The Enlightenment desktop's development team reports:
The E19 Release Cycle has concluded. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way.
Major changes since the last stable release include:
Features:
- greatly improved wayland support
- E_WL_FORCE environment variable for forcing output types
- e_uuid_store: Add infrastructure to store window/surface properties.
- Add a tiling profile.
- per-screen desklock logo visibility config
- Tiling: Merge the tiling module rework..
- check udisks1 DevicePresentationHide flag
- ACTIVATE_EXCLUDE window active hint policy
- show video resolution in filepreview widget
- add fileman option to clamp video size for video previews
- handle xrandr backlight using a single, accurate handler
- blanking options for wakeup on events (urgent + notify)
- packagekit module for package manager integration
- ibar now optionaly triggers its menu on mouse in
- selective redirection toggling
- new focus option "raise on revert focus"
- add PIN-style desklock for lokker module
- make desklock hookable, break out current desklock into module, move pam stuff to separate file
- revive personal desklock passwords
- allow moveresize visuals to be replaced
- allow desk flip animations to be handled completely externally
- E16-style live pager returns!
- comp config is no longer a module
- E_FIRST_FRAME env variable
- new compositor API
- add E_MODULE_SRC_PATH for setting current module src path without needing to install modules
- use non-recursive makefiles for entire build system
Improvements:
- filemanager popups no longer span multiple monitors
- system operations no longer dim screen until action has begun
- window stacking and focus restore is more accurate across restarts
- gstreamer1 is now used for media previews
- improved multiple monitor setup reliability
- shaped windows now render more accurately
Phoronix notes
The Enlightenment E19 update is a huge upgrade over E18 or E17, especially if you're an early Wayland adopter.
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Enlightenment E19 Officially Released With Its Own Wayland Compositor
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @11:50AM
Is there any distro that offers a good Wayland experience out of the box? The last time I looked into it, it sounded like a real pain to install it on a typical Linux system. I just don't have that much time to waste these days!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tynin on Friday September 19 2014, @11:58AM
Its been a decade since I really used Enlightenment, but at the time I loved it. I'd not mind giving it another try over the weekend. Can anyone share their user experience in using the more current versions? Is it still highly modifiable? Does it have documentation on working with it? Do you feel like it does what you need it to?
Thanks!
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @12:04PM
it feels like a lightweight yet shittier version of XFCE still, sadly.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @12:31PM
Last time I tried it, as soon as I made a few changes to the options/layout it crashed and burned.
XFCE is really much better.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Drake_Edgewater on Friday September 19 2014, @12:32PM
I have Enlightenment DR-17 in my laptop. Debian doesn't seem to have the packages for the last E, so I had to compile it from sources (script/svn, more information here [debe17.com]).
It was a REAL pain, but I'm a big fan of Enlightenment, so I think it was worth it.
There is a modified Debian distribution called Elive [elivecd.org], but I really wanted a standard Debian installation.
I can't understand why the packages aren't already available in Debian. I used Enlightenment nearly a decade ago too, and at that time I installed it easily via apt-get. It was not the newest version, but I really liked it. Now, I can't find it in the last stable Debian release at all.
I might try E19 during the weekend.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday September 19 2014, @06:36PM
Haven't used it in years either, thre was a big gap in development where it wasn't touched for years.
Rather than linking to only the download page the link should have been to the Project's home page [enlightenment.org] since the download page, oddly, has no back-links.
The best page to explain it all is here [enlightenment.org].
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tempest on Friday September 19 2014, @01:04PM
If you were using e16 it was just a (very) fancy window manager. More recently I have a few laptop setups. I didn't feel like installing KDE and it's million sub-parts (never liked Gnome), yet I wanted something more elaborate than Fluxbox. Enlightenment came to mind and I was presently surprised how its changed. Enlightenment now has a file manager, panel for launching applications aside from obviously providing window management. Enlightenment provides eye candy and just enough basic functionality, WITHOUT trying to do EVERYTHING. I just added dmenu and it does everything I needed in a desktop environment (including staying out of my way with annoying shit I don't need).
I have found it very picky with opengl. If your opengl drivers are buggy, you're going to have problems, or more likely it simply wont work at all. Laptops chip-sets being what they are, I found it hit and miss getting it working, but I'm happy with Enlightenment on the ones that do. It also uses its own binary formats for storage/configuration. The configuration setup module is a pain in the ass, but you can't just break out a text editor to fix settings either, which is annoying but an design trade off.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Arik on Friday September 19 2014, @04:03PM
That doesnt sound like a trade-off, that sounds like a flat loss.
I have used E on and off for years and always been a fan. I was thinking about trying the new version out today. But binary config files? Screw that.
It's a real shame, Rastman always impressed me, I hate to see someone like that go full retard but... binary config files? Yeah that's trash.
I guess I will just continue to be happy with WindowMaker then.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday September 20 2014, @06:55AM
It's a trade-off in the sense that it trades usefulness and a good Unix design for something more convenient for embedded systems like refrigerators [youtube.com]. I have the impression that Enlightenment is more about the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) than the desktop these days, and the focus is on putting it on various oddball systems that will need a GUI.
Not really a surprise, if you think about it. The whole thing is BSD-licensed, so it's a juicier target for areas filled with custom solutions like "smart" devices that all have their own GUIs. Companies like Samsung and ProFUSION (the maker of that fridge in the previous link) get the bulk of the work done, and all it costs them is a bit of "sponsorship" occasionally...
You probably aren't missing much. The last time I tried it post-E16 days the desktop part felt like an afterthought, like its only purpose is to showcase the GUI toolkit and utilities. I didn't stay with it.
I used to use WindowMaker religiously, and still throw it on systems with low specs sometimes, though I tend to use KDE because of its configurability and suite of applications (which I generally like).
I recently found a tiling window manager, called notion [sourceforge.net], that I've been spending time with and enjoying. It's static tiling, with the ability to create, save, and reuse layouts manually, and the option of having multiple apps in a single tile, as tabs. It also handles multiple displays fairly well and can have multiple workspaces (virtual desktops) per-monitor, with arbitrary tile layouts in each. Oh, and it has mouse control in addition to keyboard shortcuts, instead of forcing one specific use case on everybody.
I've always liked the idea of tiling WMs but hate the dynamic tiling, so this hits a sweet spot for me. Notion may even replace windowmaker for me on desktops that don't always have a lot of space, like small laptops and remote X sessions. Only thing I don't like is I haven't found a way to show the root window underneath notion's "empty" tiles, but that's not much of an issue for small screens.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday September 21 2014, @03:08AM
I still use KDE applications, just not the window manager. Even on a new fast machine it always feels clunky somehow. And even after I spend an hour going through and setting up sloppy focus and finding a NeXT theme and then going through and manually going through every setting... I still find myself sitting there a couple days with a serious look on my face, switching back to WM, and instantly smiling.
It's not *bad* - I am a huge fan of customization and I am glad it offers so many options and someday when WindowMaker just cant be used for some reason that's what I expect to fall back to. But ultimately it seems the only option I really want in a window manager is the 'be WindowMaker' option. There's something about those gradients, combined with a proper dock and a super-clean, super-fast, super-responsive GUI that just adds up to put a smile on my face. It's not fancy, it's minimalist even, understated, but everything necessary is placed in easy reach, looks great, and responds instantly to your every command. The perfect shell.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday September 21 2014, @05:07AM
I happen to like kwin + plasma (the KDE parts that are generally equivalent to something like windowmaker), mostly because of how flexible they are. Different panels on different displays as needed, plus window rules for placement, sizes, and custom overrides to window types and such to bypass misbehaving apps' idiocy. Titlebars turned off to save space, with common titlebar actions replaced by shortcuts (left/right mouse + meta for resizing and moving, for example). Plus some other stuff, like activities and the way you can put plasma's widget-app-things in the bars or on the desktop and have them behave appropriately, which works well with how I use multiple monitors; I tend to use certain displays for certain tasks, so I have different launchers, taskbars, etc. for different screens. Helps reduce mouse travel and taskbar clutter by keeping open apps only visible on their relevant screen, for example.
There aren't many WMs/launchers that are flexible enough to suit me while working well with more than two displays, so I find the warts of Plasma (kwin is top-notch, most of the gripes come from plasma) to be worth the benefits. Of course, if I had to set everything up from scratch from a plain KDE4, I might find that annoying; I started with a fairly vanilla configuration and made individual tweaks as I went, rather than changing everything at the start. Now I just keep the config backed up and use it as a starting point on new systems.
That said, WindowMaker's still one of my favourites. Started with AfterStep because GNOME 1.x, while impressively blingy and decent (for the time), ran like a dog on my AMD K5. Used that for a while, then found out about WindowMaker and made the switch. Stuck with that until midway through KDE 3.5's lifetime, which was the first time I liked another environment enough to replace WindowMaker. Even on better hardware, I stuck with WMaker because I hated all the alternatives of the time. I found KDE 1 and 2 to be crap, and GNOME2 to be unconfigurable* crap, so I stuck with WMaker for a very long time and still use it occasionally.
It's great inside a nested X session (Xephyr), as one example; or in VMs, VNC sessions, and on devices with small screens or slow hardware. Any place I don't need the fancy parts of plasma and kwin, basicaly.
It's funny how the heavyweight GUIs of old become the lightweights over time. I remember WindowMaker being "like AfterStep, but nicer if you have the hardware for it" and now it's fast on everything because it hasn't changed much while hardware's improved. Well, some things; people still act like X is a horrible resource hog, despite running on systems hundreds of times more powerful than it was originally made to run on.
Going to say it again, because it's definitely worth trying out: I'm really digging notion for the low-resource or small-screen environments. Hell, I'm tempted to give it a try on my main system (four displays) because it handles multi-display setups well, though I'd have to work out some replacements for some of the KDE customisation I have before that would be a viable replacement. First tiling WM I've actually liked using, and the first WM I've tried and liked in a long time aside from WindowMaker and KDE's setups. (Xfce is okay, but never really found a compelling reason to use it vs. WM or KDE)
---
* I find it deliciously ironic that the GNOME2 fans complain about GNOME3 removing features and having no flexibility, because the same thing happened with GNOME2 -- which was less flexible than GNOME1, WindowMaker, KDE, etc. -- but everyone seems to have forgotten or missed it by coming into Linux too late. The GNOME crew just did the same thing again with 3, that's all.
(Score: 5, Informative) by zafiro17 on Friday September 19 2014, @02:29PM
I've been using it intensively for about 2-3 years, on the Bodhi Linux distro, which is basically Ubuntu with an optimized Enlightenment desktop on it. All I can say is "wow." It's got gorgeous graphical effects that augment the experience instead of being eye candy. And it does some pretty spectacular things using fewer resources (memory, mostly) than the other distros. It ran like a champ on my Atom netbook with 1G of RAM.
It took a day or two to figure out. It's just slightly different than other desktops. But once you figure out how Enlightenment organizes its functionality into gadgets, modules, and shelves, it's smooth sailing after that. I wrote about Bodhi here: http://pipedot.org/story/2014-09-13/jeff-hoogland-announces-hell-step-down-as-leader-of-bodhi-linux [pipedot.org]
Note: the advantage of Bodhi over some other distro is that because Bodhi is the only desktop they provide, all their energy goes into making it smooth. I was so impressed that I installed E17 on my openSUSE box, and it wasn't as good because the SUSE folks hadn't done as thorough a job of integrating it. There's a good intro to E17 (and E18, E19) at Bodhi's site here: http://www.bodhilinux.com/e17guide/e17guideEN/ [bodhilinux.com] And this Youtube video is a pretty good look at what E17 actually looks like and how it works. Prepare to be impressed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kai0fobyHRc [youtube.com]
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 4, Informative) by jdccdevel on Friday September 19 2014, @02:39PM
I use E17 on my daily workstation. (Haven't had a chance to upgrade to E18 yet, now I'm going to have to try E19)
The main attraction for me is the virtual desktop handing. Enlightenment is the only window manager that I've ever seen that handles multiple monitors and virtual desktops the way I like, without xorg.conf acrobatics. E17 lets me change the virtual desktop on each monitor independently, while still allowing me to move windows between monitors. I haven't seen any other desktop environment that lets me do that. If you've never tried it using multiple monitors like that, you don't know what you're missing.
I like my desktop to be really minimal, and get out of my way. E17 does that really well. It's super configurable, with lots of modern eye-candy. There's lots of themes, etc.
The main downfall I see is that it's SO configurable, that it takes some time to get set up exactly the way you might want. The Default theme is really basic, that's why some people are comparing it to XFCE. Most people customize their configuration quite heavily. Check out some of the themes [e17-stuff.org] to get a better feel for how it can be customized.
The documentation is quite good, and the community was really helpful. I'm not the kind of person who constantly tweaks their desktop though, so it's been a while.
Before E17, I used a FVWM setup (essentially unchanged since '98), which treated each monitor independently (the way I like), but you couldn't drag windows between monitors. The reason I switched is because for fvwm to work the way I like requires xorg to be set up using "zaphod heads". That turns off accelerated graphics (i.e. composting) on most modern video cards, and isn't well supported.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday September 19 2014, @03:06PM
Bodhi Linux uses Enlightenment. I tried it about a month ago, and didn't like it. The fancy animated icons were bad enough. I was trying it out on a decade old cheap computer with horrid Intel integrated graphics, and the last thing I wanted to see was excessive CPU cycles devoted to bling. But what killed it for me were the bugs. The desktop was always crashing and restarting, or just freezing up.
Checking, I see that Bodhi Linux has been discontinued. The maintainer doesn't have time for it any more, and is asking for someone to take it over.
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Friday September 19 2014, @03:24PM
It's very likely your hardware had something to do with it - you say it was a decade old? I also installed Bodhi on a Pentium 4 from about 2010, and it wasn't great. The Atom chip was much better suited, and of course a gig of RAM was important. Bodhi isn't a lightweight distro for older hardware - you'd want something like PuppyLinux for that. But on modern hardware, you get a lot more functionality out of an E17 desktop than you do XFCE.
It's also the only other desktop I know of (other than Mac OSX) that lets your gadgets (calculator, flight checker, dictionary) stay off-screen until you hit F10 or something, when they come flying into view. I really hate the KDE approach of "the widget is on the background of your desktop all the time." I really think Mac OSX got it right here and was glad E17 lets you do the same thing.
My other well-liked feature is the "Run Anything" gadget that with Win-Space or whatever combination you choose, lets you do some great things. KRunner is similar and maybe just as good, and Quicksilver on the Mac is a good way to describe what it does. But I find it immensely useful.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday September 19 2014, @04:44PM
Yes, I did run into hardware issues. As I recall it was a Dell, made in Dec. 2002, with a 2GHz Celeron, 768M RAM, and Intel i845 graphics. There are several issues with old Intel graphics and binary modules. The Flash plugin binary is the biggest pain to get working. On that computer, just for Flash, you have to manually configure XWindows to use the older and slower SNA acceleration rather than UXA. But, if you switch to SNA, all kinds of other graphics functions break because libraries for SNA are no longer included by default. I decided Flash wasn't worth the pain or the performance hit.
Also, it's critical to have current drivers for Intel integrated graphics. Drivers from a few years back were very buggy, and would freeze the computer maybe after 15 minutes of use, or maybe after 5 ours. Then, I had to switch to VESA drivers to work around that problem. Go back to SNA, and I'd probably be dealing with that again.
An issue I ran into with Flash on an old AMD box was a lack of SSE2 in the CPU. AMD was slow to the party on SSE2, and that particular computer was among the last made that did not have it. Flash doesn't generate an error, but the user sees only a blank black rectangle where the Flash animation should be. The solution is to downgrade to the last Flash binary that does not require SSE2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @09:00PM
Puppy can be useful as a maintenance tool (a <150MB download makes it attractive).
It installs, however, as a single-user OS.
If you have a spouse or child or houseguest with whom you might share that computer, it isn't the ideal setup.
(It's often said that Puppy runs as root, but, in truth, a password is required to do anything harmful.)
antiX (pronounced "Antiques") is a much better suggestion for ancient, anemic hardware.
There's a post in the antiX forum where a guy got it installed and running on a box with 48MB of RAM.
Lots of other not-much-oomph hardware instances cited there as well.
I've recently seen StiTaz recommended again for anemic boxes.
I haven't played with that in quite some time.
Brad Rodriguez has a table of lightweight and light-ish distros. [goodbyemicrosoft.net]
It's dated, but can be useful as a starting point.
-- gewg_
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @03:41PM
Glad to see this release, really.
This is great news for those of us who are die-hard systemd fans, because the integration of these next-gen systems (Wayland and Systemd) keeps getting tighter and more powerful (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM4Mzc).
Once this is accomplished, there will be a lot less fragmentation in the linux community, which we can all agree, is a good thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @03:59PM
NOT.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @04:20PM
"Friends dont let friend enable ecmascript."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @08:25PM
ECMAScript == JavaScript
That's not what he did.
He simply used the tt markup tag to switch to a monospaced font.
If you set -your- monospaced font to Monofonto (rather than Courier), you might find that a bit less jarring.
You may need to specify a different size as well.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @04:16PM
"Variety's the spice of life,
That gives it all its flavour."
--William Cowper, The Task
Oh please enlighten me! Thought the de-fragmentation crowd from the Debian vote manipulation were more likely to go for a SystemD, Wayland, and Gnome 3+ setup then anything else?
I don't think the cats of GNU/Linux care much for the leash and are a bit finicky about the variety in their pantry and bowl.
Of course that doesn't mean we can't find a consensus somehow on cross platform operations.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Saturday September 20 2014, @03:19AM
A pile full of AC comments... Don't feed the trolls.