I have tried it a few times but I could never really get into it. For one thing, it is a tiny island unto itself where most of what you need to run is foreign to it.
In the end, I found light-weight GTK and Qt options superior.
Based on some Lemmy comments, I tried Q4OS with the Trinity desktop ( basically KDE 3 ) and I was surprised how good it was. I used the 32 bit edition but it booted to a full GUI desktop in something like 110 MB and it was surprisingly usable. I guess I should not be too shocked. MATE is essentially GNOME 2 from the same era and, though not my favourite, it is still fine.
Perhaps the viability of Linux as a desktop has had more to do with the applications than the desktop itself.
This brings back some memories from years ago. Enlightenment was fairly popular at some point and I think the author “Rasterman” was employed at RedHat. Some Linux distribution may even have had it as the default ?
There was a short period of time when enlightenment was the default window manager for Gnome, later to be replaced by Sawfish. It was a hideous experience by the way.
Early Gnome was weird. The Gnome File Manager was also originally based on the terminal program Midnight Commander.
I loved the default theme, the splash screen, all of the customization options, and how lightweight it was, but it’s missing some of the conveniences and polish of GNOME, KDE, or even LXQt and Xfce. Using an independent toolkit meant that none of my apps looked consistent, even after trying my best to find a theme that supported everything, and if I explored the settings beyond a surface level things started looking ancient and clunky.
Definitely underrated, and really impressive for how much they could pack into a desktop targeted at older PCs, but still missing quite a bit.
Ive never stopped, just recently did my first nixos build with enlightenment. Had an old XPS with 4k screen works nicely. I like the reenlightened theme
@REdOG
I see. Well for me too, Xorg offered all the features I need and is still more well supported than Wayland in some areas, but on my system Wayland has so much better performance. On Xorg I was having mouse lags, on Wayland it's just smooth.
@Deckweiss
I didn't know about that feature in Windows 11 even though I use it on my work laptop but I guess it's because I only use the laptop's screen when I work 😂
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