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E17 Available From CVS 308

Posted by timothy from the decorating-the-ecosystem dept.
Lisandro writes "As stated by Rasterman on his site, Enlightenment 0.17's window manager is now available on CVS, which means you can build e17 completely from it, as it is, and give it a try. Of course, it's still work in progress, and lacking in several areas, but it is usable, and looks as gorgeous as ever. Also, in related news, the XFCE team, one of the best 'light' desktop environments for *NIX, has released the first release candidate for XFCE 4.2, with a lot of long due improvements." About e17, Rasterman's note says "It's limited in its support for ICCCM, no NETWM support and it has no iconification, virtual desktops, shading, keybindings or button bindings, but it does WORK (just). it's also fast and beautiful."
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E17 Available From CVS More

E17 Available From CVS

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  • Work in progress (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 28, 2004 @10:13PM (#10940039)
    Enlightment has been work in progress for many many years and did include a complete rewrite. Which is OK because Rasterman considers himself an artist not a programmer. As for real world every day use, I'll stick to sawfish.

  • Screenshots (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gilesx ( 525831 ) * on Sunday November 28, 2004 @10:15PM (#10940046)
    Does anyone have any screenshots of it that don't look like one of those hacker greetz pages you used to get on pirated Amiga games?

  • In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 28, 2004 @10:18PM (#10940065)
    SourceForge Logo
    Support This Project

    Welcome to The Enlightenment Project.

    We are dedicated to providing advanced graphical libraries, tools, and environments. Currently, the project is made up of three different components: Enlightenment DR16, The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, and Enlightenment DR17. While we are best known for the Enlightenment Window Manager itself there is a long history of providing advanced libraries and tools to support the window manager and other applications, such as Imlib, FNLib, and Imlib2, which extend far beyond the window manager itself in scope. Today, in development toward the DR17 Desktop Shell we have created an entirely new set of libraries and tools that provide more power and flexibility than any other group of graphical libraries available, which we refer to collectively as The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.

    Enlightenment DR16

    The Enlightenment DR16 window manager was released in 2000, along with its dependencies Imlib and Fnlib, and remains in heavy usage today. While rumors of its death still circulate, DR16.6 was release on Nov 2nd, 2003, and it remains in development today with a long life still ahead of it. DR16 has been the choice of power users and artists due to its low overhead, highly graphical, widely theme-able, extremely configurable, yet unobtrusive interface. Nearly all functions of the window manager can be handled without mouse input, including application launching via e16keyedit. It also remains highly portable, with ports avalible for Linux on all platforms, FreeBSD, IRIX, Solaris X86 and Sparc, HP-UX, AIX, OS/2, and more.

    Imlib has lived a long life, still in heavy usage today, as one of the most popular image manipulation and rendering libs available. Its development was taken over by the GNOME project and used as GNOMEs rendering engine until it was replaced with GdkPixbuf in GNOME 2.0. It's popularity surpasses just development in C thanks to bindings for several scripting languages including PERL, Python, and Ruby.

    Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

    In developing DR17 it was made clear that we needed an entirely new set of libraries and tools. Raster had a bold vision of what was possible and where he wanted the next release to go, starting with Imlib2 and EVAS, and eventually growing into new libraries largely based on or around EVAS. It became clear that the usefulness of these libraries and tools went far beyond the DR17 release itself, just as Imlib did in DR16. Thus the collective library back-end of DR17 was given the independent title: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, or EFL for short.

    The EFL contains solutions for almost any graphical interface task, far beyond just rendering images. EVAS provides a highly optimized canvas library. Ecore provides a simple and modular abstraction interface and advanced event management including timers. Etox provides a complex text layout library complete with theme-able text stylization capabilities (previously Estyle). EDB provides a compact database format for intuitive and easy configuration management, including the storing of binaries. EET provides an integrated and flexible container that ends the traditions of providing themes in tarballs. Edje provides a revolutionary library and tool set for completely abstracting application interfaces from their code, including a complex and flexible method of designing interfaces. EWL provides a complete widget library built on all the other components of the EFL. And more!

    Enlightenment DR17

    Development Release 17 of the Enlightenment window manager represents an evolution into the next generation of desktop environments: the desktop shell. DR17 will provide integration between files and your environment in a seamless manner while encompassing a graphically rich and flexible architecture. It will not compete with GNOME or KDE, but be a completely new way of visualizing your desktop, based around the EFL which was built from the ground up for this task.

    Still in

  • Stupid question (Score:4, Funny)

    by magefile ( 776388 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @10:19PM (#10940069)
    Stupid question, for which I expect a stupid answer ... having downloaded e16 a while back, and tried it a bit ... how the fuck do I learn to use it?
    • err, have you tried clicking around? have you noticed left click, middle click and right click all popup different menus? Do you understand the names on those menus? they're pretty self-explanatory... And yes, E is for Excellency.

    • Probably the best way to do it is to use E as the WM, and use nautilus or some other desktop manager around it. That way, you can have your icons, panels, and taskbar (if you want to use it). I forego the taskbar, because the pager is good enough.

      The best way to learn is to experiment with it. If you want to get even more in depth, check out CmdrTaco's site.

    • Re:Stupid question (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:41PM (#10940403)
      First pretend you are 13 years old and just discovered that Windows 98 isn't the only operating system in the world.

      Second, get really into this movie called The Matrix. Watch it at least 20 times -- It will help you customize your Enlightment environment.

      Third, develop a crush on an anime character. You'll need this for your desktop background.

      Finally, just fire up your fake-transparent terminal and get on IRC. The "chicks" there will be glad to help you become an elite Enlightenment dood!

    • Re:Stupid question (Score:4, Informative)

      by Linuxathome ( 242573 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:58PM (#10940459) Homepage Journal
      I had the same reaction when I started using it years ago. It took me days to finally read somewhere that the mouse is INTEGRAL to the functionality of e. In other words, in other desktops, lots of functions (if not all) are mapped to certain keys or hotkey combinations (which makes sense to me for efficiency) -- not to say that e doesn't have hotkeys. But in e, you have to throw that "conventional" wisdom out the door and re-adjust yourself in a new type of environment -- that is, one where the mouse is the center of all action (without a menubar).

      That said, your mouse should be a three button mouse to best utilize e. And as another person posted, you can play around with it by right clicking the desktop, middle clicking, etc. to see all of the menus and functions.

      I haven't kept up with DR17 development, but am I right to assume that the developers are trying to not only map mouse buttons, but also button and mouse movement combinations?

  • Too Late? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Retribution ( 35798 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @10:25PM (#10940091) Journal
    There was a time, long ago, when Enlightenment was my WM of choice, and WindowMaker played backup, when I needed things to either be a bit more lightweight, or I was working over the network, or whatever.

    Nowadays, I want a lot less visually from a WM--I want it to be as unobtrusive and thin as possible. I put up with Gnome/KDE (depends on what machine I'm working on) because of the nicer and nicer applications being built around them, but I dislike all of that extra overhead--"this app depends on *WHAT*?" This is, of course, my personal taste, and nothing more.

    Enlightenment, how I used to long for you. I yearned for another release. I ached to spend long nights interfacing with you... but that was long ago. I've grown up, you've chnaged. We've moved apart. Can it ever really work again between us? Can't we just let the past stay the past, beautiful in what it is, but nothing more?

    Call me.

    • Re:Too Late? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Nothinman ( 22765 )
      I can't stand a full Gnome or KDE desktop either so I still use E16. As long as you pick a good theme (and man are there a lot of bad ones out there) E16 is still one of the best WMs out there.

    • Re:Too Late? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:39PM (#10940392)
      Actually, Enlightenment has as many shitty themes as every other WM/DE in existence - i've seen both e16 and e17 look pretty slick and nice with some themes and downright awful with others.

      The important thing about e17 is, IMHO, the technology that drives it. Some of the stuff that can be done with the Enlightenment libraries (particularly Evas) is amazing, and simply couldn't be done with software available before.

  • sco hacked (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    www.sco.com/redhat

  • progress (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Misanthropy ( 31291 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @10:29PM (#10940109)
    Enlightenment has been a work in progress since 97 or so I'd guess (been a fan ever since the fvwm-xpm days). Seemed like whenever it would start getting good Rasterman would decide to do a complete rewrite. Not that I'm complaining. I think it's cool that he has all these different ideas that he wants to try out. I guess it's more of a hobby/art project than a realworld solution.
    • I couldn't have said it better. I used E in 2000 and it was slick. Slick just doesn't cut it anymore. I like Gnome (fought against this for a long time) and still have a box running Slack/FVWM. Linux has come a long way since I started using it in 1996 (programming dot clocks to get my damn fx card to work in X) and the fact that people can argue about all these window managers is great. If you don't believe me try twm, it's horrible (although I used to use it to run quake because it was so tight!!!)

      The ne
  • From the website:
    Adding new backgrounds to E is easy. Just copy them into .enlightenment/backgrounds and restart!
    Gee, sounds great. I only have to restart the windowing system to add a new background? Not even a reboot? How painless.

    I think E is a long way from really being useable.

    • Click a button (Score:5, Informative)

      by mr_tenor ( 310787 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @10:36PM (#10940149)
      Enlightenment has a button you click which restarts the wm. All the user sees is a little spinning clock for a second or two.
    • That is not true. It hasn't been for a while. While a restart *does* restart the cache, e16 has been able to reload the bg cache without a restart for a while now. (there's a menu option for it, and you can even do it from a shell with IPC)

      Where do you see that on the site? That most likely needs to be changed.

      And besides, that's refering to e16, not e17.
    • E16 has been quite-usable for a few years now. "Restarting" involves merely restarting the Enlightenment process, which takes a grand total of three seconds on any machine bought in the new millenium, during which time windows lose their positions and borders but are all back when E has finished reloading.

      There is a common misconception (or more of a preconception as I doubt most people who hold this opinion have actually tried Enlightenment) that anything pretty must sacrifice speed. E16 (and from what I'
    • I suppose you'd just like to be able to click on an image and then click "Set as Background"? We could do that, but then e would be 300MB larger.

      It's all those little touches that keep me buying more RAM and bigger hard drives so I can run the latest GNOME or KDE. Not that they aren't a bit bloated, but all the libraries they use ARE reusable, and half your apps use most of them anyway, so why not have them around?

    • Middle-click, "restart window manager", watch spinny thing, done.

      Or better, in this case, you don't have to restart at all ... middle-click, select last menu, select "regenerate menus".

      Done.

      Of course, if you wanted to, you could write a little tool that uses fam to automatically update the menus when the files changed. Assuming you were willing to pre-parse and make sure they were valid first.

  • Enlightenment's still the best eye candy WM around (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For those of you who did not start using Linux back at the time when KDE and Gnome were still very primitive, E was the best WM in term of usability and look. Simple enough to use and beautiful enough to keep the users around.

    I have always chosen to use E for all these years as my primary WM, no matter what Gnome and KDE can bring to the tables.

    Linux is about the freedom of choices and you as the users have the freedom to use whatever WMs you please. I've been pleased with E and I can't wait to have E 1

  • Duke Nukem.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by fieldcomm ( 685891 ) <steven.chabot@NosPAm.utoronto.ca> on Sunday November 28, 2004 @10:47PM (#10940195)
    ... uses Enlightenment.

    E17 forever.
  • ..as gorgeous as ever

    is...beautiful

    Damn, you guys gotta get out more.

  • E16 vs. E17 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:04PM (#10940257)
    If I were still a Linux desktop user, I'd be using E16 without a doubt. Enlightenment always seemed to just offer more than other X11 window managers; even if it was a bit finicky. After E16 development was turned over to new folks and picked up steam again (making it compliant with the freedesktop window hints and such), it was once again the most advanced window manager available.

    But I remember building and running E17 from CVS something like two years ago; and I'm pretty sure it was further along then than it is now. I know Raster decided to rewrite everything from the ground up, but c'mon. This is in no way news. Should they ever actually FINISH - then let us know.

    • Re:E16 vs. E17 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by deek ( 22697 ) * on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:44PM (#10940415) Homepage Journal
      • If I were still a Linux desktop user, I'd be using E16 without a doubt.

      Absolutely! In fact, I'm using E16 right now, as I'm typing up this reply. It's simple, good looking, very customisable, and extremely suited to someone who has very good linux skills. It doesn't have the clutter of KDE/Gnome, nor their orientation towards giving users an almost windows-like menu feel. It's almost perfect for me.

      • But I remember building and running E17 from CVS something like two years ago; and I'm pretty sure it was further along then than it is now. I know Raster decided to rewrite everything from the ground up, but c'mon. This is in no way news.


      What you don't know is that Raster decided to rewrite the rewrite. And he possibly rewrote that too. This recent E17 release should really be called E20 or something around that. The CVS E17 hasn't actually had a window manager in it for ages, as they kept on working with the foundation libraries until they felt they finally got them right. Raster only started working on this new WM code in the last 3 or 4 months, and this is his first upload of that code to CSV, as far as I can tell.

      Personally, I feel that naming this E17 is confusing many people. They think it's the same E17 window manager from a few years back, which is completely incorrect. This update is definitely news, and it's news I've been waiting for.

  • Screenshots and Videos (Score:5, Interesting)

    by x.Draino.x ( 693782 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:17PM (#10940306)
    Here ya go guys.. I feel sorry for this guy's server [eshots.de.gg]

    • My eyes! Oww! Make it stop! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Pseudonym ( 62607 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @03:18AM (#10941037)

      I realise that E17 is still a WIP, but...

      Did anyone else see those screenshots and think "OMG! It's Kai Krause [mprove.de]! Run for the hills!"?

      As one artist once commented to me, you can envisage Spock with some alien's computer saying: "I'm sorry, Captain. I cannot work out how to use this. The interface appears to have been designed by Kai Krause."

  • DR 17 Movie (Score:5, Informative)

    by digitalfallout ( 722395 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:26PM (#10940340)
    Raster did a short demo movie of the DR 17 wm showing the current iconbar and runtime module handling, here is a mirror www.atmos.org/tmp/e17_movie-00.avi

  • Let's get some things straight here (Score:5, Informative)

    by flithm ( 756019 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:35PM (#10940381) Homepage
    There's a lot of stuff being said here about enlightenment, and people need to really understand was Raster is trying to do with E17.

    First of all I use E16.7.1 as my WM of choice. I've been using E since I first found it several years ago.

    A lot of people don't understand that, why would I use E when there's Gnome or KDE? Well, personally I can't understand why people use Gnome or KDE when there's E, but that's just personal preference.

    I'm one of those people who like minimal functionality, uber-flexibility, combined with easy of use, and demands aesthetics above all. E is for me, but I can see why it's not for everyone.

    People are scoffing at the poster who said E17 is beautiful and fast by suggesting that without functionality of course it's going to be fast.

    Some people are laughing at Enlightenment for being around for 5 years and still not having virtual desktops, pagers, etc.

    E16.7.1, the latest stable release, has everything you could ever want from a WM. It has THE greatest pager ever. It even updates the mini window images in real time! The virtual desktop support is second to none. You can even have different layers of virtual screen accessed by using the scroll wheel on the desktop.

    E also has the best Xinerama support I've ever seen in a WM, for those of you who are into dual monitors like me.

    Now let me address some of things people have been saying about E17. Apparently the poster forgot that this is slashdot and most of the posts will come from people who have never actually used Enlightenment, or who don't know anything about it.

    Like many others have said, E17 is a complete re-write, and it's not anywhere near finished. The post is simply an acknowledgment that the window manager code for E17 has finally been put back into the CVS repo. So if you're wondering why it has such limited functionality, it's because it hasn't even been available to be worked on by anyone other than Raster yet!

    Some people said that this is not news because it has always been in the repo. Not true. It was in the repo a while back before major rewrites to the foundation libraries, but it got taken out because the changes were too great. Raster had to start again on the WM code.

    And finally... why should we care about E17? It is going to be cool... seriously cool. Raster and his team are excellent coders. The reason why it's taking so long is because they're doing it right this time.

    The supporting libraries have an OpenGL rendering back-end. Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.

    E17 will be worth waiting for. It will be feature-packed. It will be beautiful. And it will be fast.

    • Re:Let's get some things straight here (Score:5, Informative)

      by macshome ( 818789 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @12:54AM (#10940660) Homepage
      The supporting libraries have an OpenGL rendering back-end. Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.

      FWIW, the Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.3 is just that, an OpenGL rendered WM.
    • . Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.

      A few, but much less than a windowing system - X - being rendered on top of OpenGL. Which is what freedesktop.org will do.

  • like the finder? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:38PM (#10940387) Homepage
    From the FAQ
    It means that DR17 will combine features of a window manager and a file manager. It will provide nicely integrated GUI elements for managing your desktop elements, both files and windows. It does *not* mean that DR17 will be another application framework like Gnome and KDE.

    I'm not very familiar with E, so feel to correct me, but this sounds a heck of a lot like the function of the Finder in MacOS (both X and classic) and explorer.exe in Win9x.

    I'm not saying that this is a BAD thing, but it's hardly original. Needless to say, I think this will be a good thing overall for Linux if we're to actually get a good desktop. It's been established that the KDE/Gnome metaphor doesn't work at all and that the file manager and window manager need to be intergrated (as shown by the OS X Dock-like thing in the E17 screenshots)

    Now, of course, you do have the problem of an application framework. It REALLY should be intergrated into the WM / File Manager (FM). As said already, monolithic models like KDE and Gnome just don't work. They're bloated, ugly, and force developers to commit to one platform.

    E17 seems to be a step in the right direction but not quite enough. First off, this stuff is pretty basic and should probably be intergrated right into X11. Secondly, we need some sort of UI toolkit which could theoretically have more than one implementation (in the same way that there are several implementations of the X protocol).

    XUL could be the answer to all this. It's a cross-platform UI language. If someone wanted to make their own XUL implementation, they'd be free to do so and the K/Gnome folks could finally get along.

    So in short -- keep the current 'layering' model that we've got going on with the unix desktop metaphor, but make it so that different implementations of these layers don't break compatibility.
    • XUL could be the answer to all this. It's a cross-platform UI language. If someone wanted to make their own XUL implementation, they'd be free to do so and the K/Gnome folks could finally get along.

      Hmmm -- a XULWM? (Or MozWM?)

    • Re:like the finder? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MikeBabcock ( 65886 ) <mtb-slashdot@mikebabcock.ca> on Monday November 29, 2004 @12:50AM (#10940643) Homepage Journal
      Rasterman's way of writing software differs quite a bit from others' in some cases. His direction and goals often encompass both cool and correct code.

      Imlib2 for example has both efficient caching for remote image display as well as all-round support for image formats of various kinds and a lot of cool tricks up its sleave.

      His decisions to create libraries of code that are used by other modules so that like can be kept with like and linked together as necessary is wise, even if it slows down release schedules.

      I've been using DR16 for "ever" now and love it.

      PS, DR17 has been in CVS for "ever" as well.

      • Re:like the finder? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @01:18AM (#10940731) Homepage
        In other words, he doesn't follow the traditional OSS development at all.

        If all open source stuff was developed this way, Windows/MacOS would have died a long time ago.

        I also admire the guy for not releasing a final release at all 'til all the major bugs are polished out. Calling it 0.17 is gutsy as well. Most people would call something like this a whole version number bump.

        Pity that more people aren't working on this project and in this fashion.

        Look at Mozilla. Remember the old Milestone builds? Talk about unnecessary bloat/misguidance. While firefox is a lean machine compared to its older cousin, it's still got MILLIONS of lines of gratuitious code in it for unnecessary 'features'. As much as XUL sounds like a good idea, imagine how much faster the browser would be if it either used native widgets or XUL was stripped clean of unnecessary features which are now permanent.

  • Interview with Rasterman (Score:5, Informative)

    by davejenkins ( 99111 ) <slashdot@da[ ]enkins.com ['vej' in gap]> on Sunday November 28, 2004 @11:39PM (#10940394) Homepage
    For anyone wondering what Rasterman has been up to lately (aside from Enlightenment), I sat down with Rasterman last month and have posted my interview here [openasia.org]. Rasterman has some interesting thoughtson the Asian market, embedded platforms, and how they will interact with network middleware.

    Oh, and he can drink like a fish-- Enjoy!
    • Great interview -- about 4 years ago I got asked if we could do Japanese on dual screens for an embedded project. I said sure. We used Enlightenment and Eterm with UTF8 support.

      Printing was a nightmare of PERL and fontsets and all kinds of wierdness.

      In fact, if you look here [magicwardrobe.com], you can see the slightly customized RedHat login screen I did for them back then.

      Disclaimer: They are no longer a customer, I can't recommend their project professionally but I think its really cool on a personal level and I helpe

  • Maybe it's just that I've been called in to work late on a Sunday night, that I'm tired, or maybe this is a trend of posting non-news on Slashdot.

    Why is this "news" posted on slashdot? Sure, I know this is a big software re-write effort on a pretty major window/desktop system (which I used to use once upon a time, and it was very nice). But when new software is available, doesn't that belong on Freshmeat [freshmeat.net] instead of a site that's about "news for nerds, stuff that matters"? Freshmeat is even part of the

    • Well I, for one, have been interested in how (read: whether) E17 is developing, so I was glad to see some news on slashdot. It's a pretty big project.

      Also, slashdot posts a lot of things that aren't necessarily important. Really, "news for nerds" is almost the opposite of "stuff that matters," when you think about it. Even so, most of what's on here is a lot more revelant than the kind of stuff they come up with to fill the air on CNN and Fox News and such, so you can't complain too much.

  • I can't wait for the Win32 port! ;)

  • E17??? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mind Socket ( 180517 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @02:37AM (#10940936) Homepage
    Isn't that some crappy boy band from a few years back?

  • Enlightenment and Evidence (Score:5, Informative)

    by kris ( 824 ) <kris-slashdot@koehntopp.de> on Monday November 29, 2004 @02:37AM (#10940937) Homepage
    Enlightenment also has a file manager application called Evidence [sf.net]. Strong on metadata support, and with cool themes, evidence is specifically written to handle large or deeply nested directories. Have a look at the Pretty pictures [sourceforge.net].
  • Why is it that most people seem to be either totally devoted followers of Enlightement who will jump at you if you ever dare question that Enlightenment is the one and only window manager and the answer to all questions ever asked, or the exact opposite - people who hate Enlightenment with a passion and would like to see it and its developers rot in hell forever?

    I mean... it's a window manager, just like many others, and it's not radically different, either (or at least not more radically different than ot

    • Simple. It dares to be different (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @06:36AM (#10941440) Journal
      Enlightenment is not like KDE or Gnome. It is a different way of looking at a desktop and with E17 Rasterman is trying some things that might finally get Hollywood to use a real desktop in the movies. It just really looks that good. Entrance is finally worthy of being "hacked" by a pretty girl by pressing the "hack" key.

      Linux is not the linux of old. You got a lot of people who grew up with windows only for whom the whole idea of configuration files is alien. Now that isn't much of a problem. Some distros have come a long way into making a linux install extremely easy. But any new desktop user soon wants to chance the look and goes searching on the internet for pretty desktops. E has some very very pretty ones. Then they try it and hit the learning curve. It ain't a wall. It is a ceiling. Breaking through it is hard if you come from a windows gui for everything background. The reward is full control but the price is RTFM.

      Add to it that most E users don't want or need things like a start button. Its far more extreme use of virtual desktops. Themes wich look cool in screenshot but perhaps grey on black text in real life is hard to read.

      This then soon scares people off who are scared and humiliated that they could not use it. This is the "sucks" era. If you can't use something it must suck, it is never your fault.

      So now you got two camps. Those that managed to break through the learning curve and those who didn't (of course you also got a camp who could care less either way but they are boring) and the perfect setup for a holy war.

      On the one hand you got those who miss their GUI theme configurations and start button on the bottom left corner. On the other hand you got people who enjoy a window manager that just draws the bloody windows as they want it without turning into the bloat that is KDE or the "you can't do this because it would be confusing" that is Gnome.

      Welcome to Linux where people got choice. The price for freedom might be eternal vigilance but the price for choice is eternal holy wars. Choice is all very well but unless you choose what I choose you are the sucks.

      The difference about E17 is not just the desktop layout, it is how things are drawn. ALL windows managers use the similar model at the moment wether it is MS windows or Apple or any of the linux ones. If Rasterman realizes his vision then E17 could be one of the most important steps forward in desktops (as he has already used it on his Zaurus. Yeah that is right. E17 on a pda. Try that MS.) Remember that most enlightenment haters are probably using it already. The libraries developed for E have found widespread use. Just check for something like imlib2 on your average linux desktop.

  • I don't believe it (Score:3, Funny)

    by ndogg ( 158021 ) <the@rhorn.gmail@com> on Monday November 29, 2004 @03:14AM (#10941025) Homepage Journal
    This can't be happening yet, unless Duke Nuke'm Forever is going to be out soon!
  • If you take a look at this screenshot [enlightenment.org], you will see that (in the darkened window) the full directory path is represented as TABS that you can navigate and presumably drag groups of files onto to perform actions.

    Really awesome. Perhaps this could be added to Firefox, especially for browsing local folders. If it's targetting IE as competition, perhaps it should also include such capabilities. It pioneered tabs as a way to revolutionize browsing, and it would be useful (to me at least) if it included this f

    • Re:Very Innovative (Score:3, Informative)

      by Taladar ( 717494 )
      Mixing local and remote file management is NOT a good idea. It opens holes where remote files can trick the user into believing they are local files and to be trusted.

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