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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

#61

Post by pino83 »

mackman wrote: post #58
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…

E13 was a great, simple, good looking WM I used for years. Eventually moved to Fluxbox then back to macOS when it went Unixy.

In my personal experience - as far as I can remember - it always stopped to be good looking when it wasn't a screenshot anymore but a running process on my machine. In motion, all the eye-candy became ugly and foolish and visibly hobbyist, and as soon as I began using some applications outside of the E-ecosystem, the last sparks of fanciness went away anyways.

But that was... idk... E16 or so?! I really cannot remember. Maybe it had better times earlier, or maybe (surely) people are different and have different criteria for choosing such things.

Was E13 before they started trying to be a klingon starship UI?

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

#62

Post by ldng »

cdmckay wrote: post #60
PunchyHamster wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback

You can always fork it if you don’t like the choices they make That’s the point the OP is trying to make about the advantage of open source

And people did but it is hard against Redhat that has actively made harder and harder to use Gtk+ outside GNOME.

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

#63

Post by jimbosis »

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.

AV Linux uses Enlightenment 0.27.1. The creator of that distribution also offers a version based on Moksha 0.4.2, the E17 fork mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

https://www.bandshed.net/

Latest Version Release Announcement:

https://www.bandshed.net/2026/03/01/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...

A few more details from and older release announcement:

"Both ISO’s are built on an MX Linux 25/Debian Trixie base with Liquorix kernels."

https://www.bandshed.net/2025/11/27/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...

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

#64

Post by jdiff »

ldng wrote: post #62
cdmckay wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always fork it if you don’t like the choices they make That’s the point the OP is trying to make about the advantage of open source

And people did but it is hard against Redhat that has actively made harder and harder to use Gtk+ outside GNOME.

What changes have been implemented in GTK that make it harder to use outside of a GNOME environment?

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

#65

Post by vidarh »

pjmlp wrote: post #40
mhd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In '99 or so, I ran Enlightenment with Amiga-style draggable virtual desktops. As a former Amiga user, it made me very happy.

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

#66

Post by bandrami »

cdmckay wrote: post #60
PunchyHamster wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback

You can always fork it if you don’t like the choices they make That’s the point the OP is trying to make about the advantage of open source

That's happened like three times to the extent that the forks are more widely installed than the original

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

#67

Post by antisol »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #54
exitb wrote: post #44

It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.

Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback

Hey! Someone sneaked into my brain and wrote down my exact comment!

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

#68

Post by antisol »

pino83 wrote: post #55
wvh wrote: post #19

This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment. I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org…

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…

Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion floating point operations just to open a menu. And if you're using a current version they're responsive to bug reports and whatnot. It does most everything you could want. And it looks damn fine while it's doing it.

Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images! Right there in the terminal! Wow! I was compelled to point out that terminology has had that (and video playback, too) for a LONG time.

One of my favourite features of enlightenment is that it has this thing from back in the day called "configurability", where behaviours tend to be optional and you can decide for yourself whether you want them enabled or not. I know it's not fashionable anymore and maybe not for everyone but personally I think it's a better approach than the gnome-style "You'll take what we give you and be happy about it" approach which is in vogue these days.

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

#69

Post by antisol »

vidarh wrote: post #65
pjmlp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In '99 or so, I ran Enlightenment with Amiga-style draggable virtual desktops. As a former Amiga user, it made me very happy.

May I present: amiwm

https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiwm

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

#70

Post by pino83 »

antisol wrote: post #68
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…

Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion floating point operations just to open a menu. And if you're using a current version they're responsive to bug reports and whatnot. It does most everything you could want. And it looks damn fine while it's doing it. Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a w…

In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. So you could turn it on and live with its defects, or you turned it off and live without the feature. Linux Desktop was always full of that.

But yeah, I also do not like Gnome, because they more and more just removed the switches, but without spending effort to make things fine for everyone.

Plasma is so configurable, I've never seen anything more configurable. On any OS that I've seen.

My personal experience: Yes, you can also build your own environment out of blocks. And then you configure a lot. But not in order to customize it better, but in order to somehow glue these components together in a way that somehow remotely makes sense. :-/

And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? E is a graphical desktop, no? Based on X11 or Wayland. There are actual media players!! A lot. Not a single one is really great, but most will be better than the terminal, I guess. VLC is that bad?

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