been added to Enlightenment 0.19. Building upon earlier Wayland support, Enlightenment can now act as its own Wayland compositor by communicating directly with the kernel's DRM drivers instead of having to rely upon Weston. The Wayland support is still considered experimental but it's now the first Linux desktop with full Wayland support." Quick README on building and using it.
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Enlightenment E19 To Have Full Wayland Support More

Enlightenment E19 To Have Full Wayland Support

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  • DRM drivers? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Megane ( 129182 )
    Oh great, another acronym overload. The first thing I thought of was Digital Restrictions Management drivers, which was plausible because stuff that plays the crap that comes from Hollywood usually wants to be paranoid about DRM. Do we really have to overload this acronym with something related to screen display?

  • The main wayland API docs are pretty meh and any others I can find are also not great. Does anyone know of a site gives proper C/C++ examples akin to the venerable Xlib Programming Manual?

  • Not the first exactly. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @09:29AM (#46524019) Journal

    Hawaii was the first, I think.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]

  • RBOS (Score:5, Informative)

    by jones_supa ( 887896 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @09:30AM (#46524031)

    There is also a Wayland distro called Rebecca Black OS [sourceforge.net]. Although when I tested it last time, it was super glitchy and crashed all the time. It has been recently updated so it might be worth another shot.

    Anyway, great to see the Wayland stuff rolling in.

  • I'm sticking with E17 [wikipedia.org].

  • I have absolutely no idea what the summary is talking about, but I did recognize the word "Linux" at least. And "DRM", but apparently it's not that DRM.

  • I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on /. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
      I have no idea either, but I did notice that it seems like every single release of Enlightenment makes the front page for whatever reason.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The reason is that Enlightenment was awesome in the late 1990s -- a window manager you could do beautiful things with. Then it hibernated forever as Rasterman, it's lead developer, did years of meditation on how to refactor the code. The refactoring, amazingly, actually did happen and the project sped up again and started doing regular releases. If you still visit /. because it was cool in 1998 and still think of Ubuntu as some sort of recent Linux upstart, then the chances are good you'll be interested

        • IPv6 is a version that the Internet Protocol has to adapt - sooner or later - to succeed IPv4. That's hardly true about Enlightenment vis a vis KDE, GNOME, GNUSTEP, XFCE, LXDE/Razor-qt, Unity, Cinnamon, et al

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          Red Hat used to ship with Enlightenment (and employ its author) but dumped it for GNOME and Sawmill IIRC. Red Hat wanted a more conservative and familiar desktop experience and E wasn't delivering on that.

        • The 'rebirth' of enlightenment coincided with said Rasterman getting a full time job at Samsung.

          The libraries that underpin E are the basis of a fledgling mobile OS, Tizen.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        Rob Malda did some stuff with Enlightenment (a couple of themes and the really cool ePlus monitoring application) before starting slashdot so every single release of Enlightenment makes the front page.

      • Haha. Makes a nice change from all the pyramid-scheme stories about bitcoin.

    • No, it seems that half of the people reading this article crawled out from under a rock in the last couple weeks.

      • No, it seems that half of the people reading this article crawled out from under a rock in the last couple weeks.

        Well, it *is* spring in the northern hemisphere, that might have something to do with it.

        :-P

    • I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on /. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?

      Latest craze and buzz? No, Enlightenment was pretty popular about the time you registered your slashdot account. Wayland has been in the works for years now, too.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by geek ( 5680 )

        I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on /. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?

        Latest craze and buzz? No, Enlightenment was pretty popular about the time you registered your slashdot account. Wayland has been in the works for years now, too.

        Enlightenment was all the rage when I register MY slashdot account. It's positively ancient and has never had any real install base. In fact its pretty much the buggiest pile of shit on earth and even trumps Google in terms of length of time in beta.

        • Enlightenment was all the rage when I register MY slashdot account.

          Well, that was only a couple of years before Opportunist registered his.

    • Yeah, way out of the loop. Maybe wayland is the latest craze, bue Enlightenment is old school. It was for a long time the year of the linux desktop hope. People here used to call linux desktops ugly. Then someone would chime in about how beautiful enlightenment was. So its kind of burned into the linux desktop nerd's memory.

      Wayland has been discussed for at lest 4-5 years now.

  • Enlightment is one of those things which always seems great from an distance but somehow I never get around to really using. I've been playing with terminology recently and it seems pretty good (shiny effects are even smooth on my venerable eee 900).

    But lots of people Ive spoken to share the same sentiment. Does anone here use it and is it any good in practice? Ultimately I'm not very sold by merely shiny things. Terminology does at least seem to be really functional.

    • I've used it since 1997 or 98 and still have e16 with the same theme I've been using since 1999 on a new work pc. I've put a variety of things on other machines but keep coming back to e16/17 and fluxbox. There are many things better about e17, which I have at home, but I've got too comfortable with different coloured window borders meaning different things and haven't found or put together a e17 theme like the "ganymede" theme I'm used to.
      The window snapshot thing is nice but even win7 has that now so it
    • Yep, running it at work and at home. I have it configured with a lot of custom keybindings which make it very fast and comfortable to use. E is fast on all manner of hardware and most of my machines are older so its a good fit. When I got a brand new laptop (T530) I figured I would try the latest desktops out there including Cinnamon and Unity. They are definitely more friendly but even on a brand new, well-spec'd machine, I found them laggy and unresponsive compared to E on an older machine. Of course, I d
  • I'm dying to find out whether Wayland is faster and smoother than X. Anyone have any evidence?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      It is designed to have much less round-trip communication between program and server which was a performance problem that plagues X.

      In other cases it does not necessarily make programs more responsive, but it is designed to avoid tearing and visible redraw.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Flammon ( 4726 )
        I understand what it is designed to solve but is there any evidence on how well it solves these problems? Do you know of any videos or benchmarks pitting Wayland against X?
  • I realize this is a specialized subject and that the people who are really interested in this already know what is being discussed. However, I feel your audience would be much wider if you added a short paragraph on what Enlightenment is, what Wayland is and why what you are discussing is a big deal. I'm not being sarcastic, the title is intriguing, but I don't have the time to dig through all the available resources to really understand what is being discussed. Just a suggestion.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      Enlightenment is the window manager that Rob Malda used to do some themes and a couple of applications for not long before he started Slashdot, so it gets mentioned a bit here.

      Wayland is a display method that differs from X windows in many ways to get around situations like it being difficult to port X windows to phones and get iPhone style display performance - so it's part of the same iPhone eyecandy inspired drive that includes Windows8 etc. It's a reduced feature set based on the premise that some sit

  • WTF... look away for a few months and it skips two wole versions after having sat on 0.16 for years...

    Anyway, the enlightenment website itself only mentions Enlightenment 0.17... so where the heck is this 0.19?

  • Heading off all the E haters (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @11:07AM (#46524843)
    No it will not take a decade to see E19 final. Once the project started back up again, they went from E16 to E17 in one year. E18 was quickly on it's heels and now a functional beta of E19 is already out. I am on their mailing list and follow the project closely. They are developing at warp speed. To all the people who install a recent version of E, play with it for a few hours, declare it crap and purge it from their systems: you have no idea what you are missing. If Enlightenment has a problem, it is that to use it to it's full potential - which is vast - one must endure one of the, if not the, steepest learning curves of any DE out there. Once mastered, there is no GUI\DE more powerful and flexible. I am currently running Bodhi 4.2 with E 17.4 and out 16 years of using Linux and every other DE\WM that has come along over that duration, this is the greatest setup I have ever had. I have one display setup with four workspaces, each setup in it's own tiling configuration and my other display setup in a more traditional, but heavily customized way. The window tiling abilities in E are no joke and one of the primary reasons I use it. Being able to use it both ways, one on each monitor is more than I could ever ask for. Now, if all E could do right after an install was limited to what you are presented with, then yes, it would be silly. But it is up to the user, perhaps with a little Googling, forum searching, and getting the mailing list to make it do whatever your hearts content. Because of this, Enlightenment is not for everyone: power users only need apply. I keep going, but i will stop here before I get too carried away. My only gripe is the current lack of documentation for Elementary, which makes writing software for it difficult since you can only learning by studying source code, but standard tutorials are on the way.

    • If Enlightenment has a problem, it is that to use it to it's full potential - which is vast - one must endure one of the, if not the, steepest learning curves of any DE out there.

      In other words then, it will never get used. At least, not in it's current state. A new WM either needs:
      -to be similar enough to a well established one that people can at least get going with it immediately
      -be intuitive enough so that, even if unfamiliar, people can very quickly get up and running

      From your description, not only do you have to be a power user to make it work, you have to spend a lot of precious time just trying to get familiar with it and configuring it. Which all but a very very slim min

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
        I will quote myself:

        Enlightenment is not for everyone

        I tell that to people all the time, encouraging many not to bother with it. It has reached enough critical mass with developers and admins that it's not going anywhere. If you take the time to mold it into what it can be, there is nothing better. I have considered drafting a proposal for a version of E that lacks much of it's current complexity while still being awesome. Past that, I am not denying it exists in a niche market. The goal of my post was to

        • I have considered drafting a proposal for a version of E that lacks much of it's current complexity while still being awesome.

          Why should you need that? Why not just a tool that makes it easy to configure it in a way that's useful to more humans? If E is so great, it ought to at least be possible to do, if not easy.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
            Clearly you have never used it, or at least never learned it. They do have such a tool. It's called settings, it's five-miles across, ten-miles deep, and can be accessed in different places in different ways. A main part of the philosophy of E is extreme flexibility in it's configuration. Myself as someone who knows it, uses, and loves it, it is an absolute marvel of perfect complexity - a work of art. The system is so flexible I don't know where to begin explaining it or what I even mean by it without writ

            • I have considered drafting a proposal for a version of E that lacks much of it's current complexity while still being awesome.

              Why should you need that? Why not just a tool that makes it easy to configure it in a way that's useful to more humans? If E is so great, it ought to at least be possible to do, if not easy.

              Clearly you have never used it, or at least never learned it.

              Clearly you did not read my comment. And I ran Enlightenment back in the olden days, sonny boy. On my 386. It was very pretty, but there was no compelling reason to run it otherwise as compared to, say, fvwm.

              They do have such a tool. It's called settings, it's five-miles across, ten-miles deep

              That's not what I said. I said a tool that makes it easy to configure, not a tool that makes it possible to do anything with it. How specifically is Enlightenment functionally different from fvwm2 or windowmaker? Because last I remember, it differed mostly in that configs were harder to write, and that

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
                You completely missed my point. As I said, "settings" is the tool you are talking about. To make a user friendly configuration tool you would strip "settings" of a zillion features down to basics. There, you now have an easy to configure Enlightenment tool and a much more basic Enlightenment. You can't design a configuration tool with everything E has to offer and make it easy to use - the very notion makes no sense, it's already as easy as it can be. You could argue that you could have two levels of config

                • You can't design a configuration tool with everything E has to offer and make it easy to use

                  Good thing I never suggested that anyone do that.

                  Also, Enlightenment reduced to a basic "every other DE" kind of configuration is no better than any other DE and in some respects may be worse.

                  Worse? So it's not that good, just configurable?

                  If you really want to know the difference between Enlightenment and what you mentioned as well as others, I would say install it and spend some serious time getting to know it, but I am not going to sit here and write you a manual in a Slashdot comment outlining all the differences

                  Nor, in fact, have you named one difference.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by xvan ( 2935999 )

      one must endure one of the, if not the, steepest learning curves of any DE out there.

      steeper than the awesome?

  • Finally Wayland will start to approach what the fanboys said it was already doing two years ago!
    Jabs at the very weird fanboys aside, I wish the developers the best of luck (even the one that likes to make fun of Enlightenment) and hope it goes well. We need a range of options and not "one true desktop" like some of the fanboys want.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's easy to be a fan of anything that replaces X.

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