Linux desktop with Enlightenment (e17) by top-tier electronics maker | Hacker News Reader

Linux desktop with Enlightenment (e17) by top-tier electronics maker

enlightenment.org

27 pointsgsbarbieri15 comments

The screenshots look pretty much the same as the Enlightenment version I used more than a decade ago. Which is to say, really awesome, if you're an eleven year old boy...but kind of dorky if you're a grownup with reasonably grownup taste. While it was amazing to use a computer that looked like a scifi movie, the novelty wore off pretty quickly, and I switched back to WindowMaker, and eventually to various others (including a few tiling window managers, and Sawmill or Metacity).

old Unix person highfive

I actually got into Linux 11-12 years ago - and determined my future career - after seeing a screenshot of Enlightenment. Funny thing is, I did exactly the same, using a combo of minimalist environments and full featured desktops (annoyingly the minimalist ones never bothered implementing freedesktop.org standards, which meant users had to recreate all their shortcuts - AFAIK most of them still don't).

Any guesses who? Who are the top-5 electronics makers, that make mobile phones, televisions, and sound systems?

Hmm, Samsung said they're releasing their own mobile OS stack: http://gizmodo.com/5401326/why-did-samsung-just-announce-ano...

Which would correlate as a top electronics manufacturer, including phones, tv, and sound systems.

Raster seems to start learning about the Samsung's RISC Microprocessor so probably you are right. http://www.rasterman.com/files/man-6410-1.2.pdf

In some pics from 2008, he's playing with Nokia N810. But perhaps that went to hell after they embraced QT. Too bad, I always felt that the N-series and E17 would've been a perfect match.

The graphics tricks that e is able to pull of on some very skimpy hardware are simply amazing. I am not surprised somebody thought these libraries would be great for embedded devices too.

This really is true and under-appreciated. Carsten's (raster, rasterman.com) early work on EFL was fantastic, and even though the delays of E17 became a bit of a joke in some circles, the progress was always impressive.

Does anybody know if the eye-candy+speed advantage of E17 is still relevant, after the advent of the Clutter toolkit ? Given that the toolkit natively uses OpenGL and people can hack compositing managers together pretty quickly for it(http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/07/26/so-you-want-to-build...), is E-17, still the "sci fi window manager" ?

This is good news!!

I started using e long long time ago. Now I use gnome(ubuntu). I love e, but it was not practical for me:

+ I use (and program) a lot of gtk-qt that looks so bad under e. It needs a wrapper that uses e widgets.

+ Raster is over perfectionist. He didn't wanted how skype and other icons looked in the notification are. His solution? Remove the system tray(notification area) and make impossible to use apps like instant messenger or amarok(I'm sure there must be a way, but not easy).

+ If you look at raster and e team screenshots you will find they use (and care)the terminal, gimp, inkscape a mIrc program and a memory mapper, so it's difficult for them to understand other people needs(not developers).

+ When compiz was introduced again raster thought it was not a good idea to include it. Other people included it, I don't know if raster dropping the link to elive(http://www.elivecd.org/) in his personal site have something to do with that.

+ Raster default widget theme was a little... how to say it?, I don't know if this is the word in english: tacky.

I became interested in e17 nine years ago when its development started. I'm not sure if I should feel impressed or cynical at this point. When I was first learning Linux back before the turn of the century, I found enlightenment to be the most cutting edge desktop environment I'd ever experienced. It has been quite a while since then, and desktop environments have come a long way. At this point, I'd be very surprised to see something disrupt the entrenchment of what have widely become widely accepted as the default environments across platforms. That being said, I am very curious to see what so much work has resulted in, so I'll be checking this out.

I have no idea why the E devs are delaying the release of E17. I tried it for about week, and it works just fine. It gives you a lot of eye-candy to gorge yourself on, and most of it is tasteful. The performance is great, too.

I think at this point, the E guys should put up a 1.0 release candidate for public consumption. I'm sure the pace of development will pick up once thousands of users are breathing down their collective necks.

Seriously. High standards are one thing, but e is a prime example of perfectionism as the enemy of the good. You seem to have fallen in and out of love with it at the exact same times as I did.

possibly more from these guys?

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7114714037.html

This is really awesome; I've been a fan of enlightenment for a while and personally think it deserves some wider appreciation.

However, not to be a Nattering Nabob of Negativism (to steal a phrase from Spiro Agnew), but the enlightenment project predicted an alpha release[1] of e17 in September; it's now November, and there hasn't even been a snapshot since July. That isn't on the top of the list of ways to impress large corporations.

[1] http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/ReleaseSchedule

One of the first things I learned in business - never pre-announce.

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