Enlightenment 0.28.0 Release

(enlightenment.org)

67 points | by birdculture 2 days ago ago

33 comments

  • arjie 2 days ago

    Like almost everyone here I only recall this DE/WM with nostalgia. It’s interesting to see how minimal it is now. It felt like the height of maximalism back then. And on very weak hardware had compositing.

    • BeetleB 2 days ago

      I would say in the old days (2001-2002) it was more like a "minimax". It was maximal minimalist. It had really fancy visuals that worked on fairly slow hardware. I was blown away.

      • pjmlp 2 days ago

        For me the old days in Linux land were more like 1995 - 2005, folks on my degree were already using Enlightenment in 1997.

      • arjie 2 days ago

        As was I. Ran it on a Via pentium-compatible!

        • asveikau 2 days ago

          I was recently randomly thinking of Cyrix. I never had one but in retrospect I think they were better than their reputation. A lot of people thought of it as a cheap knock-off, so lesser quality. I think I thought that way until I got one of the earlier generations of AMD Athlon a few years later, in the 1 GHz era.

  • BuildTheRobots 2 days ago

    Remembering e17 makes me extremely nostalgic - in fact, if anyone has a screenshot of the clock circuit-board background with the working 7-segment clock on it, I'd be eternally grateful.

    It was lovely to use in the very early days of amd64 as a window manager (along side gtk and kde libs). My absolute favourite was the virtual-desktop handling with multiple physical monitors in that you can switch between virtual desktops in a screen-independent way. Nothing else I've used has hit the same seamless ease.

    • treadmill a day ago

      i3 does this well. Switching to a virt. desktop on another screen switches to that screen by default but you can also move virtual desktops from screen to screen, e.g. "move this desktop with all windows to the screen to the right". It should also be possible to configure a shortcut for "move desktop x to current screen". Personally, I find explicitly moving desktops more intuitive.

  • peri-cl 2 days ago

    Some more discussion,

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50317534 ("Enlightenment 0.28 Released with Many Improvements")

  • perarneng 2 days ago

    I remember when this came out. It was so cool to see all effects and nice graphics. I did not even know it still existed. Either way great work and nice to see it back.

  • thatguy89 a day ago

    Does anyone remember the theme called "Yellow"?

    https://ps.ucw.cz/e16/e16-themes-gallery/tn/Yellow.png.html

  • tapoxi 2 days ago

    It's been in development for 26 years and still isn't 1.0, I wonder what the criteria for that is.

    • amelius 2 days ago

      By the time they reach 1.0 we've long switched from working with GUIs to speaking to AI.

  • pantulis 2 days ago

    It’s great to see the Rasterman himself still doing releases after all these years! Legend!

  • Arubis 2 days ago

    > Restored the Pants module with skirts, kilts, lederhosen, malloc variants, and translations.

    Delightful.

  • rdwrrr a day ago

    This is the greatest window manager I never really used. Back in the days it looked very futuristic, a lot of promises but in the end not really fit for daily driving purposes. Came back quite a few times to it but never a real competitor.

  • bluepoint 2 days ago

    How does it fare with stability? The golden age version (e16?) was fun but would crash regularly.

  • v3ss0n 2 days ago

    I can't believe this crash ridden peice of WM Still exist.. It was horror just to setup something.

    • haolez 2 days ago

      That was always my experience as well. I commend the effort, but I have never been able to use it as a daily driver. Gave up like 10 years ago or more.

      • v3ss0n 2 days ago

        I started trying like 10 years ago , it looks good but never managed to get it to stable. But forgivable because all the WMs , including gnome (was stable at that time to some point) , and KDE , same as crash heavy as that .

        But then KDE become stable so switch to it.

        Then Last time i tried to give it a chance was 2022 STILL Same broken WM with looks good stuff and they are trying to build it like KDE at that point including multiple apps.

        At that point Enlightenment no longer looks good , KDE had caught up all the compositor effects and looking cool , can configure as much as we want. Elightment at that point still crashy as hell and never looked back.

  • serf 2 days ago

    enlightenment has experimental wayland support.

    now THAT must be a narrow cross-section of users.

    the screenshots make me want to fire it up, I miss linux UIs when the sun/BeOS influences were still apparent. " First off, we need a nice big clock, then we'll go from there."

    • zokier 2 days ago

      e has had "experimental" wayland support for over a decade (since 0.20 from 2015).

  • lateralux 2 days ago

    I miss E16

    • itomato 2 days ago

      Some part of me does, and then I go look at all the horrible UX experiments it enabled (mine included) https://ps.ucw.cz/e16/e16-themes-gallery/

      One-shotted script-fu buttons and those gradients haven't aged well.

      • n_l 2 days ago

        That was a trip down memory lane I did not expect. Thank you!

        I was using the LCARS theme on a tiny Toshiba laptop around 2005. Yes, the UX was incredibly bad, but I loved it, …for about a week :)

      • jraph 2 days ago

        Most of these were probably not very usable, but this feels a bit like all these winamp skins, passion obviously went into these things and that's freaking cool.

    • jraph 2 days ago

      I've read they still maintain it!

  • bottlepalm 2 days ago

    They should use AI to organize the change notes as well.

    • jraph 2 days ago

      Is your concern that they organize the change notes differently (and what do you suggest?), or that they specifically use ai for doing it?

      I'm tired, boss.

      • bottlepalm 2 days ago

        Currently they’re not organized at all, and yes AI could do it in seconds making that list readable.

    • functionmouse 2 days ago

      Why don't you do it?