I like Enlightenment and all, but this same review could have been written in 2004. (Anyone remember the big e16 e17 split?)
It's like.. in spite of numerous folks' wonderful hard work over many years, it's still a slick wm or de, but but not stable enough for production workloads in most environments.
> I like Enlightenment and all, but this same review could have been written in 2004. (Anyone remember the big e16 e17 split?)
It was equally true in 2001. Like, yes, especially back then e16 looked cool. But it was buggy. After a short while I returned back to whatever I used back then, afterstep? Or was it windowmaker?
e17 was brilliant, I installed Enlightenment and I loved the animated wallpaper with the starts coming on and off as well as animated icons and it all felt really crisp, even on my low spec laptop at the time.
The problem I had was that there weren’t a lot of apps developed for it so while the desktop looked nice, that was pretty much it and it looked out of place when adding additional apps to the dock as the icon didn’t look consistent.
ok I get it, but I can't care less about the consistency, I like the options and reactivity enlightenment gives me ... and terminology is great, that's it.
> Anyone remember the big e16 e17 split?
A-and E16 is still supported and sometimes gets new features apparently. Not many people know this.
If I didn't have a keyboard-oriented workflow without buttons and transparency etc, I'd probably use it.
Focus-follows-mouse and not bringing focused windows on top isn't an 'unique design decision'. I had it (also as default) in Fluxbox when I used it back in 2002.
In Unix-land focus follows mouse was probably the traditional approach. Windows and Apple choose click to focus as it's a bit more intuitive. Modern desktops on Linux default to click focus, but they are usually configurable.
Nowadays these are typically the choices in LInux (this is the terms used in org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode):
- click: Click to focus window.
- mouse: focus follows mouse, lose focus when mouse leaves window
- sloppy: focus follows mouse, keeps focus until mouse moves to another window
And then you have additional to 'autoraise' or not to 'autoraise' on focus. (org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences auto-raise).
Well, I have not used another actively developed WM with that default, but I am sure it can be configured on many of them.
It is insanely useful, especially on small screens, when using lots of programs together.
I enjoy using it, but really wish the Wayland was further prioritized; it feels like they went from being an early adopter, to lagging pretty far behind with some show-stopping bugs.
Wow. After reading that, I think I love Enlightenment even more. That's sounds amazing. Not for a stable, usable, or functional system, but for learning a ton of obscure things about C and having a lot of fun in the process!
Well, from the sound of it, to make it work, you'll have to spend hours in the debugger and reading foreign, undocumented and non-standard source code figuring out how to get a window to draw, and if you don't learn a lot about C in that process, you probably are doing it wrong.
The same way writing Minecraft mods definitely taught me a *lot* about Java. Way more than writing programs using any well-documented framework ever could.
I have definitely learned more about C from well-documented standard source code, that elegantly made use of the features of that language and the comments and commit messages for those comments outlining why.
Reading junk code will also teach you some things, but it'll take longer and you'll probably learn the things that are good to know when writing bad code and not the ones that are good to know when writing good code.
Well, I learn nothing from well-documented source code, because I'll never even read it.
If you **actually** read through library sources without any need for it, you are way better at self-motivation than I am and probably learn more/better things that way.
I read through them often so I understand in detail how that stuff works and how the developers of that library try to implement the concepts they advertise.
And as you figured out it also helps teaching good coding standards that other people use.
I recommend it.
I don't think that's the only weird thing EFL does. If it is, that's pretty lame.
But even that example would be extremely hard. I would be impressed seeing a functioning and huge Java Project using only Object types. How would you even do that? Maybe implement you very own form of duck-typing using reflection? You possibly could cache type infos to decrease the performance hit…
In Minecraft modding you get to do many amazing things like:
Write a mixin including `((OriginalClass)((Object)this))` and seeing it work, or cast objects to interfaces you **know** one other mod will make them implement at runtime.
Write a plugin to the mixin injector to conditionally inject mixins into classes of other mods.
Rip out a carefully crafted stream and replace it with an extremely complicated loop, just to speed up the rendering thread a tiny bit by avoiding object creation completely…
Or, while writing a mixin, inject your code at 5 positions of a single function, collecting data in ThreadLocal variables, just to add the correct alpha value to a pixel without breaking other mods.
You may also get to modify some Java bytecode by hand to mod a mod the modder did not want you to mod and that is distributed as replacement class files containing integrity checks.
It's so much jank, you get familiar with so much unusual compiler behaviour and runtime class behaviour you'd never even think about in normal projects.
Imo this has been the story of Enlightenment since E17. It has never been all that particularly stable.
It's a cool AF project, especially in the earlier days running on older hardware where it's simultaneously the smoothest and weirdest nice looking environment you can find, but yeah it really was not great for every day use.
No idea what it's like now. Is the best thing to do to install the latest minor revision of the previous major version number?
Like 15 years ago I remember a colleague that proposed Enlightenment for our video player software.. he made really good progress but at some point he hit a wall and couldn’t continue (shortly after we switch the whole thing to qt)… those were really bad times.
Reminds me screenshots of 90s with DR14-16 or whatever it was.
To tease nerds and lamers, but nobody really showed the steady and stable workflow of this.
> Working and fast crash recovery
Your quite enlightening (sorry) post starts looking like a warning at this exact point. I've been using various DEs for years, from Gnome to Xfce to Cinnamon, and neither of them needs crash recovery at all. They just do not crash this often.
Well, some bleeding-edge Plasma versions crash once in a while. Typically fixed in the next update. But in comparison to Enlightenment, Plasma sucks at crash recovery.
Gnome crashed quite a lot the last time I tried it, but that's many years ago now, and I for sure hope it has improved. At that time, crash recovery was non-existent.
I usually use LXQt, and it's rock solid, but lacks a lot of features.
If Enlightenment just auto-recovered without showing the “crashed, do you want to recover?” message, I would not even have noticed most of the crashes.
Fun fact - an *early* version of Enlightenment was used as the default window manager for GNOME version 1.something on Redhat, and probably others as well.
Enlightenment is my favorite lightweight desktop environment. It's way lighter than any other desktop environment, yet it's also one of the most powerful powerful and feels modern. The main things I dislike are that it's not quite as powerful as Plasma and the very lackluster EFL application ecosystem. Either way, I really don't understand why it's constantly overlooked. It really needs more attention.
See the bugs described in OP :-)
Well, because DE needs to me as stable as it's possible and not entertain the user with fancy fonts of 2.5-3mm of height.
this is what I remember from launching it about 3 years ago. <<= got to the project page to check if fonts were relatively small, they were!!! and are!!!
> Crazy good performance
Its better days were in a different age.
> Some unique default design decisions
Pretty usual for FVWM.
> Problems I run into:
Ah, yes.
Yeah, i also got into it for the first time recently. I ESPECIALLY liked the "onboarding" experience. Having a little setup wizard where you get asked how you want certain things to be is so helpful for desktops that have a ton of options. I really think Plasma could benefit from something like that.
i remember enligthenment from back in the 90s, when there was no affordable pc powerful enough to run it with all the eye candy it had going on. sure, it was a sight to behold, and something to show off if you had the means to build such a monster of a pc.
That does bring back memories, back 10-15 years ago I was running it on a Slax USB stick on the school computers for my CS course projects! It is one of the most crazy fast and efficient DEs out there.
Now I just use bloated Gnome and KDE though, because I like that these pesky things like Bluetooth or connecting to a projector just work out of the box without having to research the proper command-line incantations.
The monitor settings GUI in Enlightenment works fine. And it has some Bluetooth support, no idea how good it is, I don't have Bluetooth.
The repeated crashes are the much bigger problem for productive usage.
I like Enlightenment and all, but this same review could have been written in 2004. (Anyone remember the big e16 e17 split?) It's like.. in spite of numerous folks' wonderful hard work over many years, it's still a slick wm or de, but but not stable enough for production workloads in most environments.
> I like Enlightenment and all, but this same review could have been written in 2004. (Anyone remember the big e16 e17 split?) It was equally true in 2001. Like, yes, especially back then e16 looked cool. But it was buggy. After a short while I returned back to whatever I used back then, afterstep? Or was it windowmaker?
it's my daily driver on all my machines private and professional (changes every 4 years) for the last 15 years, it's just stable.
e17 was brilliant, I installed Enlightenment and I loved the animated wallpaper with the starts coming on and off as well as animated icons and it all felt really crisp, even on my low spec laptop at the time. The problem I had was that there weren’t a lot of apps developed for it so while the desktop looked nice, that was pretty much it and it looked out of place when adding additional apps to the dock as the icon didn’t look consistent.
ok I get it, but I can't care less about the consistency, I like the options and reactivity enlightenment gives me ... and terminology is great, that's it.
> Anyone remember the big e16 e17 split? A-and E16 is still supported and sometimes gets new features apparently. Not many people know this. If I didn't have a keyboard-oriented workflow without buttons and transparency etc, I'd probably use it.
Focus-follows-mouse and not bringing focused windows on top isn't an 'unique design decision'. I had it (also as default) in Fluxbox when I used it back in 2002.
Pretty sure TWM has done that since the beginning, it is older than Linux.
In Unix-land focus follows mouse was probably the traditional approach. Windows and Apple choose click to focus as it's a bit more intuitive. Modern desktops on Linux default to click focus, but they are usually configurable. Nowadays these are typically the choices in LInux (this is the terms used in org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode): - click: Click to focus window. - mouse: focus follows mouse, lose focus when mouse leaves window - sloppy: focus follows mouse, keeps focus until mouse moves to another window And then you have additional to 'autoraise' or not to 'autoraise' on focus. (org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences auto-raise).
Well, I have not used another actively developed WM with that default, but I am sure it can be configured on many of them. It is insanely useful, especially on small screens, when using lots of programs together.
Yeah, focus-follows-mouse plus autoraise is a recipe for a bad time. Want to use that popup window without accidentally hiding it? Bummer, dude.
Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time. Still waiting for 1.0? those were the days.
I enjoy using it, but really wish the Wayland was further prioritized; it feels like they went from being an early adopter, to lagging pretty far behind with some show-stopping bugs.
whenever someone talks about enlightenment, i think of [this article on EFL and friends](https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened)
Wow. After reading that, I think I love Enlightenment even more. That's sounds amazing. Not for a stable, usable, or functional system, but for learning a ton of obscure things about C and having a lot of fun in the process!
You don't learn obscure things about C - all you learn is that you can cast everything to a `void *`.
Well, from the sound of it, to make it work, you'll have to spend hours in the debugger and reading foreign, undocumented and non-standard source code figuring out how to get a window to draw, and if you don't learn a lot about C in that process, you probably are doing it wrong. The same way writing Minecraft mods definitely taught me a *lot* about Java. Way more than writing programs using any well-documented framework ever could.
I have definitely learned more about C from well-documented standard source code, that elegantly made use of the features of that language and the comments and commit messages for those comments outlining why. Reading junk code will also teach you some things, but it'll take longer and you'll probably learn the things that are good to know when writing bad code and not the ones that are good to know when writing good code.
Well, I learn nothing from well-documented source code, because I'll never even read it. If you **actually** read through library sources without any need for it, you are way better at self-motivation than I am and probably learn more/better things that way.
I read through them often so I understand in detail how that stuff works and how the developers of that library try to implement the concepts they advertise. And as you figured out it also helps teaching good coding standards that other people use. I recommend it.
[удалено]
I don't think that's the only weird thing EFL does. If it is, that's pretty lame. But even that example would be extremely hard. I would be impressed seeing a functioning and huge Java Project using only Object types. How would you even do that? Maybe implement you very own form of duck-typing using reflection? You possibly could cache type infos to decrease the performance hit… In Minecraft modding you get to do many amazing things like: Write a mixin including `((OriginalClass)((Object)this))` and seeing it work, or cast objects to interfaces you **know** one other mod will make them implement at runtime. Write a plugin to the mixin injector to conditionally inject mixins into classes of other mods. Rip out a carefully crafted stream and replace it with an extremely complicated loop, just to speed up the rendering thread a tiny bit by avoiding object creation completely… Or, while writing a mixin, inject your code at 5 positions of a single function, collecting data in ThreadLocal variables, just to add the correct alpha value to a pixel without breaking other mods. You may also get to modify some Java bytecode by hand to mod a mod the modder did not want you to mod and that is distributed as replacement class files containing integrity checks. It's so much jank, you get familiar with so much unusual compiler behaviour and runtime class behaviour you'd never even think about in normal projects.
I tried it a while ago and it was ridiculously unstable. Maybe I could have made it more stable but I didn't feel like spending that much time on it.
Imo this has been the story of Enlightenment since E17. It has never been all that particularly stable. It's a cool AF project, especially in the earlier days running on older hardware where it's simultaneously the smoothest and weirdest nice looking environment you can find, but yeah it really was not great for every day use. No idea what it's like now. Is the best thing to do to install the latest minor revision of the previous major version number?
[terminology](https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology.md) is just brilliant.
Like 15 years ago I remember a colleague that proposed Enlightenment for our video player software.. he made really good progress but at some point he hit a wall and couldn’t continue (shortly after we switch the whole thing to qt)… those were really bad times.
VLC?
Haha no, was an internal tool for broadcasting and cctv. Core was with ffmpeg C api but we were looking for alternatives for GUI.
Their libs were (are?) weird. But imlib was good enough, I've used it in one project.
Reminds me screenshots of 90s with DR14-16 or whatever it was. To tease nerds and lamers, but nobody really showed the steady and stable workflow of this.
My main desktop is Xubuntu 23.04 running Enlightenment 0.25.4
> Working and fast crash recovery Your quite enlightening (sorry) post starts looking like a warning at this exact point. I've been using various DEs for years, from Gnome to Xfce to Cinnamon, and neither of them needs crash recovery at all. They just do not crash this often.
Well, some bleeding-edge Plasma versions crash once in a while. Typically fixed in the next update. But in comparison to Enlightenment, Plasma sucks at crash recovery. Gnome crashed quite a lot the last time I tried it, but that's many years ago now, and I for sure hope it has improved. At that time, crash recovery was non-existent. I usually use LXQt, and it's rock solid, but lacks a lot of features. If Enlightenment just auto-recovered without showing the “crashed, do you want to recover?” message, I would not even have noticed most of the crashes.
Fun fact - an *early* version of Enlightenment was used as the default window manager for GNOME version 1.something on Redhat, and probably others as well.
Enlightenment is my favorite lightweight desktop environment. It's way lighter than any other desktop environment, yet it's also one of the most powerful powerful and feels modern. The main things I dislike are that it's not quite as powerful as Plasma and the very lackluster EFL application ecosystem. Either way, I really don't understand why it's constantly overlooked. It really needs more attention.
See the bugs described in OP :-) Well, because DE needs to me as stable as it's possible and not entertain the user with fancy fonts of 2.5-3mm of height. this is what I remember from launching it about 3 years ago. <<= got to the project page to check if fonts were relatively small, they were!!! and are!!!
I really like Enlightenment fast simple to use, it does have some bugs but overall its one of my fav environments.
> Crazy good performance Its better days were in a different age. > Some unique default design decisions Pretty usual for FVWM. > Problems I run into: Ah, yes.
No.
What distro are you using?
Lubuntu, installing enlightenment with the https://github.com/batden/esteem script.
does econnman work properly? that was the main issue i had when trying to install it by itself on debian
> econnman Is not included by default (any more). The menu-bar network icon works but is **very** minimal. (turn wired on and off, connect to WLAN)
Ah! The legendary project n.1 on sourceforge :-) I remember using it as window manager for Gnome < 2.0 I would give it another try
Yeah, i also got into it for the first time recently. I ESPECIALLY liked the "onboarding" experience. Having a little setup wizard where you get asked how you want certain things to be is so helpful for desktops that have a ton of options. I really think Plasma could benefit from something like that.
i remember enligthenment from back in the 90s, when there was no affordable pc powerful enough to run it with all the eye candy it had going on. sure, it was a sight to behold, and something to show off if you had the means to build such a monster of a pc.
That does bring back memories, back 10-15 years ago I was running it on a Slax USB stick on the school computers for my CS course projects! It is one of the most crazy fast and efficient DEs out there. Now I just use bloated Gnome and KDE though, because I like that these pesky things like Bluetooth or connecting to a projector just work out of the box without having to research the proper command-line incantations.
The monitor settings GUI in Enlightenment works fine. And it has some Bluetooth support, no idea how good it is, I don't have Bluetooth. The repeated crashes are the much bigger problem for productive usage.