Enlightenment 0.24 Alpha Released For This X11 Window Manager / Wayland Compositor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Enlightenment 0.24 Alpha Released For This X11 Window Manager / Wayland Compositor

The first alpha release of the Enlightenment 0.24 window manager / Wayland compositor with new features and other improvements...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Enlightenment-0.24-Alpha-1

[moilami]

Most underrated DE?

[stormcrow]

Most underrated DE?

I used Enlightenment extensively 10? 15? years ago.
I'd forgotten about it entirely as I've been using KDE for the past few years.

I'd definitely say it's probably one of the least talked about because its development has been slower than a snail's pace.

[rene]

Most underrated DE?

nope, not really. Mostly gfx bling bling without too much usability.

[bash2bash]

Enlightenment is the pinnacle of failure.

some decades ago, they made history with their progressive user interface and their promises of releases that never happened. People waited years for them to actually release something that never came. Eventually, people just moved on and forgot all about Enlightenment.

Now, their progressive user interface feels dated and chunky, some unique features have become irrelevant, but most important is the fact that their lack of development left them decades behind the competition.

It's the titanic of window managers.

[blacknova]

Used it exclusively at time of Debian Woody, that was Enlightenment DR15. For one reason or another every version after that I've found unusable. Probably I've grown up and got tired of tinkering with WMs and settled with actual DE.

[raster]

I'd definitely say it's probably one of the least talked about because its development has been slower than a snail's pace.

Perhaps you should update your view of that from the "I read a meme once and will continue to repeat it regardless of facts on the ground" Actually look at the git repositories to see development is continual as well as relatively regular releases. E 0.17 came out end of 2012, and here comes 0.24, so that makes for about one release per year. For many years now. The fact that it ships on more devices than Gnome or KDE do by a huge margin whilst doing release and a whole toolkit. You do know it has something like half a billion systems out there running both Enlightenment and it's toolkit as the native toolkit out of the box.

It grew a whole toolkit too so that of course directed development to work on that as well as WM, so large parts of E's functionality are in the toolkit. It has had full OpenGL for the entire 2D toolkit for all widgets for a decade and GTK+ is still working on it I believe. It's one of the very few WMs/DEs that has actually also grown full Wayland compositor support. I wouldn't call that slower than a snail's pace. It has massive amounts of functionality and development that you simply have not been following or paying attention to I guess. It has roughly the featureset of the larger desktops out of the box with a fraction of the developers. Just because you're not paying attention and don't even know what is being developed and released regularly doesn't make your repetition of some meme correct or useful.

Between EFL and Enlightenment there's something like 1.5 million lines of code. That doesn't appear due to a snails' pace development. A GUI toolkit with Windows, OSX, Wayalnd, X11, Drm+KMS and good old fbcon support. Over the years it even had PS3 support too (not relevant anymore and removed). Middleware device handling (libinput, udev, etc.), C, Lua, C++ and C# binding support auto-generated in-tree, and much more. A WM/Compositor for both X11 and Wayland, File manager, lots of desktop control settings for network (connman), bluetooth (bluez5), single and multi-screen support, other devices, applications and so much more.

Take another look in more details.

[raster]

Used it exclusively at time of Debian Woody, that was Enlightenment DR15. For one reason or another every version after that I've found unusable. Probably I've grown up and got tired of tinkering with WMs and settled with actual DE.

E is a DE these days - maybe not with a large set of apps, but it does all the core bits before you go install a suite of apps.

[raster]

Enlightenment is the pinnacle of failure.

some decades ago, they made history with their progressive user interface and their promises of releases that never happened. People waited years for them to actually release something that never came. Eventually, people just moved on and forgot all about Enlightenment.

Now, their progressive user interface feels dated and chunky, some unique features have become irrelevant, but most important is the fact that their lack of development left them decades behind the competition.

It's the titanic of window managers.

Well. Something like half a billion systems out there that run it out of the box disagree. What lack of development? The development made it work better than anything else on embedded devices with OpengGL-ES support and good Arm support long before everyone else. More features for less footprint.

[numasan]

I used Enlightenment 0.16 for 7 years straight up until 2008, but have almost forgot about the WM before this news. Been on Gnome since and am happy with it.