One of the first wow-moments when I first installed linux (2003ish) was Enlightenment. I though it was very pretty, and quite different from the mainstream WMs. It was presented as a feature, not a bug, that development was slow: the people behind it wanted to take the time it took to get it right.
So I waited. I always installed it on new computers, but it never seemed quite ready to use.
I did the same today, and the feeling is the same as in 2003: it’s not quite there yet.
Hence the question: does anyone actually use it as their everyday WM?
Wait - you’re still running e16?!
My Linux journey started on fvwm2, but after that I ran enlightenment for a good few years. Probably from 1999 to 2005, when I switched to blackbox/fluxbox.
Today I expect a DE to have great integration for managing wifi/bluetooth. It wasn’t needed 20 years ago, because computers didn’t have these fancy things. I haven’t really tried enlightenment recently, but it feels like that’s where it’s lacking today.
Eh? You mean bluetoothctl and tray support?
Bodhi linux users do. Their Moksha desktop is based on Enlightenment, and the pace of development, while not speedy, is ongoing
‘not speedy, but ongoing’ - That sounds like E, alright …
I used E16 in early 2000 and it had really cool themes. It was the hot shit right beside the newest xmms skin for your pirated but fully tagged mp3 library (with picard) on your local hard drive.
I remember that one of the things that really blew me away was the virtual desktop pager which was a live miniature of the actual desktops.
I share the same experience. I remember back in the 00’s when it had the same allure but tbh nothing has changed that much.
Enlightenment has a fantastic feature set and some very interesting ways of using a Linux desktop.
But…the themes are just so 2005. It’s hard to look past that, or at least make it a little bit 2015 at the least.
Could you expand on that? What is exceptional about the feature set, and how does e use the desktop differently?
The virtual desktops functionality is miles above any other DE, specifically. The settings are really simple, and the options in the right click context menus are really well featured.
I did daily drive it for a couple of years sometime around then.
It was so beautiful, yet still performant on basic hardware because it was written relatively low-level iirc. It was like having the flashy UI that they used in movies (anybody remember the 3D filesystem browsers?), but for real and actually usable. And the aesthetics were in contrast to the other major DE of the time which were all kind of drab tbh.
But that was the main use case imo: nice UI for low-end hardware. Once other DE started looking nicer, partly due to leveraging GPUs, the niche nature of Enlightenment became more of a hindrance.
I haven’t looked at it in quite a while and don’t know what their current philosophy or design is but, if it’s still the same, I think it might still be an interesting alternative to XFCE or LXDE for somebody with older hardware that wants to experience a unique UI from a passionate team.
That 3D file system browser (I presume you’re talking about Jurassic Park) was totally real.
It was a tech demo that SGI included with IRIX called “fsn”. Ironically, at the time, many people criticised it for being unrealistic. There is an open source clone called “fsv”.
I think Budgie plans to move from GTK to ELF.
Wild theory, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they change to iced-rs when they realize they can’t do the work needed to get elf to do exactly what they want, and instead can ride off of system76’s insane development accomplishments in their new rust based ecosystem of desktop components.
Reasons it might happen: the blog post specifically mentioned wanting a new ui-toolkit that worked well with rust or go, but at that time s76 hasn’t announced or dived into developing iced-rs more. I think it even mentioned hoping that s76 would build an alternative.
