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Enlightenment GUI Software Linux

Enlightenment Lives 339

Anonymous Coward writes "The Enlightenment Project, far from dead, is pleased to announce the DR16.7.1 release of the Enlightenment Window Manager. With tons of fixes, a massive overhaul of the internals, and several new features this release is a must try for those who haven't run E in a long time. The window manager that redefined the way a desktop can look is still going strong."
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Enlightenment Lives

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  • by quelrods ( 521005 ) * <(quel) (at) (quelrod.net)> on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:32PM (#10061690) Homepage
    It's cool to see E is still alive. I've been using it as my wm for many years and haven't found anything else that does virtual desktops just the way I enjoy them. Does anyone know if they fixed the mozilla related focus bugs?
    • I tried it years ago, when it was the new great thing, and was discouraged by the hideously difficult installation.

      I've pretty much replaced Linux with MacOS X (and I'm not the only one - I notice another similar reply already), but I would be curious to know if it's any easier to install than the old whole day or more nightmare where it seemed like you needed every library on the planet to get the thing working.

      D
      • I would be curious to know if it's any easier to install than the old whole day or more nightmare where it seemed like you needed every library on the planet to get the thing working.

        You could always let your package manager handle the dependencies. Let's see:

        emerge -p /usr/portage/x11-wm/enlightenment/enlightenment-0 . 16.7.ebuild

        These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

        Calculating dependencies \
        !!! all ebuilds that could satisfy "x11-themes/ethemes" have been masked.
        !!! possible candidates
        • Check your make.conf file and check your keywords variable, should be set to x86. If the ethemes ebuild is set to something else (ie ~x86) then it wont build, beyond that .... Depends on why its being masked, could be blocked by a broken (or unresolvable) dependancy conflict or it might be blocked in the /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask file.

          I have run enlightenment on gentoo since gentoo was pre 1.0, never had any problems. Matter of fact I just had to re-install over the weekend do to hardware fail
        • Read the manual. (Score:3, Informative)

          by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
          Gentoo's Portage documentation is pretty nice.

          Try:
          ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -p enlightenment

          Make sure it's not going to install some hideously unstable library in that cast.

          Or edit /etc/portage/package.keywords, package.mask, and package.unmask. (They may need to be created.)

          For example, package.keywords might have:
          x11-themes/ethemes ~x86
          to unmask unstable versions of ethemes on x86 systems
          and
          x11-wm/enlightenment ~x86
          to unmask "unstable" versions of E.
      • Best of both worlds (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Dhrakar ( 32366 )
        :-) I use both. I have Enlightenment set as my X11 window manager for 10.3 and it works really well (via Fink).
    • It's cool to see E is still alive.

      But why is it? All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

      To be fair, I thing E does better than most... more attuned to my taste than KDE or GNOME. But why must we have hundreds of hours of development hours go into something which is inferior to the two market leaders? Sure there are Lunix/BSD vs Windows/Mac arguments/fests all time time, but no Linux/BSD WM looks or functions as polished as WinXP/Mac
      • by AstroDrabb ( 534369 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @09:03PM (#10063044)
        But why is it? All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

        To be fair, I thing E does better than most... more attuned to my taste than KDE or GNOME. But why must we have hundreds of hours of development hours go into something which is inferior to the two market leaders? Sure there are Lunix/BSD vs Windows/Mac arguments/fests all time time, but no Linux/BSD WM looks or functions as polished as WinXP/MacOSX (note I am walking WM/GUI here, not OS in general).
        You are obviously stating your opinion, so why not make it sound that way? I think the default WinXP desktop is childish, though the Classic desktop on WinXP is nice and usable. As for Mac OS X, I have used it far too much, and don't like the GUI at all. I am dead tired of the over done theme, and can't stand every menu bar being at the top. I will take Gnome over Mac OS X any day, though that is _my opinion_.
        which is inferior to the two market leaders?
        Huh? What crack are you smoking? Max OS X is _not_ a market leader. There are some sources showing Linux desktop having a higher percentage then Max OS X as of December 2003. While others show Linux at around 1% or so and Mac OS X around 3%. No matter what source you take as gospel, Neither Linux nor Mac OS X are a _leader_ when it comes to the desktop. MS has that sealed. Now if you want to talk server. Well, Mac OS X is no where on the radar, while Linux is a _very_ strong second with MS in first, percentage-wise. Linux in fact has been the fastest growning server OS for the past 4 years or so, growing faster then any other OS, including MS Windows. So please don't call Mac OS X a "market leader" in any field, since Mac OS/X has always been and always will be a niche market.
    • I'd reckon it'd be really nifty nifty if Enlightenment started using Damage and Compositing in the next Xorg releases to handle its transparency. This would also make E hardware accelerated for most folk.
  • by DLR ( 18892 ) <dlrosenthal@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:32PM (#10061696) Journal
    I always thought Elnlightment was the most innovative WM I'd seen.
    • I've only used Fluxbox as a WM, and was impressed by it's performance on a PII-400. How do you think E would fair on the same machine? It's a PII-400, 256mb of ram, Radeon 7000 64mb video card. I started using Fluxbox after KDE and Gnome just became so bloated. I'd dual boot this machine, but the time I spend on this computer is either working (which requires Photoshop, LW, Painter, and a few video editing applications) and playing games, so that's why I keep linux just on the PII machine.
      • by Anonymous Coward
        It would work fabulously. This is exactally the kind of machine that E was designed on (it was mentioned in an article I read last week). So, it shouldn't be a problem at all. You could probably get away with taking it down to 128MB of ram if you really wanted to.
  • Mirror...Kinda (Score:5, Informative)

    by matz62 ( 74523 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:35PM (#10061726)
    DR16.7.1 has been released!. This is the biggest release since DR16 first debuted! In this release dependencies have changed from Imlib/FreeType to Imlib2/FreeType2. The old default themes (which made the distribution almost 18M in size!) have been replaced with "Winter" by rephorm. The distribution has been split into 3 diffrent packages: programs (source), docs (Edox), and themes. A long long list of bugs have been fixed (including some very old nagging ones that weren't easy for kwo to squash). And probly of most interest to the end user: "Theme Transparency". Get the files source and RPMs in the usual place.

    If your wondering what happened to DR16.7.0, it was halted last minute by several bugs that were only reproducable by a small number of us but were major bugs none the less. You can see the changes since the initial release here.

    Ports for Solaris are avalible now and the DarwinPorts port is ready. Gentoo Portage will be updated shortly.
    • The old default themes (which made the distribution almost 18M in size!) have been replaced with "Winter" by rephorm.

      One of the things that always bugged me about E was that when you installed a new version, everything would look different. I would mostly pick one theme from the defaults that came with it, but when I'd go to update to the latest version, that choice would be gone. Yes, there's no denying that some really slick graphic design went into some of those interfaces... but when the initial "ooh

  • hmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by liloconf ( 560960 )
    I heard they were porting Duke Nukem Forever to D17!!
  • sourceforge group (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Coneasfast ( 690509 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:38PM (#10061752)
    something interesting i noticed, the group_id on sf is 2, (is this the first sourceforge project ever?!?!)
    • Re:sourceforge group (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kundor ( 757951 )
      Must be; group_id 1 is alexandria itself. (and 3 is mesa3d.)
    • Re:sourceforge group (Score:4, Informative)

      by FuzzzyLogik ( 592766 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @07:11PM (#10062065) Homepage
      If I recall correctly Mandrake (of http://www.mandrake.net fame) worked with rasterman (of http://www.rasterman.com fame) at VALinux (the software area) long ago.. they've all parted ways from VALinux now. But since SF is run by VALinux these guys were some of the first to have access to it and all that. hence the group_id of 2 :-P I believe Rasterman worked for VA... but my brain is a little fuzzy
      • Raster WAS working for RHAD Labs (RedHat's advanced development group) for a while, but left.

        Not sure if he went to VA later or you're just thinking of Mandrake only. (I don't remember Mandrake's history. FYI Mandrake the E author had NO association with Mandrake the distro.)
        • correct. Raster used to work for RH and i am pretty sure he worked for VALinux and then quit to move back to australia.

          Mandrake (http://www.mandrake.net) however was not associated with Mandrake-Linux (http://www.mandrakelinux.com).

          Mandrake went on to found another company, which he then sold and is in the process of working on yet another. BTW, Mandrake's first company was bought by VALinux, it was called Enlightened something I believe... Someone care to correct me? I may have my facts slightly mixe
    • Re:sourceforge group (Score:4, Informative)

      by Precision ( 1410 ) * on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @07:45PM (#10062362) Homepage
      Yes, back when we hacked up SF, Raster and Mandrake were just down the hall, so E became one of the first projects. IIRC mainly because at the time they were hosted on openprojects which was broken/down.
    • Re:sourceforge group (Score:5, Informative)

      by chrisd ( 1457 ) * <chrisd@dibona.com> on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @07:46PM (#10062371) Homepage
      Yeah, during the creation of SF, the team reserved 2 for Raster and Mandrake who were working at VA (in the disco room, don't ask) at the time.

      They didn't take posession for some time, as they resisted moving off their own hardware, but they eventually gave in.

      Chris DiBona

  • Oh goody. (Score:2, Funny)

    by BJH ( 11355 )
    I hope Rasterman has remembered to include plenty of that CPU-crushing eyecandy that was the major (indeed only) feature of earlier releases.
    I always found Enlightenment to be the most enjoyable of WMs, as it felt so good when you stopped using it.

    Enlightenment - the best advertisement for Ratpoison [sourceforge.net] yet!
    • Re:Oh goody. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BJH ( 11355 )
      Shit, if I'd known I was going to be modded down for speaking the straight truth, I would have posted with my +1 bonus to give you modders something to get your teeth into.

      By the way, from the FAQ:
      Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down.
  • by kamelkev ( 114875 )
    Oh wait... what? It's almost september? WTF is going on here...
  • i love E (Score:5, Funny)

    by OmniVector ( 569062 ) <see my homepage> on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:40PM (#10061778) Homepage
    i can't wait till it hits 1.0..
  • Version numbering (Score:2, Insightful)

    by P-Nuts ( 592605 )
    It seems Enlightenment has only gone halfway on dropping the leading 0 from the version numbers, as the news pages don't include it, but the tarballs do. It seems unlikely given how long E has been around that it'll ever reach 1.0, so perhaps eventually it will do an emacs, and drop the leading numeral (a 1 in emacs' case)
  • by DNAspark99 ( 218197 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:46PM (#10061837)
    Anyone interested in what rasterman and crew have been up to should really check out and compile the EFL [enlightenment.org] (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries)

    Some really neat stuff is on the way, of particular interest is the edje/evas/evoak stuff. Eventually this work will lead to an improved themeing system, for E and anything else that ties in to the EFL.
    Rasterman [rasterman.com] has even given a glimpse of the power these libs will bring to the programmer with his own version of a DVD player, using the EFL, in just 17 lines of code!

    so no, contrary to popular belief...E is NOT dead!
  • by Burgundy Advocate ( 313960 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:49PM (#10061865) Homepage
    The Future of Window Managers...

    ...in 1996.

  • E overdose! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ESqVIP ( 782999 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:50PM (#10061878)

    Anyone noticed the title of the song being played on this screenshot [enlightenment.org]? (see the bottom right)

  • by nbert ( 785663 )
    it's funny to read this now - I just visited enlightenment.org some hours ago to check if they got any closer to 0.17 stable since the last time I checked (~6 month ago). Now / tells me that they finally made it to 16.7.1. I guess I'll have to lower my expectations. Don't get me wrong - I really like Enlightenment. I used it for several months before I finally switched to XFCE. 0.16 showed me the potential this project has, but it lacks some features which I really want to use. I started searching for alte
  • The default theme for E13 KFA'ed but everything since that has been down hill
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @06:58PM (#10061972)
    Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

    Sheesh, just great, a third set of graphical toolkits to load in memory for nothing... Like we didn't have enough waste of memory with Qt/kdelibs and GTK/Gnomelibs having to be both loaded in memory most of the time (who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?)

    Really, there are some times where the OpenSource approach to things isn't the right one. Sure choice of graphical toolkits is great, but do we look like stupids forcing users to have more memory to load several huge sets of similar libraries *just because* or what? I wish F/OSS folks decided to rally behind one and I'd happily follow, even if it wasn't my primary choice, for the sake of reducing the bloat...
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Feh. This is the day of the gigabyte. Most new computer have 256MB+ Which is plenty for what most people do. Hell, it's plenty for what I do most of the time. Many computers ship with 512, and a gigabyte of the highest performance DDR isn't out of reach for even a casual user anymore.

      Add to this the fact that most people don't typically have a myriad of apps open at any given time; maybe a web browser and an email client, a few terminals with whatever project they've got going on, etc etc. Shouldn't
      • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @07:18PM (#10062139)
        Add to this the fact that most people don't typically have a myriad of apps open at any given time;

        You just need one, say GIMP in KDE, and there you have megabytes of additional, functionally identical code loaded in memory for nothing.

        And you know what? even with 512M, when I edit really big images with GIMP, I need all the memory I can get. Memory isn't there for applications and libraries to waste as they please, it's supposed to be used for the data you create/manipulate.

        Many years ago, it used to be that memory taken by applications and the OS was minimal compared to your data, simply because it was vital. Now it's the other way round, because developers have gotten comfy with Moore's law. The problem is, code grows faster than Moore's law...
    • Cheap troll, but I'm bored.

      Don't like EFL / Enlightenment? Don't use it. That is the power of open source. Your bitching about inefficient memory usage when you probably haven't written a single line of code in your life should not and does not affect the ability of others to write and use code that you don't approve of. That is the power of ope source.

      If you took the time to see what the E team had been up to, you'd see that their approach is the way of the future - they are pushing the boundaries fo
      • Don't like EFL / Enlightenment? Don't use it.

        Don't be silly. If some program uses the EFL, even if I don't use Enlightenment, I'll have to use the EFL libs to use said program.

        For example, I don't give a rat's ass about Gnome. I think Gnome, as an environment, is as ugly as it gets. But I need to use GIMP and Gnomeeting. There's no Qt/kde equivalent: what do I do? do without them? of course not, and you know it full well.

        Your bitching about inefficient memory usage when you probably haven't written a s
        • Tell me, is computing all a matter of how much it costs to you? or "just get xxx more of yyy and you're set"? how about engineering elegance? how about not wasting when you don't need to?

          Right, and I suppose you're entering this from a Sun SLC with a 200MB SCSI disk, because it does everything that someone needs to do, because you can run emacs and TeX at the same time? Or maybe a PDP/11 with legacy Unix? Come on, we're all being wasteful in the name of convenience.

    • I don't use any QT apps. I don't have QT installed. I run E, and I have gnome installed so I can use Galeon. That's really the only gnome app I use. I use the GIMP, and gaim, but they aren't really gnome apps.

      So yes, some people do restrict themselves to one or the other. There's nothing written with QT that I need.
    • (who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?)

      I restrict my applications to those in the GNOME project (or, at the very least, those using GTK2). I find that I can work far better when my applications share the same look, feel, and general behavior. Far more so, that is, than when I attempt to take advantage of the slight-to-nonexistent benefits of some KDE applications over GNOME ones.

      My one exemption, however, is Kile, to which there appears to be no GNOME equivalent.

    • do we look like stupids forcing users to have more memory to load several huge sets of similar libraries *just because* or what?
      Don't like it? Don't use it. Nobody's forcing you or anyone use it. It's simple as that. But no matter what, don't bitch it if you're not willing to help. Thanks.
    • Like we didn't have enough waste of memory with Qt/kdelibs and GTK/Gnomelibs having to be both loaded in memory most of the time (who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?)

      Join the 21st century. At $130 for 512MB of DDR2 who gives a crap about wasting memory any more?
      • by nanoakron ( 234907 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @05:06AM (#10065856)
        Who the fuck thinks this is +5 Insightful?

        It's just the insight you'd expect from combining an arrogant linux zealot who doesn't care about product coalescence to reduce redundancy with a bloated american 'honey, let's take the SUV to the ATM tonight' approach to the world.

        Beautiful to see in all its unadulterated corpulence.

        -Nano.
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @09:38PM (#10063287)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • "which means almost any unix program will work on it with relative ease (mostly a compile) - and if you need X protocol support, you have that too, without the hassle."

        Bah. True but only half true. Sure you can attempt to compile anything you want but lacks a real official package system. If you have any dependencies then you have to download each one and compile it too.

        Sure there is fink and darwinports but both of them are very small compared to the freebsd ports or apt,

        I like my mac but don't pretend
    • Yes... the atrocious memory wastage, oh wait. WRONG. The complete core EFL is 1.3 MB (stripped).

      I know it's a concept that's hard to grasp, but actually looking at something and TRYING IT OUT before you critique it is usually a good idea.

      For those interested:
      http://enlightenment.org/pages/efl.html/ [enlightenment.org]
      http://enlightenment.org/pages/cvsnotes.html/ [enlightenment.org]

      Try out some of the cool apps people have started working on like:
      • entrance - EFL based Login Manager (gdm replacement)
      • engage - OS X-like dock with smooth sc
  • Give us E17 damnit! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 )
    I've tried the CVS for Enlightenment v0.17, and it looks so sexy i can't wait to give it a shot. The ammount of work the E team is putting onto E17 is incredible.

    Who knows, i might even drop XFCE for it if it runs well enough.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Unbelievable, must have slept for a while. What's next? Doom III?
  • The problem with enlightenment is...

    That most of the common desktop applications are written for gnome or kde. Thus ruining the look and feel. I tried "e" a few of years ago and it looked good by current standards, but by todays standard I'm afraid the promise it holds has become dated. Maybe if the toolset were more integrated and it didnt have such a "grainy" look "e" might be a contender. IMHO its looking old fashioned.

    One of the nice things "back in the day" were the animations and the window transpar
  • The last theme I installed on E16.4 was 23 oz of glass, it's like having a Mac face on a Linux box. Have ripples running on a 4x1 desktop on a lo-spec Thinkpad, with enough resources left to loop my favorite trailers to the tune of techno.

    Pixelmoose if you're listening, don't forget to a)port your theme to E16.7.1 b) make a 23oz of glass xmms skin...

  • by Mr. Cancelled ( 572486 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @07:34PM (#10062286)
    This isn't a troll, or at least it's not meant as one, but try as I might, I could never get into using Enlightenment. And from the fact that Gnome and KDE get the majority of the press/developers/software, I'm guessing I'm not alone in this impression.

    Don't get me wrong: Enlightenment is certainly a powerful and capable windowing system, and there have been some fairly original looks/themes released for it, but, to me at least (he says, carefully circumventing the Troll under the bridge) it's not a GUI that a new user coming from the Windows/Mac/KDE/Gnome world can immediately begin using. Or configuring.

    (This is where all the Slashdot/Linux "elite" begin to quote my thread for their 'RTFM', and 'How could it be any simpler than xxxx?' responses)

    When I first began investigating Linux all those years ago, Enlightenment themes and screenshots were all the rage. KDE and Gnome were promising, but Enlightenment was how all the coolest geeks seemed to produce such cool eye candy-based desktops. But to a Linux newbie like me, coming from an Amiga/Dos/Windows background at the time, it was totally alien. It was just too much to have to begin learning Linux, and a totally different GUI like Enlightenment, both at the same time. So Enlightenment went goodbye after way too many wasted hours trying to become productive and look good doing it.

    So flash ahead several years (last year, to be exact), and a much more Linux-savy version of Me decided to give Enlightenment shot again. I hadn't kept up with it, and had meanwhile become an avid KDE fan, but I wanted to try something different, and figured that Enlightenment had to have matured by this time, to a point wherein I could grasp it easier. I mean... KDE had came so far in this time.

    So I boot it up after installing the latest version, and ,after booting, am faced with the identical look and feel of the last time I used it. Nothing (on the surface, at least) had changed! No icons... Just a couple of odd, pager-like boxes [enlightenment.org].

    Now... I'm not expecting enlightenment to change their way and become KDE or Gnome or anything. But they've gotta realize that virtually any converts to their window manager will be coming from an environment such as KDE, Gnome, Windows, etc. It's a totally different methodology from that of Enlightenment. You'd think that one of the first things that you'd see on a default desktop would be a "how to get started" type of document.

    Yeah, yeah... I know. RTFM. Yes, I also know that I can configure Enlightenment to look and interact like whatever I want it to, but I'd kind of expect "something" to push the new user in the right direction.

    But other things were not impressive also. Fonts, in paricular, looked poor when compared to the more popular window managers around.

    So flash foward to todays announcement here on Slashdot, and so I decide to take a look at Enlightenments page to see if anything's changed yet. I see this [enlightenment.org]. Come on... For crying out loud, someone get Enlightenment a PR director. If the programmers hope to grow the userbase of their window manager, they really should make it a bit more accessible. If an "intro level" of usability isn't a possibility, then how about a simple "Introduction to Enlightenment" document, or walk through? Something to offer the new user a glimpse of the power of Enlightenment. And without requiring them to hunt it down, or surf out to a website.

    At least make the default font's look better. This [enlightenment.org] is a good example of both the default look of Enlightenment, and it's default fonts. Conversely, this [kde.org] is the default look of KDE. I'm not saying that KDE's superior (to me it is, but who cares), but the default look, which all of us have seen many times before, and consi
    • by topher1kenobe ( 2041 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @08:18PM (#10062627) Homepage
      I've used E for a long long time. I don't use gnome or kde because they LOOK heavy. The bars, the widgets, everything feel fat.

      As far as I'm concerned, E is perfect the way it is. I couldn't care less if there's never another release. I couldn't care less if no-one else ever uses it.

      It's fast, stable, powerful, flexible, and pretty. No, it's not for people who don't like to tweak. I like to tweak. Gnome and KDE are for those who just want to get work done, and not mess around on their computer. I like to mess around with it, make it stand up and talk (I have a COOL computer ;) ).

      So really, if you don't like it, don't use it. Don't tell anyone else to use it. Tell people other things are better. I really don't mind in the slightest.
      • by ajs ( 35943 )
        I've used E for a long long time. I don't use gnome or kde because they LOOK heavy. The bars, the widgets, everything feel fat.

        And since, as we all know, Gnome and KDE are not window managers, and I believe that E is at least Gnome-compatible, there's no reason to be speaking as if E and Gnome (or KDE for that matter) are equatable.

        What's more, Gnome and KDE are both fully themable, and at least in the case of Gnome, that means that you can select pixmaps/SVG, layout and fonts that result in a very E-lik
    • by Mornelithe ( 83633 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @09:17PM (#10063161)
      According to the text of the article, they switched the default theme to winter, so it looks more like this [gaming4ever.org] by default. Those screenshots on the E website are (if you look close) from E 16.0, and this is 16.7.

      Also, I don't know what you heard, but E16 is just a window manager, like Fluxbox or KWin or Metacity. It isn't an never was trying to be a whole desktop environment. In fact, it used to be the default window manager for Gnome before Sawfish replaced it.

      In other words, if you want panels and desktop icons and stuff, then you need to run Gnome or KDE with Enlightenment as the window manager, or you need to use iDesk or something like that to provide that extra functionality. E by itself is closer to the minimalist window managers.

      E17 will be more like Gnome, KDE or XFCE, but that's been years in the making and may yet be years before it's released. But E16 was never trying to be like that. What you're doing is sort of like complaining that Fluxbox doesn't do everything that KDE does. E isn't designed to do fancy stuff out of the box and be GUI configurable in all aspects. That's what KDE and Gnome are for.
      • To be more specific, E17 has been years in the remaking.

        They've been quite far into awesome development progress when Mandrake and Rasterman get the inspiration to scrap the code base and do a "rewrite". I was using E CVS snapshots 3 years ago that were more advanced, more featureful, and more pretty than what's currently available.

        I suspect the reason why E17 isn't catching up to where it used to be is because a lot of the developers have left. EFM was getting really, really nice, and they scrapped the c
    • E was never meant to be a replacement for windows. There are two crowds of linux users. Those that want everyone from windows to convert and those that don't give a damn what other people use.

      Enlightenment belongs in the latter catogery. KDE and Gnome have a mission and so does Enlightenment but they are not the same mission. Read their site.

      It being hard to use is not a problem to the people who use it. That is may be a problem to you is not their problem. This is the hardest to get about opensource. Tha

  • That now hardware is fast enough to run it.
  • Enlightenment was/is a really cool window manager. Unfortunately, that is all it. A window manager. A lot of eye candy, a lot of processing power and it doesn't _do_ a heck of a lot when compared with even OS X's Aqua, MS' WinXP, IBM's WPS....

    Pretty eye candy is cool, but how about making it do something useful?
  • I just re-installed linux last night, and enlightenment is my WM of choice...go over to the website....dum dee dum....

    It was released today? WTF?

    Weird coincidence...ok proceed to mod this down...
    • Do people still use DR16?
      Yes! Hundreds of people use DR16 daily, possibly thousands. As more and more users move to Linux and other UNIX platforms they are becoming aware of Enlightenment and making it their window manager of choice. As KDE and GNOME pick up more and more steam it becomes harder to find a powerful, yet elegant window manager for the power user who wants simplicity, flexibility and functionality. Enlightenment is often emulated, but never duplicated. Many of the users who have left E for F
  • by apachetoolbox ( 456499 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @08:47PM (#10062904) Homepage
    I had just settled for a quiet night, just me, the fags, the vodka...

    I never knew!
  • by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @09:07PM (#10063083)
    ...and always will be. :)
  • now in portage (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @09:19PM (#10063176) Homepage Journal
    Gentoo users, this is now in portage.

    PCB
  • by kris ( 824 ) <kris-slashdot@koehntopp.de> on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @12:33AM (#10064597) Homepage
    There is also Evidence [sf.net], the enlightenment file manager. See the Screen Shots [sourceforge.net] and download [sourceforge.net] the release.

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