In the final years of my high school career, more concerned with going out and drinking three times a week than with actually doing anything meaningful at my supposedly posh gymnasium, I rediscovered my love for computing – a love lost during the onset of aforementioned going out and drinking. Realising I would hit university soon, I saved up 2000 guilders, ordered the parts for a brand-new computer, and thanks to this then state-of-the-art computer, old flames were rekindled. Since this pun is burning a hole in my pocket – it was an enlightening experience.
One day, while perusing the magazine section of a supermarket in Oudorp, I came across a Linux magazine carrying a disk with Mandrake Linux on it. I don’t exactly recall which version, but I believe it came with KDE 2.x. Having heard of Linux before, I decided to just give it a go – it’s been pretty much downhill from there.
Those years were, to me at least, the golden years of digital experimentation. Even though the BeOS was already on its last legs, the sense of excitement about alternative operating systems was still very much palpable. During this time, several projects managed to squeeze their way into my heart – like BeOS (really?), QNX, KDE 3.x, and, yes, Enlightenment.
Enlightenment was the odd one out. Where both KDE and GNOME tried to build a desktop environment for the masses – in which they succeeded, in my view, only to throw their respective babies out with the bath waters – Enlightenment did its own thing. It was different from the rest, focussing on extreme customisability and copious amounts of digital glitter, and all this in a time before Quartz and Compiz.
Enlightenment, in its first 0.1 release in 1997, started out as a ‘mere’ window manager with narrowly defined goal of addressing the issue that “[every window manager] was gray bevels and UIs had to be plain to be functional or useful, and that computers/X11 were not capable of more”. It sure was capable of more – so much so, in fact, that E16 is surely not for the faint of heart, and sports so many options and abilities you can get lost forever.
E16 is old, but technically, so is its successor whose release we celebrate today. The first bit of code for Enlightenment 0.17 (yes, 0.17) was committed to cvs a long, long time ago. “The first wave of files were committed to CVS on Friday the 8th of December [2000] at 22:52:54 UTC. More will certainly follow in the next couple of weeks and months,” Martin Geisler wrote 12 years ago.
“I don’t think that it should be necessary to add, that I’m looking forward to this”, Geisler added back then, “I don’t have a release-date, because Raster and Mandrake doesn’t want to give any promises. When asked on the maillinglist, they promptly decided to add one week to the release-date, every time someone asked.”
I guess a whole lot of people asked about release dates, because here we are, more than twelve years later, and Enlightenment 0.17, or E17 for short, has finally been officially really actually released. However, most of us will know that E17 has been very usable for years now; I recall using it several years ago to great satisfaction.
So, has E17 stuck to its roots, or has it, like many other similar products, lost its way trying to focus on a specific type of mythical user that doesn’t really exist? You will be relieved to know that E17 is every bit as configurable and themeable as its predecessor, and that the developers see this as a core aspect of the Enlightenment user experience.
Music to my ears:
Enlightenment has so many options, because we believe that CHOICE is important. If you don’t believe that your preferences matter, then maybe another project is better for you, but we firmly believe that they do. We also believe that there are others who have different preferences to you and that they matter too. We may not have accounted for every single option out there. We may not have presented it to you in a way that makes it child’s play to find and use, but we have tried.[…]
Sometimes options are dangerous, but necessary for some people. Sometimes they are so dangerous that they are buried under layers of complex systems to try and keep them from being mis-used. Sometimes they are just, by nature, complex, and that’s life. In the end, choice is good. That means that options and configuration are important. We’d love to streamline how they are presented, and make it easier for the “Average Joe”, but never shall we do this at the expense of the power user.
Part of this is a focus on bringing all that Enlightenment has to offer to older and less powerful systems too. “We have gone to a lot of effort to make Enlightenment scale from anything like a 200Mhz ARM phone with 32M RAM all the way up to the latest multi-core, 64bit multi-Ghz and 16GB+ desktop beasts with 2 or more screens,” the team states. In other words, whatever machine you have lying around for testing, E17 will most likely work.
By this point, it’s important to explain what, exactly, Enlightenment 0.17. While E17 is still a window manager, it’s also a desktop environment – but most of it actually consists of lower-level libraries. About 80% of Enlightenment’s code are the libraries powering the environment, which means it’s a lot more than what you see on the surface. From bottom to top, E17 is unique and custom.
I’ve just made space on my laptop for Enlightenment 0.17, and I can’t wait to get going. E17 feels like it’s mooning KDE and GNOME, like it’s flipping the bird at the current trend of every project targeting some sort of mythical ‘ordinary user’ which either doesn’t exist or which they won’t attract anyway.
It’s a throwback to that time when I bought my first own computer for university, which only ended up as a battle-hardened sandbox for whatever I could coax into running on it. Now that I’m closer to 30 than to 25, have an accountant, and worry about things like the state of the housing market and the resale value of my car, E17 is just what I need.
Screw you, convention.
I might be wrong, but after installing some pre-release of 0.17 I’ve got a feeling, that, actually, Enlightenment is mainly about “nice looking” desktop.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but – on the other hand – after trying it a few days, I’m back on IceWM, which IMHO gives me if not more, then at least similar level of “customization”.
No, it doesn’t offer “translucent windows”, available in E17, it doesn’t offer “wizards” for configuration (but I’ve got no problem with editing text config files) – but actually, after these few days I noticed, that I don’t need that much of eyecandy.
I agree: maybe there are many people, who do – but that’s why I’m asking: is E17 anything more, than “nice looking desktop environment” (since what I can have using IceWM is nice enough for me)?
The answer is in the article: it’s a stack of libraries that you can make such a desktop with, or anything else you want to create.
yep, Tizen is based on EFL
I guess it’s possible to theme e17 “like icewm” (and without all the bling) – and it would probably be faster than the original.
It’s quite amazing what their libraries are capable of.
yes, faster and consume even less memory, of course.
Do you know terminology ? Look at http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology&l=en and the videos on that page
And is it possible to make it *NOT* messing with fonts? E17 makes all the fonts a bit blurry. And switching antialiasing to “none” in “look -> fonts -> hinting/fallbacks” didn’t help.
This is why I don’t use E16 or E17. The fonts hurt my eyes.
I could be wrong, but I think E17’s “pitch” when it first came out was that it could (supposedly) do most of the things other desktop environments could with less resources. It included it’s own file manager, some effects/compositing, had some sort of desktop grid feature or “shelves” or something, and could also support external modules.
But yeah, it always seemed a more “bling” based environment to me as well. Couldn’t really gel with it myself, but I tend to prefer tiling or box type WMs, so I won’t say my opinion of it is fair in any sense. Always good to have choice, though.
If I recall correctly, E17 got a bit more PR when it came with gOS (Ubuntu based, I think), a distro with lots of Google & Web2.0 services built into it. Had a sort of OSX-on-a-budget look about it. Dead project now.
E17 has a tiling mode that you can get at first start from the configuration manager.
Take a look at Bodhi Linux or Elive. They are based on E17 too.
however the developer of Bohdi Linux is a massive blowhard.
Care to expand on that? What makes Jeff a “blowhard”?
Just look at his blog.
I’ve seen his blog. I don’t understand your point. What, specifically, makes him a “blowhard”?
“Lucas_maximus” likes insulting people, not searching for reasons.
Edited 2012-12-27 15:18 UTC
Of course, especially unlike you.
Pot meet kettle in dayglo orange.
:eyeroll:
I don’t make my own linux distro.
I have to admit that I was never too much of a fan of Enlightenment’s eye candy myself either. Sure, it can look pretty… but I just never really wanted all that extra stuff. Something about the overall feel of it also felt awkward to me. One thing I can seriously compliment it on, though, is its ability to perform those effects with so few resources; it barely even works up the processor, let alone even needing fancy 3D hardware acceleration from a GPU to perform its animations.
Edited 2012-12-23 01:25 UTC
A question I always ask. Did they ever add wireframe resize/move in addition to their opaque modes?
I remember E16 and didn’t really use it, and E17 was basically the Duke Nukem forever when I was using Debian.
Glad that they have a good back-end API, should be useful for people wanting to make applications.
I was an Enlightenment 0.16 user for a long time and I still remember that the first time I read the expression “desktop shell” was on Enlightenment website’s own description of Enlightenment 0.17.
Technically E17 is amazing, but the biggest problem, in my opinion, is that the formal release took so long. The mantra “release early, release often” should have been taken more seriously by the Enlightenment team. That way they could have gained much more traction on the community.
Distributions including Gentoo have been packaging SVN snapshots for at least five years now. My first experience with e17 was on Arch in 2008. This is just the “ok, we’re done, we really mean it, go nuts” release.
I use Linux Mint, and it’s one of those times where the central repository model really shows its weakness. There’s no packages for my distribution yet, so I would need to compile E17 from source myself (which I won’t do, as it takes too much time).
If this would be Mac or Windows or BeOS or AmigaOS or any other not-linux type OS, there would be a neatly prepared installer for me – but not here. These developers do not have the resources to take care of all the different distros – they could just as well be different operating systems.
But it’s been over a decade since Linux matured to a stable and productive state. Linux devs still haven’t figured out how to distribute binaries in a userfriendly way (unless you figure that the centralized repos give you all the bliss you’ll ever need). It means that the app developers can’t reach their users directly, but will have to depend on third parties to do it for them. I don’t know if this distance between the developers and the users is a plus or a minus.. (Then again, in the case of Gnome 3, the developers couldn’t really be bothered with users in the first place, unless they are also Gnome developers…).
I’d really like to try this DE, as I liked the older version back in the day. I guess I will just have to wait till some Mint user packages this. But it has to be said – the way Linux is designed for software distribution could be improved.
Edited 2012-12-22 22:50 UTC
You don’t want a desktop environment distributed as a single binary or a single installer. Yes, I see you believe you do, but you don’t. E17 is a window manager, but also a collection of libraries that may or may not be installed before you get “E17”. It needs system level integration, and you’ll get that soon enough. Just be patient.
Yes I do want it, and I *could* have gotten it
Even if it would be a GUI to compile the whole thing (and later, uninstall if possible) – I would want a GUI.
If you are telling me that it’s not possible to install a framework and a set of apps with an installer then you must be relatively new to computers. An installer is a solution to the exact problem I’m having, and it’s being done every day on every platform other than *nix systems (well, even *nix systems I’d imagine, even though most Linux developers prefer other people package for them).
I’m not telling you it’s impossible, the problem is it’s going to be a mess of incompatible libraries installed in various locations. Library hell.
Installers are fine for games and smaller application suites. It’s not a solution to your problem, which is impatience. There’s no installer for E17, so it doesn’t solve the problem of there being no packages either.
> If you are telling me that it’s not possible to install a framework and a set of apps with an installer then you must be relatively new to computers.
Of course, it’s “possible”, but on Linux platforms it’s highly “undesirable”. This is because, unlike Windows, it actually has a common installer (rpm or dpkg) and repo system (yum or apt-get) already, so to be frank, anyone writing their own installer for Linux binaries should be taken out around the back and whipped to within an inch of their lives
What devs need to do – and they often epicly fail at this – is to actually make it easier for the distro maintainers to build an RPM/.deb/whatever out of their source code. This means making sure that everything installs into the appropriate trees, including necessary package config files (e.g. .spec files for RPM) and so on.
Having said all this, it does highlight one of the majorly broken issues of package installation on Linux – there needs to be *one* binary package format and *one* repo format before this mess ever gets properly cleared up.
It would also be nice if everyone agreed the same install trees too – if all of the above happened, we might see the day where everything in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentoS/RHEL and openSuSE is completely interoperable/installable. Sadly, the chaos we’re in doesn’t look like sorting itself out any time soon.
It should be noted that Windows is actually worse mess – no central repo across all apps (Windows Update is MS products only, which is ludicrous) and there are literally hundreds of different installers written out there which have wildly variable behaviour.
Custom binary installers are *not* the way to go and yet Windows people seem to happy to use them. The problem with those installers is there’s often no easy way to tell what or where they’ve installed or if they’ve left anything behind on uninstallation (which they often do). It’s exactly why Windows PCs get into a mess as they go through installations and uninstallations of third-party software.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the purpose of OpenSuSE’s factory service? (To make it easier for developers to make the latest releases of their software available for install via yum.)
Confusing.
Select one of the myriads installers for Windows – it will work for Windows.
Select one of myriads repos (or w/e) for Linux – it will work for Linux (Debian) but not for Linux (Fedora, SuSE, Arch, Gentoo, etc).
And Linux also becomes a mess – leftover log, configuration files. Same as Windows. Doesn’t work any slower, you just lose some kilobytes of space from your storage which has more than terabyte.
Central update – well duh. That isn’t how Windows software works. I just cannot fathom how quality software could be upgraded via free of charge to newest version. When Ubuntu will be able to upgrade my Photoshop, Visual Studio, Sony Vegas or w/e via apt-get upgrade, then this “central” thingy argument might work. Right now – woo new updates for some random libraries that a non factor programs uses and I don’t get any new features/performance. Woo exciting indeed.
How Windows is a mess again?
Edited 2012-12-25 11:57 UTC
Except none of those even run on Linux in the first place so why would the upgrade work? Logic, you fail it.
That’s like complaining that Windows can’t update my Linux e17 installation.
Know what you mean, but this is one of the things that makes Linux strong – installation is not modular at all. That means the dummies can’t just go and click away installing things.
Usually when I do software maintenance on user’s Windows machines, this kind of thing is a disaster, they just click away a .EXE file and load up ten different toolbars in IE, they don’t even uncheck stuff like this when installing adware apps.
Edited 2012-12-22 23:11 UTC
Nothing is stopping the E-17 team from builidng packages for Mint.
Only if the E-17 team made one and if they can’t be bothered to build debian packages why would they have bothered with installers?
Yes they can, they only need to create a deb or rpm and make it available. It’s not much more difficult than creating a Windows installer really.
https://launchpad.net/~efl/+archive/trunk
Here you go my friend. Works fine for me in Mint.
Also works well on Ubuntu.
Well, aside from the fact that dual-monitor doesn’t seem to work and all gtk apps looks like ass now (but that was expected).
On the plus side, the default theme is a big improvement and terminology seems to be quite nice.
Look at the control panels you can turn on gtk themes in e17
Or you can use google Easter than complaining about pointless eye candy crap (but that is the sate of the Ubuntu community. )
Yes, I figured that out pretty quickly and dual-monitor can be fixed by running xrandr manually on each login.
Oh the irony of being told this by an e17 user…
If I remember well, back in very early 2000’s, there was an announcement about E17 in their site saying: “When it is going to be released? Probably never. Yes, probably E17 will never see the light of day. But then who knows”.
Sense of humour, as they say, just went too far. I took this seriously.
I am really sad to be using OS X instead of linux. Really, I would switch were it not for the couple of things I have too fastened with Mac’s system.
E16, which I used until I changed my computer 6 years ago was unbelievable and I guess E17 is even better.
Kudos.
FYI, I know that some people have installed e17 on Mac OS X and are using it
E developers claim that strength of E is in it’s underlying libraries but I don’t see any real benefit of using them over let’s say – Qt.
I always seen E as hobbyist project without any chances of gaining enough popularity to become an alternative. While it was fun to play with its eyecandy features before anyone else had them (especially on low end platforms) it for some reason couldn’t hold to be my desktop. There were stability issues, incompatibility issues, things I couldn’t do, features I liked that only other desktops had, etc.
Nowadays even modest platforms have decent hardware support for 3D graphics so (in my opinion) E will shrink bit by bit until everyone will loose interest in it.
To me E is like the demoscene of 8/16 bit era so I’m putting it on the same shelf as my C64 emulator and an archive of software for it. Those were magical times so it is not bad place.
Merry Christmas to you all!
EFL is sponsored by Samsung and the Tizen Association.
http://www.tizenassociation.org/en/
Edited 2012-12-24 14:59 UTC
Consuming more and more resource will never be a problem… The fact is that even with high end desktop it take times to start a KDE session or a GNOME one. Also when moving to a more mobile, battery dependent, world, using less memory and being more efficient give you a direct benefit. That is not going to vanish soon.
Also EFL is a free software project, it exist for a long long time with and without the support of big corporate sponsor. It was created to make it possible to create a file manager more easily than directly using Imlib2 and still be light, fast and beautiful. We didn’t choose any of the existing toolkit, because none of them matched the goal we had and they still don’t match.
And I have been hearing for the last decade, that writing efficient software wasn’t necessary as we will soon have bigger CPU/GPU, but reality is that we still need to care about that… Oh, and the need for the software backend, is just that in many many many case OpenGL driver are just to buggy or inefficient to be used !
I get the complaints about Unity, Gnome3, and win 8 but KDE? I think its probably more tweakable than e17, especially with the whole plasmoid collection.
But I can’t really comfortably use E17. It’s very impressive how smooth all the animations are and stuff, but as much as I configure it I can’t get it working how I want it in the same way as I can with KDE. There seems potential there to make a great desktop environment, but it seems lacking in a lot of places.
I made a little video review showing some of the major aspects of e17: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9pd1qR3tvo