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Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

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Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#121

Post by badsectoracula »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the more interesting things to think about is the big push to rendering all window manager stuff through a gpu, because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows.... Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.

> because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows As screens get larger, the amount of pixels you need to push to composite windows gets larger-squared. It makes sense to move the pixel pushing away from the CPU and more importantly away from CPU-RAM and on to a separate RAM bus. The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) saves memory at…

> The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X)

Same way, they both come from Macintosh (which, if i remember the apocrypha correctly, was Bill Atkinson's idea based on what he thought Xerox Smalltalk was doing even if it turned out it wasn't working like that).

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#122

Post by kdhaskjdhadjk »

pvtmert wrote: post #90

I liked the author's pragmatic take on the stability. Indeed that running bleeding edge now has implications to greater attack surface as the supply-chain attacks getting more and more common. A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past... > Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils…

To put a finer point on it: running bleeding edge does not just now have implications of a greater attack surface, it always has had such implications.

It's just that a tiny fragment of people are suddenly becoming aware of this fact (the masses always remain clueless), whereas others have known it for some time. These people are referred to as "crazy tinfoil hat nutters."

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#123

Post by badsectoracula »

sgt wrote: post #20
pjmlp wrote: post #9

Oh, people are still using Enlightenment. My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker. In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others. Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.

Funny, I was also one of those people who switched from E to WindowMaker. At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great. After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though. Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).

> At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.

I used (and still use) Window Maker for almost a decade before learning what NeXTSTEP actually was (i heard about the name occasionally but never looked into it), then for several years before even trying one. I remember having a heavy sense of uncanny valley because the thing in front of me looked almost exactly like what i was using for years but it behaved in very odd ways (and lacked most of the window management features i came to expect) :-P. It made me realize what people who were used to Mac OS X felt when they tried the various Aqua GNOME/KDE themes that were popular on Linux desktops some years ago.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#124

Post by arwineap »

BozeWolf wrote: post #11

I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo. I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however. To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.

Greetings from e27!

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#125

Post by arwineap »

rasterman wrote: post #76
cheschire wrote: post #45

https://www.enlightenment.org/ Seems down at the moment. Coincidence, or collateral hug?

that was literally me... i stopped it because... well.. short version - chasing bug in efl that blurted out an invalid object stdout errors when http requests for the forecasts module failed - the module relies on a caching proxy service on e.org to get weather forecasts. i simulated it a bit brute-force by temporarily taking down apache :) it's back and bug is fixed in git. it's silent now not complaining about inva…

Thank you for all your work on e, still my daily driver after all these years

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#126

Post by pino83 »

badsectoracula wrote: post #117
pino83 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> KDE 1? Yeah, compared to Win 95 at least, it looked interesting in a positive way... Problem was: Whenever you clicked on something, some message box appeared, with some one-line error message that contained the word "unknown" or "unexpected"... :)

With KDE1 is was most likely "Not yet implemented" :-) I never used KDE2, KDE3.x was rock solid though. It wasn't until KDE4 where things took a massive nosedive and everything was crashing if you looked at it wrong - something that lasted until most of KDE5's lifetime, though by late KDE5 and now KDE6 it seems to be fine. Well, "fine", for some reason Wayland sessions crash and restart the entire session whenever i…

No no, it always tried to do something, with a lot of self-confidence, but then constantly failed.

I can spontaneously remember k3b (CD burning tool) constantly failing because the CLI tools behind it (cdrecord, mkisofs, ...) replied in some way that k3b hasn't expected (e.g. because the locale was non-english, or the CLI tool devs changed the strings slightly, or there was a pointless warning text that k3b did not expect, ..., ...).

Admittedly, k3b was later... KDE3 era? But this is exactly how KDE1 felt... And in very bad days it still does today... You click on something, the developers assumed that the file manager can deal with it, but instead you just see the file manager saying "Unknown protocol" or similar. All the problems that arise when your system is very modular, but every module is a separate hobby project with no coordination.

I definitely loved KDE3 and was sooo excited about KDE4. And it was a pretty terrible disappointment. Nowadays I'm again fine with Plasma. Since mid KDE5 days.

> for some reason Wayland sessions crash

That's definitely a mess, too. I'm not fundamentally against Wayland. I'm using it right now. Even if it is still slightly broken today (yes, Wayland is a protocol; here I mean: the biggest implementations). But the entire Wayland story is very very sad. It took ages before it was at least usable for five minutes. And then everywhere the X11 support already gets disabled, while Wayland is still in a somewhat immature state. Sure, I somewhat understand what the devs say, and I can't force them anyways. But it's really not a success story for the Linux desktop.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#127

Post by kdhaskjdhadjk »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #46
BozeWolf wrote: post #11

I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo. I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however. To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.

They're up to e27 now, it even supports Wayland.

The dbus requirement is a hard pass from me.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#128

Post by kdhaskjdhadjk »

ryandrake wrote: post #116
pino83 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to K…

> Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots Yea, this was my memory of it, too. I remember installing it, and making a theme that looked all "elite" and cool. I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time. Took a few screenshots, basked in how cool I was, and then just switched back to whatever I was using before (I think Gnome).

Lots of teenagers were using it back then judging by the old themes, 95% of which suck. As an adult I made a simple, attractive theme, enabled only the most basic and useful eye candy, and just use it. None of the other alternatives interest me, and I've tried them all.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#129

Post by tangus »

somat wrote: post #103

"Sadly, the hang was deterministic" No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for. I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bl…

I guess they wanted to keep working on their slides (at least for the moment) and not be forced to go debugging. Sadly, the hang was deterministic, so they didn't have another option.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#130

Post by BeetleB »

somat wrote: post #103

"Sadly, the hang was deterministic" No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for. I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bl…

Back in the early 2000's, I used Enlightenment. I wouldn't have called it "lightweight", but it definitely was not heavy. It ran smoothly on my not-so-great-hardware. And definitely lighter than DEs like KDE/Gnome.

I stopped using it for other WMs. I remember how it was taking forever to release E17 and totally forgot about it. E16 was definitely awesome in those days.

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