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Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

iczelia.net

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

#31

Post by pjc50 »

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.

I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.

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

#34

Post by pjc50 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #2

E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module. I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished…

Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.

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

#35

Post by ChrisGreenHeur »

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…

eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do. the gpu simply has buffers that it compsits, the cpu can do that as well. with the benefit of less complexity leading to not needing to worry about driver crashes. on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway

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

#36

Post by pjmlp »

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).

Kind of similar story, eventually I ended up on GNOME, as I favoured Gtkmm over how KDE was at the time, but then GNOME 3.0 happened, and my travel netbook got migrated into Unity, and when it went away, XFCE.

Due to similar realisation, my main working devices became Window 7 with Virtual Box/VMWare Worstation, nowadays WSL.

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

#37

Post by sneak »

angled wrote: post #12
zeruch wrote: post #7

The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process. I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.

I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.

it’s not a valid enlightenment screenshot without a digital blasphemy wallpaper.

(digital blasphemy is still around and still selling art.)

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

#38

Post by pjmlp »

pjc50 wrote: post #31
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.

I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.

Win 11 has some niceties, however many of those could have been provided on Windows 10 as well, for example the security stuff like VBS and secured kernel were already available, even if disabled by default.

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

#39

Post by pjc50 »

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #35
pjc50 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do. the gpu simply has buffers that it compsits, the cpu can do that as well. with the benefit of less complexity leading to not needing to worry about driver crashes. on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway

> eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do.

True, but which is more efficient?

> on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway

Opinions differ. The main benefit of splitting RAM is not having to share the bus. As I said, this lets you use the CPU for CPU things without having to spend precious DRAM bandwidth shovelling pixels.

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

#40

Post by pjmlp »

mhd wrote: post #25
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.

Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason. Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping t…

Yeah, I got introduced to it via some friends that were former Amiga users.
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