Submitted by So, yeah, it’s been ten years in the making, including a number of rewrites, but the day has finally come: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which, surprisingly enough, form the foundation of, among other things, Enlightenment, have reached beta status. This is a major step towards the final release of Enlightenment DR17, which should hit before year’s end.
Sadly, I’m just not educated enough on subjects like this, but from what I understand from those that are, the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are pretty impressive, combining low resource usage with advanced functionality and great performance. With the support from companies like Samsung, development has been given an impulse, leading to this beta release.
“These libraries were created after E16 to help with E17, the goal was to build infrastructure to aid development of rich graphical user interfaces that would be both fast and easy to use,” the team writes, “They went through major rewrites over these past 10 years, but they have settled nicely over the past and now feel ready to be released.”
The libraries were already pretty stable (my usage of DR17 a few years ago was already quite pleasant), so the act of stamping them with beta is done to indicate the team has hit API and ABI stability. This could lead to more widespread usage of the EFL.
All this also means that the final release of Enlightenment DR17 will arrive before the end of this year. “After 1.0 final the work force will be put behind Enlightenment DR17 and Elementary, the widget set, with the goal to have everything 1.0 final before the end of the year,” the team adds.
I hope they’re not
But hey, DR17 getting released, DNF being released as well, what kind of vaporware will we be able to complain about now ?!!
Edited 2010-10-04 09:21 UTC
I^aEURTMm getting you a Phantom gaming console for Christmas
Yeah, I’m starting to wonder if hell froze over this year
There’s always the trusty GNU Hurd. It’ll probably remain vaporware for years to come. Unfortunately we’ve lost two projects to joke about, but at least one major one remains…
Edited 2010-10-04 09:53 UTC
Looks like 2011 will be the Year of Vaporware Condensing. Of course, then the world will end in 2012 but we can celebrate the Apocalypse playing Duke Nukem Forever.
Meh, Hurd doesn’t really count. I mean, anybody really believe that was ever going to come out?
Can’t they just kill hurd and switch over to making something like plan9 rock?
I don’t think “vaporware” means what you think it does….
It all started with the release of a new Starcraft…
We all go through this every now and then. Remember Wine 1.0? How about Mozilla 1.0? And I had similar thoughts when Star Craft II was released this year.
All in all as a long-time E16 user I am pleased to see E17 reaching maturity. You can really do some impressive things with it and I’d like some more modern E16 alternative that doesn’t suck. Remember when there were dozens of interesting window managers and everyone used something different? Now most people don’t know what a WM is, much less which they’re running. Metacity, compiz, kwin and the die-hard minimalists are all you really hear of these days.
I had exactly the same thoughts when I read the title.
What is happening to this planet, is the end really near?
No, that happens when the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.
Yeah, I mean even Duke Nukem Forever will finally come out next year. Seriously?
Vaporware ?
According to Slashdot this is old news. Enlightenment was released on 2003 april first: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/04/01/1423252/Enlightenment-goes-…
I just reminded the days when the enlightenment was one most recommended window manager with its eye candy and features. I am looking forward to tinker with it. Though would it be hard to port to mac’s x11?
http://wiki.enlightenment.org/index.php/E17_User_Guide/Installing_o…
@t3RRa : “Though would it be hard to port to mac’s x11?” It’s already working on Mac OS X. See
http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/MACOSX
I seem to have become a Linux user just in time. This was the first desktop that attracted me to Linux! This is the greatest news ever. I will have to start writting some programs for it ASAP. It seems like the jokes about it will be mute when its finished. I am already using despite it not being “ready”, and I love it! Its requirements are so low it runs on cell phones! It also has support for 3d windows I seen somewhere… I wish I could find it again.
Or as Joey Tribbiani said: “It’s a moo point. It’s like a cows point of view, it just doesn’t matter, it’s moo.”
We’re only waiting for the Hurd, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse.
You mean GNU/Apocalypse. </RMS>
Can’t wait to play Duke Nukem Forever on my Hurd/E17 box! The 3D drivers for Wayland make it run really smoothly on my ARM multicore! Truly next year is the year of the linux desktop!
(More seriously, yeah for the good news!)
Linux on the desktop ?
The desktop is already losing ground, the webstatistics from netapplications and statcounter show that:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-200909-2010…
This one is somewhat harder to read, it shows Windows, Mac and Linux (desktop) loose to iOS and other (mostly mobile):
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9
Well, those are percentages, so without raw data it could simply be that mobile OSs are growing faster than desktop, while the desktop still sells a stationary very high flow of devices every day.
That would not be surprising, considering that only few people currently own mobile devices that are good at web browsing, so there are lots of potential buyers once said devices start to become attractive.
We cannot conclude anything from this, because we’re comparing a mature market to an emergent market. It would be like saying in the 90s that lasers are going to outsell milling machines and drills for all machining jobs, using numbers showing that the industrial laser market share, which was nonexistent before, is growing, while the mature drilling&milling market is stationary.
Edited 2010-10-04 17:39 UTC
Seeing that “Linux on the desktop is dying, the stats prove it” comment, I was going to make a joke about combining Enlightenment’s vaporware/(un)dead status with the old troll-meme about “BSD is dying, the stats prove it”… ( http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1391352 )
and then I remembered I already had… 3 years ago!
http://www.osnews.com/comments/18736
Oh the hu… manity!
They should hold off until Jan 2012 just to make sure we are all *really* Fuc*ed
Who would of thought that R17 would ever *really* be released?
I can’t wait until January 1st, 2013… so I can point and laugh at everyone who seriously believes that the world will end in 2012.
I have it on good authority that the world will end on the 31st of December this very year! Oh… Wait, just need a new calendar…
I’m still not pleased that the EFL is just another ‘c’ GUI library that re implements the object model of c++ rather poorly. There’s nothing wrong with leveraging the small subset of the c++ object model, it really makes sense for GUI development.
frankly the entire linux desktop model is boring. Etoile/GNUStep looked interesting but it’ll be 2025 before they produce anything resembling a usable desktop.
“I’m still not pleased that the EFL is just another ‘c’ GUI library that re implements the object model of c++ rather poorly.”
You just don’t know how it works. It’s not at all like GObject. It does not try to implement an object model in C.
“There’s nothing wrong with leveraging the small subset of the c++ object model, it really makes sense for GUI development.”
Try to use QT on embedded devices, and have speed and low memory usage. It’s just impossible. As an Example : on a set top box running a MIPS @200MHz, QT was just not running, gdk was uber slow, Evas (the graphic part of the EFL) allowed animations at 25 fps.
QT isn’t light weight c++. It’s the epitome of bloat. Look at something more like fltk for something light weight that can be done with c++
Looking at the api it looks like emulating c++ objects with ‘c’. Noting all the c style namespacing there’s another low hanging fruit. Not to mention the function calls with 15+ arguments.
Edited 2010-10-05 14:26 UTC
“Looking at the api it looks like emulating c++ objects with ‘c’.”
There is only 1 object : Evas_Object. That’s all. And you say it emulates c++ objects ? Seriously…
“Noting all the c style namespacing there’s another low hanging fruit. Not to mention the function calls with 15+ arguments.”
If for you C++ is namespace and some (few) functions that take more than 10 parameters, you have a bad idea of C++. Talk about heritage, polymorphism, exceptions, template, etc… That’s C++. And all that stuff cost. C++ can be light but then slower than C. It can beat C in speed using meta programmation maybe but then the memory consumption is quite high.
We have chosen C for several good reasons. That’s a design choice.