Enlightenment was such a cool window manager. Shame the development pace was (and still is) slow and it never really took off.
I think even Samsung was funding it for a while. They took a long time building libraries supporting rendering on X11 what I remember. I used the 0.16.x version with my 1GHz Athlon years ago, it was very cool.
I believe they actually adopted it for their Tizen OS, unless I completely invented that memory.
I love seeing these screenshots of old Linux distributions as it makes me realize how much things have improved.
I’m just a consumer but I really appreciate the work everyone has done and I ain’t going back to Windows anymore.
I ran enlightenment for a long time. It was great.
If there was an updated version these days i’d be fully inclined to run it, haven’t followed the project in more than a decade though
That was probably close to one of the last versions of enlightenment I used regularly. It was such a fun WM to use at the time. If I remember correctly, GNOME and KDE were really ramping up about then and e fell behind.
TRANSPARENT TERMINALS! Haha it felt so futuristic and to this day I can’t run a terminal without a little transparency. Enlightenment was my first experience of it.
I mostly use it because it looks nice, but I’ve found that with limited screen space, they’re actually really useful! I can have the man pages or a stack exchange open in the background, and don’t need to constantly switch back and forth
I ran Storm Linux for a short while in about… 2001-2002. Got it on a CD in a misc pack of disks from some Linux distro vendor.
It was supposed to be a server oriented distro, secured more than others, and ran Enlightenment for a desktop. Overall, it was a reasonable distro, but didn’t gain enough general support and devs to keep it up and running. The group behind it folded after a short while.
Do you ever miss something you’ve never had?
It looks quite usable, to be honest. I would have loved to use it back then.
I really enjoyed the diversity of WM/DE back then, and the innovation when new ones like Enlightenment were released!
E was one of the best. They even created their own sound subsystem, ESD, which became the de facto default for Linux desktop sound for quite a while.
Text rendering sure has come a long way. Those topic links look absolutely horrendous.
I have to say these desktops look to damn confusing
What are you confused by?
There are way too many bars that look like dockable windows, the stuff at the bottom. Lots of stuff looking like decorations (but in general these buttons are confusing af even macOS is better than that.
And at the top it looks like the whole desktop is a window with decoration??
In general low contrast, too many strange thin things, no clear icons.
This is a screenshot of window running a VM, so yes it is a window running a whole desktop. The top window decoration, menu bar, and the very bottom panel are not part of the old desktop, but rather from the modern host system.
I agree though, it is confusing. Main problem (and I remember this) is that this is Gnome with Enlightenment as a wm, and Enlightenment had aspirations to be more than a wm. So there’s some duplication of effort there, and no integration/communication between the two projects (Gnome in the next version used sawfish/sawmill as wm, which was more coordinated with Gnome).
Enlightenment has/had its own toolkit, which you can see here in the DOX window, which is different from Gtk. Enlightenment also has a bunch of widgets, like the top bar and the stuff in the bottom corners, which are non-Gnome and clash with and are on top of the Gnome panel. The desktop icons are also zero pixels under the Enlightenment top bar, which suggest the people responsible weren’t coordinating at all.
Interesting! This explains a lot, thanks!
Happy to be a Linux user in 2024!
Of course I am not talking about Windows ;)
