Enlightenment 0.28.0 Release | Hacker News Reader

Enlightenment 0.28.0 Release

enlightenment.org

64 pointsbirdculture30 comments

Like almost everyone here I only recall this DE/WM with nostalgia. It’s interesting to see how minimal it is now. It felt like the height of maximalism back then. And on very weak hardware had compositing.

I would say in the old days (2001-2002) it was more like a "minimax". It was maximal minimalist. It had really fancy visuals that worked on fairly slow hardware. I was blown away.

As was I. Ran it on a Via pentium-compatible!

I was recently randomly thinking of Cyrix. I never had one but in retrospect I think they were better than their reputation. A lot of people thought of it as a cheap knock-off, so lesser quality. I think I thought that way until I got one of the earlier generations of AMD Athlon a few years later, in the 1 GHz era.

For me the old days in Linux land were more like 1995 - 2005, folks on my degree were already using Enlightenment in 1997.

Remembering e17 makes me extremely nostalgic - in fact, if anyone has a screenshot of the clock circuit-board background with the working 7-segment clock on it, I'd be eternally grateful.

It was lovely to use in the very early days of amd64 as a window manager (along side gtk and kde libs). My absolute favourite was the virtual-desktop handling with multiple physical monitors in that you can switch between virtual desktops in a screen-independent way. Nothing else I've used has hit the same seamless ease.

Some more discussion,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50317534 ("Enlightenment 0.28 Released with Many Improvements")

I remember when this came out. It was so cool to see all effects and nice graphics. I did not even know it still existed. Either way great work and nice to see it back.

It's been in development for 26 years and still isn't 1.0, I wonder what the criteria for that is.

By the time they reach 1.0 we've long switched from working with GUIs to speaking to AI.

It’s great to see the Rasterman himself still doing releases after all these years! Legend!

> Restored the Pants module with skirts, kilts, lederhosen, malloc variants, and translations.

Delightful.

How does it fare with stability? The golden age version (e16?) was fun but would crash regularly.

I can't believe this crash ridden peice of WM Still exist.. It was horror just to setup something.

That was always my experience as well. I commend the effort, but I have never been able to use it as a daily driver. Gave up like 10 years ago or more.

I started trying like 10 years ago , it looks good but never managed to get it to stable. But forgivable because all the WMs , including gnome (was stable at that time to some point) , and KDE , same as crash heavy as that .

But then KDE become stable so switch to it.

Then Last time i tried to give it a chance was 2022 STILL Same broken WM with looks good stuff and they are trying to build it like KDE at that point including multiple apps.

At that point Enlightenment no longer looks good , KDE had caught up all the compositor effects and looking cool , can configure as much as we want. Elightment at that point still crashy as hell and never looked back.

enlightenment has experimental wayland support.

now THAT must be a narrow cross-section of users.

the screenshots make me want to fire it up, I miss linux UIs when the sun/BeOS influences were still apparent. " First off, we need a nice big clock, then we'll go from there."

e has had "experimental" wayland support for over a decade (since 0.20 from 2015).

I miss E16

Some part of me does, and then I go look at all the horrible UX experiments it enabled (mine included) https://ps.ucw.cz/e16/e16-themes-gallery/

One-shotted script-fu buttons and those gradients haven't aged well.

Most of these were probably not very usable, but this feels a bit like all these winamp skins, passion obviously went into these things and that's freaking cool.

That was a trip down memory lane I did not expect. Thank you!

I was using the LCARS theme on a tiny Toshiba laptop around 2005. Yes, the UX was incredibly bad, but I loved it, …for about a week :)

I've read they still maintain it!

They should use AI to organize the change notes as well.

Why don't you do it?

Sure, give me write access to the website and I will.

Send me an email with that content and I'll update the page

Asked Deepseek to order by category, it did ok I guess.

https://pastes.io/clMQpNDi

Is your concern that they organize the change notes differently (and what do you suggest?), or that they specifically use ai for doing it?

I'm tired, boss.

Currently they’re not organized at all, and yes AI could do it in seconds making that list readable.

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