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A Look At the Lightweight Equinox Desktop Environment
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon May 26, 2008 03:41 PM
from the feature-rich-is-still-important dept.
from the feature-rich-is-still-important dept.
Linux.com (who share Slashdot's corporate overlords) takes a look at the Equinox Desktop Environment and why, even though it is extremely lightweight, it may still lack the ability for widespread appeal. "the Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is the fastest desktop environment I know of -- but its lack of standards support and a few missing features may be troubling to some users. [...] EDE feels as light as a window manager but also offers the features mentioned above. The speed advantage of EDE most likely lies in its foundation, a modified version of the Fast Light ToolKit GUI library. EDE started almost instantly on the 500MHz machine I tested it on, whereas the other environments needed at least a few seconds. EDE provides a coherent and simple interface that requires little effort to learn."
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I thought ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I did all my editing in vi, used epic for irc, naim (ncurses-based aim/icq client), w3m for web browser, etc.
I'd just Alt+F(x) between my vtty's and do my business. Frankly, I think that was one of the happiest times I've had on a computer in a long while.
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Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I thought ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
Frankly, I think that was one of the happiest times I've had on a computer in a long while.
(Perhaps you were fed up missing out on images?)
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Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I thought ... (Score:4, Informative)
mplayer -ao alsa -vo fbdev funny-youtube-link.flv
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Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
When I went to school, I had to use X because I had to program in Java and do stupid Swing things.
About half way into my first semester my girlfriend ditched me after 5 years and I had sort of a break down and ended up switching to the English department, where being a sad, whiny little bitch gets you bonus points.
Then all I did was write papers. I never learned LaTeX, and even if I knew it, I'd have been too lazy to use it, so it was StarOffice and then OpenOffice.org - again, under X.
I'm going back to get another degree in engineering though, so I'm getting out of "lazy mode."
its not so much the images -- w3m can display them in frame buffer.
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seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
Just be happy in the knowledge that your suffering has provided us with 30 seconds of entertainment.
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Re:seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dramatic emotional conflict.
Admissions of an emo/goth/whiny little bitch period.
Your post had it all, and now your response to moderation really shifted gears and made this seriously epic
I applaud you.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That part made me snicker a little.
"If someone could please tell me wtf was so funny about that, I'd be much obliged. None of it seemed particularly funny to me while living it."
That part made me fall out of my chair from laughing so hard.
Re:seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
After 3 months of ASCII porn, he started to get excited while reading books.
Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I thought ... (Score:4, Interesting)
making E themes is actually why I need glasses to see far away now
Fluxbox is pretty nice though.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Theme isn't great, but I'm personally far more interested in stability and performance. A GUI really is just a means to an ends, if it's taking up a whole lot of resources, that's just broken. The main reason I run fbsd is that I can get away with keeping a computer for several y
Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I thought ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Windows 95 called.... (Score:5, Funny)
There have been so many great UI innovations in the last decade, this seems pretty niche to me...
Re:Windows 95 called.... (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been so many great UI innovations in the last decade, this seems pretty niche to me...
Better that than copying Windows 3.1 [blogspot.com]. Seriously, this may have been meant as humorous but I'm starting to get frustrated. Windows 95 is one of the very few times that Microsoft got things indisputably right. Yet despite that, it seems that everyone is determined to redesign this classic formula in an attempt to making things more usable, only I haven't seen anyone actually get it right. I'm using KDE right now, since it seems they're the ones least infected with this "Let's change everything for the sake of seeming fresh and original!" virus (seems to have started [wikipedia.org] with [wikipedia.org] Microsoft [wikipedia.org] and spread out from there), but I'm sceptical about KDE 4. I know I'll probably use it someday, but I'm scared that they're going to fuck it up and the best desktop environment will end up losing a lot of its lead.
I'm sure there's a user interface revolution on the scale of Windows 95 out there somewhere, I'm just hoping we don't have to wade through too much more crap before someone finds it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You keep using that word... etc, etc...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What, like Open Look with a decent file manager? I've been fond of that since forever ago - since 486 and 8 megs ago. Can anyone get more lightweight than that?
Gimme back my oval buttons, bitch.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
OLPC? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Missing Features" (Score:4, Insightful)
Plenty of choices (Score:5, Insightful)
1) New low-power machines with slower CPU's
2) Older machines being brought back to life
3) Lock-down environments were you want grant a little as possible to the user. Kiosks, single-purpose machines, etc
4) Thin client environments where you want to push as little eye candy as possible through the network
5) Smaller virtual machines where you want to use a little space as possible
6) Live distros that you want to load quicky
We have used IceWM for over a decade. Fast, stable, controllable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icewm [wikipedia.org]
Looks like EDE is just another to add to the mix of blackbox, fluxbox, twm, etc.
Re:Plenty of choices - missing use (Score:5, Funny)
Me to Confused Techie: "What are you looking for?".
Techie: "My Network Places".
Me: "Arf!".
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xfce (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The number of tray plugins are sortof limited, but all it needs is more developers willing to help out with that end.
I've never had this problem. There's quite a nice list here [xfce.org], but if that's not enough, you can always use Gnome plugins with it [xfce.org]. Granted, a lot of people (including myself) refuse to install the base gnome or kde libs, in which case that wouldn't be via
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Quick Launch seems to do pretty much the same thing as Xfce's Quicklauncher plugin though, so you might want to give that a try first.
the cycle of lightweight software (Score:5, Insightful)
yet another light-weight desktop. fluxbox, xfce, ratpoison, etc etc. why so many?
herewith my theory of the cycle of lightweight software.
- program $Z is bloated and slow, lets write a small, streamlined, lightweight replacement
- 0.0 - the program runs, does something but not much
- 0.1 - it's beginning to be useful
- 0.2 - it's not bad, you don't miss program $Z so much now
- 0.3 - 0.9 - hey, where's my fave feature $F, you can't be seriously missing that out, ok, we'll add that in
- release 1.0 - quite good, not too bloated, fairly quick, has its serious fanboys, but most people would rather stick with $Z and buy a faster computer to keep the missing features
- 1.1 to 2.0 - adding all the features that made $Z great, gaining bloat and bugs, losing speed all the way
- release 2.0 - a direct replacement for $Z and runs 20% faster
- release 2.1 - fixing all the bugs discovered now the code base is too big to audit, making it much less secure than the now quite mature $Z
- Hey, your new program is a bit bloated and slow, I'm going to write a replacement for it and it's going to be a small, streamlined, lightweight replacemen
and repeat ad nauseamRe: (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously - Given 3 or 4 desktops (Gnome, KDE, some lightweights), are any of you going to seriously claim you can't find or custom configure at least
Re:the cycle of lightweight software (Score:4, Interesting)
If two teams both try for the exact same target program, then a single team which pools the available expertise is more efficient. However, if two teams try for two different target programs, then a single team is less efficient, since the result will be approaching neither of the two targets.
The mistake many OSS commentators make is that they think OSS wants to go where they would like it to go. Then they say things like why have several desktops, when the one ideal desktop *I* want is a combination of a couple of existing ones, and they would be more efficient at offering what *I* want if they combined forces instead of duplicating effort.
In fact, if the goal is to get close to what each person wants for all people at the same time (the "utilitarian" goal), the best approach is to have hundreds of slight variations of the same program, so that regardless of what any one person wants, there's a random program which is only a short distance away. The more programs there are, the shorter the distance for everybody simultaneously.
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Re:the cycle of lightweight software (Score:4, Insightful)
herewith my theory of the cycle of lightweight software.
A better theory may be that people are simply looking for different feature sets. This ain't Windows, so you can do things any which way you please.
To use your example of fluxbox, xfce and ratpoison, I doubt you'd find anyone who would say any of them is even remotely similar to the other, other than to characterise all of them as "lightweight", and that's only in the context of Gnome and KDE. Similarly, I doubt you'd find anyone using ratpoison, for example, who would even consider xfce.
Me, I use fluxbox. It looks and behaves exactly like I want. That's not to say I wouldn't drop it in a heartbeat if someone wrote Yet Another Lightweight Window Manager that was similar to fluxbox, but offered some trivial features that fluxbox lacks but are found elsewhere.
There's merit to the "cycle of lightweight software" argument, but I really don't see it being very meaningful or useful here.
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Make your own desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to use Gnome, but then it got too bloated so I moved to XFCE. Now XFCE is bloated (memory leaks in the panel app don't help either), so I made my own "desktop environment".
I use fbpanel [sourceforge.net] as a panel, Sawfish [wikia.com] as a window manager, ImageMagick's "display" program to set the wallpaper, the Gnome settings daemon/screensaver applications, and a quick little Bash script I wrote to launch a Nautilus window without taking over the desktop.
Sawfish has more features than Metacity, and pretty close to the same number of themes.
The whole thing takes less than 40mb. I realize something like this isn't for everyone, but for me it does just what I want without using that much memory.
Re:Make your own desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never really gotten into the desktop idea, especially with the panel. I started my Linux journey with Gnome, and with a 800x600 laptop display I thought the panel is a waste of space. Later I used Enlightenment for quite a while, and finally settled into the lightweight window manager world with Blackbox and then Fluxbox.
My .xinitrc sets the background image with xsetbg and launches an xterm. I have a key combination to lauch more xterms, plus a few selected applications in the Fluxbox menu. The idea of opening a menu just by clicking the background is awesome -- no wasted space or distraction by the panel. I also use lots of virtual desktops, generally one per task, so as not to distract from the playing around.. I mean the job.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because memory costs practically nothing and my time is expensive?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because memory costs practically nothing and my time is expensive?
I spent maybe 20 minutes setting the whole thing up on a whim. It's not like I went out and coded my own DE.
Re: (Score:3)
(I've used it since it was called Sawmill.)
Microsoft called... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would be quite upset if a GUI toolkit that looked like windows 95 wasn't quick on a 500MHz cpu. Win95 itself was blazing fast on hardware of that speed.
yet another (Score:3, Informative)
Same concept, but it sounds like its at a slightly more stable state. Check it out as I just did.
Missing it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes, (Score:5, Funny)
EDT - Exherbo Dev Team, EDE - Equinox Desktop Environment
EDT: Exherbo is one bad ass muthafucking distro! Seriously!
EDE: Cool! I wan to run on Exherbo.
EDT: No, you don't.
EDE: No really, I do.
EDT: OK. But we will have to break you since our distro is so badass that it does everything badly.
EDE: eeep
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Re:Ugly as Windows 95 (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Many non-technical users judge the quality of Linux by what the DE looks like. If it has a black bar on the bottom it is futuristic and "vista-like", if it has a brightly colored bar on the bottom it is automatically XP-like and seems to be as familiar to them as XP, if it has a bar at the top and the bottom it becomes OS X-like, however if it is grey on the bottom and uses a rectangle as a applications menu, it is automatically thought as Windows 95/98/ME and old and obsolete. Now, all this could be avoided by using say, black or another color on the bottom, but grey will always make the non-technical users think that Linux is as current as Windows 98. Ubuntu with the brown color scheme seems to avoid this as brown hasn't been used much in any default Windows theme yet.
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