Submitted by “Enlightenment is one of the oldest open source desktop projects in existence. With E17, the developers are gearing up to their latest release, an occasion that has been a long time in the making. The word is that the team will make some announcements at the EFL Developer Day taking place as part of Linuxcon Europe on 5 November. With a release likely being close at hand, The H spoke to project leader Carsten ‘Rasterman’ Haitzler about how the desktop environment has been progressing and what the goals are for the project.”
My biggest issue with E17 is that they are doing a terrible job of selling it.
The website has all this pretty, fancy talk about how great it is, but there’s no obvious way to “See More…”. No links to screenshots, no example code, and no more in-depth description of it.
It’s as if they’re pretending to be some fly by night operation to hide the fact that they’ve actually got something good and worthwhile.
So what they need next is not programmers but sales and marketing people. Bodhi Linux will have to do for now, and are doing reasonably well for those who can tolerate a Debian/Ubuntu base.
Edited 2012-11-03 04:45 UTC
The problem is that, unless you’re already hooked enough to be truly dedicated to assuaging your curiosity, you don’t really explore Bodhi Linux.
You search up E17, wander around for a while, maybe find an image or two on Google Images or the Wikipedia page, don’t find a solid explanation of why this thing named E17 is more interesting than KDE 4 or GNOME 3 or some other pretty desktop, and run out your curiosity inertia before you start properly investigating the See Also links.
Edited 2012-11-03 09:10 UTC
You have to try it and see.
It’s incredibly snappy, very smooth animations (integrated graphics intel gma965). Makes everything else look slow and overloaded.
Except, it’s very simplistic. If you like that, then Enlightenment is worth the effort.
For an older timer like me (first Linux kernel 1.0.9), that wishes to revisit Enlightenment without much trouble, does anyone know if there are Ubuntu packages available?
There are packages in Ubuntu and Debian, but they are horribly outdated and incomplete. As others have said, the best experience right now is Bodhi Linux.
That said, the Arch Linux packages are very complete and stable enough for daily use.
Good to know. I’ll probably stick with LXDE since their Debian and Ubuntu packages are nice and up to date and Arch is one of those things I keep wanting to try but never can justify time for.
Still, you didn’t say anything about how it compares to LXDE, performance-wise. Are we talking a little-known alternative to LXDE or just a much lighter competitor to KDE and GNOME that LXDE still outperforms?
Edited 2012-11-03 15:21 UTC
In my experience it’s just as snappy as LXDE on most hardware I’ve tried. The only machine I’ve seen with noticeably better performance in LXDE is an old i586 thin client.
Hmm. Maybe, when I have some time off, I’ll check whether I still have that unpartitioned space left on the old Celeron for testing out alternate distros.
That’d let me check out E17’s performance and whether Arch’s package selection meets my needs in one go.
…keeping in mind, of course, that, even on my Athlon II X2 270 with a GeForce GT430 and 16GiB of RAM, I’ve yet to meet a compositor as snappy as something non-composited even when only the bare desktop and Leafpad are running.
(And given that, with Kwin on minimal effects, I can toggle the “weight” I feel when dragging windows by hitting the “toggle compositing” keybind, blaming the compositing seems like an accurate conclusion to draw.)
Edited 2012-11-03 16:39 UTC
Earlier today just for fun, I tried out Bodhi Linux on my “retro gaming/BeOS” machine, an AMD Duron 800MHz system with 768MB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 2MX. I must say that I was highly impressed! For a distro based on Ubuntu 12.04 to be that snappy and responsive was refreshing.
Granted, I didn’t run with the compositor (I chose the “Desktop” interface when prompted) but it was a very usable system and I wouldn’t hesitate to use it as a backup if something happened to my main box.
Then I’ll pass.
I lack the time I used to have for playing around with distributions and for work I need Ubuntu.
How would you say it compares to LXDE for performance and memory-consumption?
…because that’s currently sort of my gold standard for what I want. I’m always looking for new functionality that streamlines my day (for example, I may replace Openbox with AwesomeWM or XMonad) but only if it doesn’t increase the CPU or memory footprint disproportionate to what I gain.
(Among other reasons, because I run the same desktop on both my monster of a main machine and the 2Ghz Celeron with 1GiB of RAM that I use as a minimum target platform for my own creations)
I still remember my first Enlightenment installations around 1996.
Our paths drifted away when I settled in WindowMaker, before moving back to Windows as my main desktop OS.
Nowadays I want to use desktop environments that just work with minimal configurations.
After checking the Bodhi Linux video, I think I need to play again with Enlightenment.
I started using Enlightenment around 1998 and they were talking about e17
IIRC even some 1999 CHIP magazine mentioned E17, when discussing Enlightenment – and that’s not even a Linux-focused periodical. Also WindowMaker BTW, when reviewing Red Hat 5.2 in CHIP 02/1999 (that I had at hand, was able to quickly find).
I guess it’s simply a good writing material, with kinda epic name.
That’s clearly visible above with “Seeking Enlightenment” – but also, consider the differences between exploring your files versus enlightening yourself about the contents of your computer. ;>
I attended Rasterman’s talk at Atlantacon in 2001 (http://www.atlantacon.org/events_2001.html) where he presented Evas and discussed the upcoming E17. That was over 11 years ago. It was an exciting prospect at the time, but now? Probably not.
Oh wow, it’s like the Duke Nukem Forever of the window manager world.
Once I asked a ~demographer about mortality statistics for the most likely demographic (mostly teens to early adults) of Duke Nukem 3D players – and it turns out that ~1% of them didn’t make the wait, the decade+ of DNF development.
It’s certainly similar for Enlightenment…