Enlightenment 0.28 Released with Many Improvements
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
[1] https://i.redd.it/fravza9fzie31.jpg
(In fact, it's kind of funny and sad that the state of the Linux desktop and the ambition level hasn't really changed much in 25 years)
I find that totally wrong. Look at niri - I can imagine MS and Apple will introduce scrollable wm features in the coming years.
Most people agree that a screen should feel like a physical desk where windows can pile, overlap, and scatter naturally. Would you use a tiling "system" for your physical desk? I highly doubt it.
Niri's infinite scrolling approach makes that into a rigid filmstrip sequence. It might be interesting for some people though.
Where they could improve is hotkeys: they are all heavily reliant on them, which is unreasonably hostile to non tech users.
Humans aren't very good at identifying what they need from tech. The earliest example is the spreadsheet: no average user would have asked for it because there was no skeomorphism to draw from. We would have had graph paper with a single char per cell if we went with skeomorphic.
Cascading window managers are objectively terrible. Obviously we don't force better solutions onto people, but they have very few redeeming qualities.
A tiling wm, or scrolling such as niri, solves this very well It’s of course designed for people actually using a computer for work rather than leisure.
Once you are used to it it’s hard to move back to windows being scattered all over.
In this setup theres the assumption that theres only ever two things Im looking at, and they are equally important because each one is 50/50.
Even if two can be configured to 3, and the 50/50 ratio can be changed, thats not the point, the desktop arrangement is a reflection of the task I am working on, not a rigid pattern enforced by a window manager.
I find these types of wms very bizarre. They must fit some people's mental model but its so far from being useful for me, I just find it fascinating that anyone could find this useful.
Quite a problem since the default theme (of the prior version at least) was a mess.
Enlightment is the most complete ( although not complete ) UI ecosystem in C that I've seen.
I forgot about GNOME/gtk+
Which is odd, because I've written a bit of gtk 3 code.
I don't know, I don't want to say anything negative, only that I'm looking forward to using enlightenment again. :|
Much like physicists who spend their careers searching for a "grand unified theory of everything," I'm a software engineer searching for the UI toolkit that runs on everything.
I wanted it to be enlightenment, way back in the day,
Before becomming enthralled with the widgets of gtk,
Gave both IUP and Agar a try, but much to my dismay,
There were quirks to be found, so I tossed them away.
:|
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150308153847/http://what.theda...
As for the decade old roast, theres a few things I disagree with.
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Using Qt, one would write:
auto widget = new QWidget{parent}; widget->show();
2 lines, all obvious, all working as expected.
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No. It's 2 lines, which makes it "not at all obvious." Those 2 lines have so much baked in functionality, I have no idea what its doing until I read 100 pages of documentation and become an "expert" on the internals of that specific UI toolkit.
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But let’s go into some details. Remember the quote about types? EFL takes that philosophy seriously. Everything is a pointer to something called Evas_Object, which translates to void *. Those knowledgeable in the horrible language of C know it’s a pointer to anything. And so it is.
...
Okay, now we see where the motivation to roast comes from. This guy hates the C language itself, so he's going to hate any GUI toolkit coded in C.
Theres no argument from me that C's syntax makes coding GUIs based on object hierarchies more difficult than languages with proper OO support, but the alternatives have their own problems as well.
At the end of the day, its good to have choices.