Does anyone actually use Enlightenment?

eshep, 10 months ago

@eyolf I've been carryin around the same #e16 configs for 20+ years. It's by far my favorite environment!

eyolf, 10 months ago

Wait - you’re still running e16?!

eshep, 10 months ago

@eyolf But of course, it's the best!

HarriPotero, 10 months ago

My Linux journey started on fvwm2, but after that I ran enlightenment for a good few years. Probably from 1999 to 2005, when I switched to blackbox/fluxbox.

Today I expect a DE to have great integration for managing wifi/bluetooth. It wasn’t needed 20 years ago, because computers didn’t have these fancy things. I haven’t really tried enlightenment recently, but it feels like that’s where it’s lacking today.

Crunkle_Foreskin, 10 months ago

Enlightenment has a fantastic feature set and some very interesting ways of using a Linux desktop.

But...the themes are just so 2005. It's hard to look past that, or at least make it a little bit 2015 at the least.

eyolf, 10 months ago

Could you expand on that? What is exceptional about the feature set, and how does e use the desktop differently?

Crunkle_Foreskin, 10 months ago

The virtual desktops functionality is miles above any other DE, specifically. The settings are really simple, and the options in the right click context menus are really well featured.

shu, 10 months ago

I used E16 in early 2000 and it had really cool themes. It was the hot shit right beside the newest xmms skin for your pirated but fully tagged mp3 library (with picard) on your local hard drive.

eyolf, 10 months ago

I remember that one of the things that really blew me away was the virtual desktop pager which was a live miniature of the actual desktops.

gfom, 10 months ago

I think Budgie plans to move from GTK to ELF.

ike, 10 months ago

Wild theory, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they change to iced-rs when they realize they can’t do the work needed to get elf to do exactly what they want, and instead can ride off of system76’s insane development accomplishments in their new rust based ecosystem of desktop components.

Reasons it might happen: the blog post specifically mentioned wanting a new ui-toolkit that worked well with rust or go, but at that time s76 hasn’t announced or dived into developing iced-rs more. I think it even mentioned hoping that s76 would build an alternative.

xohshoo, 10 months ago

Bodhi linux users do. Their Moksha desktop is based on Enlightenment, and the pace of development, while not speedy, is ongoing

eyolf, 10 months ago

‘not speedy, but ongoing’ - That sounds like E, alright …

neuromante, 10 months ago

I share the same experience. I remember back in the 00’s when it had the same allure but tbh nothing has changed that much.

piranhaphish, 10 months ago

I did daily drive it for a couple of years sometime around then.

It was so beautiful, yet still performant on basic hardware because it was written relatively low-level iirc. It was like having the flashy UI that they used in movies (anybody remember the 3D filesystem browsers?), but for real and actually usable. And the aesthetics were in contrast to the other major DE of the time which were all kind of drab tbh.

But that was the main use case imo: nice UI for low-end hardware. Once other DE started looking nicer, partly due to leveraging GPUs, the niche nature of Enlightenment became more of a hindrance.

I haven’t looked at it in quite a while and don’t know what their current philosophy or design is but, if it’s still the same, I think it might still be an interesting alternative to XFCE or LXDE for somebody with older hardware that wants to experience a unique UI from a passionate team.

ccunix, 10 months ago

That 3D file system browser (I presume you’re talking about Jurassic Park) was totally real.

It was a tech demo that SGI included with IRIX called “fsn”. Ironically, at the time, many people criticised it for being unrealistic. There is an open source clone called “fsv”.