I liked the author's pragmatic take on the stability. Indeed that running bleeding edge now has implications to greater attack surface as the supply-chain attacks getting more and more common.
A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...
> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.
This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to KDE or Gnome.
It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.
People have different tastes and opinions, and I don't remember how GNOME looked in 1998, but KDE 1? 2? wasn't so great imho (saying that as a huge fan of plasma, and intermittent KDE user for the last 25y).
I used enlightenment for a bit and was very happy with it - just like some things on a desktop at home don't matter, but do on a laptop. I've more than once mangled i3 and gnome or xfce or kde together to have the "desktop environment" things like wifi and power management and so on.. whereas in the 90s on a desktop I cared about neither of these things.
And while this was all very much a long time ago, I don't see how enlightenment would have changed - it's just a bit barebones compared to a DE, just like i3.
I used E17 for a while and the killer feature for me were independent virtual desktops accross monitors, meaning switching virtual desktop would only switch it on the monitor your focus was on.
I ultimately switched back to KDE despite that ergonomic advantage because it crashed too often and then to Gnome because KDE also crashed too often. Gnome has been rock solid ever since.
Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion floating point operations just to open a menu. And if you're using a current version they're responsive to bug reports and whatnot. It does most everything you could want. And it looks damn fine while it's doing it.
Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images! Right there in the terminal! Wow! I was compelled to point out that terminology has had that (and video playback, too) for a LONG time.
One of my favourite features of enlightenment is that it has this thing from back in the day called "configurability", where behaviours tend to be optional and you can decide for yourself whether you want them enabled or not. I know it's not fashionable anymore and maybe not for everyone but personally I think it's a better approach than the gnome-style "You'll take what we give you and be happy about it" approach which is in vogue these days.
In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. So you could turn it on and live with its defects, or you turned it off and live without the feature. Linux Desktop was always full of that.
But yeah, I also do not like Gnome, because they more and more just removed the switches, but without spending effort to make things fine for everyone.
Plasma is so configurable, I've never seen anything more configurable. On any OS that I've seen.
My personal experience: Yes, you can also build your own environment out of blocks. And then you configure a lot. But not in order to customize it better, but in order to somehow glue these components together in a way that somehow remotely makes sense. :-/
And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? E is a graphical desktop, no? Based on X11 or Wayland. There are actual media players!! A lot. Not a single one is really great, but most will be better than the terminal, I guess. VLC is that bad?
well why video in a terminal? 1. it's "free" because the toolkit already offers video objects - feature is there... why not expose it. you just call 2 lines of code or so and and tell it to play. it's similar amount of code for an image, so it's basically free really. why do still images and NOT video? why stop there when video is only a little more code. sure. if you want a movie as a background: probably a bad choice, but if it's one of those zen videos with just trees swaying in the breeze as a background or a mountain lake rippling in the wind with very little motion but enough to make it "come to life", why not? but ok - for real usability? example: you're browsing through your dirs. cd ~/xxx/yyy; ls; cd zz; ls ... oh there's cat-sunning.mp4 there... i have 87 videos of cats sunning themselves.. which was that? tycat cat-sunning.jpg -> boom. video appears in terminal - you cat'd it.. it plays (tycat is just a tiny cmdline tool that emits the right escapes to terminology. you could make it a shell alias or script too and not use tycat. escapes are documented in the readme. this works even in a dumb framebuffer without wayland or x display systems (because the toolkit handles auto-detecting its environment and if in just a tty/vt it'll fall back to fbcon or kms/drm and render there). so you get a mouse and a full-screen graphical terminal that can do splits/tiles/tabs and so on with no windowing system and you can happily still explore all your files there even if they are videos... you aren't forced to use the feature... but it's there if you need it or want it.
I have absolutely no doubt that this is possible to do, particularly if you assume that you already have all kinds of libraries available, and if you don't care at all about the terminal ecosystem in general.
And then you only need access to the mouse position in pixel granularity, and you basically have the foundation for a graphical environment. We can implement Qt and GTK for that new thingy. So there is finally a usable text editor available in a Unix terminal! Email clients that don't make you sad! You can finally navigate your files in a less lousy way!
And, of course, we can then also port these E libraries, so we can start their terminal app inside their terminal app inside their terminal app!
But: What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way? The existence of terminal emulators is the proof for it being at least as strong (or stronger) as your terminal can ever get. Right? So what's the point of this indirection? I just don't get it...
Yes... Let's imagine I regularly look through my files. And these files aren't plain text (otherwise it would just be cat or mcedit) and aren't ODT files, kdenlive projects, Gimp files, ..., ..., but they are particularly png or jpeg or mpeg (or whatever the tycat thingy understands). And I want to do that via ssh. And I always have this E terminal in range. Then this is one valid option to do so imho. Still a very weird, freaky, odd one. But it would somehow make some sense to me...
> In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'.
No - You're making the assumption that everyone wants everything to be the same. Which is the same faulty assumption responsible for so many horrible horrible user interface choices made since smartphones became a thing.
For instance, there's a setting in enlightenment to allow you to choose how scrollbars work - you can:
a) Have sensible scrollbars like graphical applications have had for 40+ years, or
b) Have 'hover at the right to show the scrollbar and make it virtually impossible to select the last item in a list' behaviour, like the gtk-bros insist you want, or
c) Have no scrollbars at all if you prefer. Maybe you've got a touchscreen or a wheel mouse and a tiny screen, or whatever.
In e, this is just a setting where the user gets to choose what their computer does.
I know, it's a pretty revolutionary idea. So I'll just say it again: the user is the one who chooses what their computer does.
I haven't played with KDE seriously since the days of Corel Linux. I tried KDE4 back when it was a new thing, observed my desktop running at <1fps for the 10 minutes it took me to exit, and never tried it again. I've since heard good things about plasma. One day maybe I'll try it.
> And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that?
Aha, I can tell you haven't tried it! :)
It's a fantastic way to preview videos. You type "ls", and it gives you a list of files. And you say to yourself "Huh, I don't remember what 'video_clip_1280p.mp4' is. So you right-click on the filename and choose 'preview', and the video pops up in your terminal window and starts playing. And once I know what the file is I press escape and I'm back to where I was. It's marvellous! The only way I could think of improving this would be if there was some way to do it without any mouse interaction... like for example by typing 'typop video_clip_1280p.mp4'.
I do watch my movies in either vlc or mpv, usually - nobody is actually sitting around watching movies in their terminal (I hope!). For that, you use a media player. But for quickly previewing videos / images / audio (yes, audio too!), it's :chef-kiss:
I also have a custom command_not_found_handle which displays a randomly-chosen animated gif from a list I've built up (things like picard facepalming and people shaking their heads), along with a nice ascii art message in the vein of "You suck!" when I type an invalid command [1]. The reason I have that is........................................because it's fun!
Well, I explicitly said that I dislike Gnome for that. Sure, there are switches that are fine for actual customization, in order to actually adapt to personal preferences instead of work around technical weaknesses. I love how configurable Plasma is.
When I read further, about your scrollbar example, I wasn't sure if I would consider that a good example for your point or for my point... ^^ Anyways... Maybe it's a corner case. Fine. Not the worst one I've ever seen.
> I know, it's a pretty revolutionary idea. So I'll just say it again: the user is the one who chooses what their computer does.
That's obviously just the 2nd part of the story. At least so far. In some years, sure, every user (of FOSS software at least) can vibecode her own creepy set of features...
> It's a fantastic way to preview videos.
What you describe sounds exactly like what I would do, but I would start Dolphin instead. It's another shortcut for closing it. That's it. On the other hand: Here I can start arbitrary applications. For a LO-spreadsheet, LO would start! For a Blender model, Blender would start! VLC starts so quickly, and can read any remotely valid video file. I still don't really understand what I'm missing tbh...
> I also have a custom command_not_found_handle which displays a randomly-chosen animated gif from a list
Well, okay, that's far away from my taste how a system should behave... Maybe I'm just too old... ^^
PS: When can terminal apps get mouse coordinates in pixel granularity?
Then Qt and GTK can have backends for terminal( emulator)s and I can finally run a graphical terminal emulator inside a terminal emulator? tmux and screen will be dead!!! :D
And when do the terminal hacks for AR glasses start to appear? I still cannot walk through vimacs? Doing ":q!" with just some head gesture? Why not??
In my personal experience - as far as I can remember - it always stopped to be good looking when it wasn't a screenshot anymore but a running process on my machine. In motion, all the eye-candy became ugly and foolish and visibly hobbyist, and as soon as I began using some applications outside of the E-ecosystem, the last sparks of fanciness went away anyways.
But that was... idk... E16 or so?! I really cannot remember. Maybe it had better times earlier, or maybe (surely) people are different and have different criteria for choosing such things.
Was E13 before they started trying to be a klingon starship UI?
It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.
Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback
The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
Certainly not everywhere. I definitely remember plenty of tasteless ones, some deliberately so and others just cases of other people's taste differing from mine!
And detractors of Emacs used to claim that it stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" meaning that even on a then-huge machine with eight megabytes of RAM Emacs would use up all the memory. Now it is a tiny program compared to things like Visual Studio Code.
one of the more interesting things to think about is the big push to rendering all window manager stuff through a gpu, because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows....
Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.
> because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows
As screens get larger, the amount of pixels you need to push to composite windows gets larger-squared. It makes sense to move the pixel pushing away from the CPU and more importantly away from CPU-RAM and on to a separate RAM bus.
The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) saves memory at the cost of more redraws. The composition model allows you to do things like drag window A over window B without forcing a repaint of window B every frame.
It also allows for better process isolation. I think in both Win16 and X11 you could just get a handle to the "root window" and draw wherever you wanted?
eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do.
the gpu simply has buffers that it compsits, the cpu can do that as well. with the benefit of less complexity leading to not needing to worry about driver crashes.
on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway
> eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do.
True, but which is more efficient?
> on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway
Opinions differ. The main benefit of splitting RAM is not having to share the bus. As I said, this lets you use the CPU for CPU things without having to spend precious DRAM bandwidth shovelling pixels.
I still install it and play with it for a bit every other year. I really appreciate that it's held true to its own core. Yes it works with Wayland now, but it's still using its e-foundation libraries. I still wish I had screenshots of my desktop from 1998/1999. Downloading cool software from Freshmeat, hitting up Slashdot (news for nerds... stuff that matters) to see what was going on. Kinda wish I was into IRC back then but I was more of an ICQ->AIM chatter. It's an era I wish we could have back.
Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
Yeah, I saw that back in the day, and it's great, but that was too faithful. I liked the eye candy of Enlightenment, but with a nod to the nostalgia...
There is still a lot of things I miss from the Amiga, but I'm acutely aware that a lot of what I wish for are based on rather rose-tinted memories.
AV Linux uses Enlightenment 0.27.1. The creator of that distribution also offers a version based on Moksha 0.4.2, the E17 fork mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.
Win 11 has some niceties, however many of those could have been provided on Windows 10 as well, for example the security stuff like VBS and secured kernel were already available, even if disabled by default.
Kind of similar story, eventually I ended up on GNOME, as I favoured Gtkmm over how KDE was at the time, but then GNOME 3.0 happened, and my travel netbook got migrated into Unity, and when it went away, XFCE.
Due to similar realisation, my main working devices became Window 7 with Virtual Box/VMWare Worstation, nowadays WSL.
No kidding. Last time I used Enlightenment back in the late 90s, both KDE 1.x and GNOME 1.x were orders of magnitude more usable on my lowly Pentium MMX 166 with 16 MB of RAM.
I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.
These are exactly the kinds of posts I love. It seems technical posts like this are less and less on the internet. Is this a result of "vibe coding"? We don't feel like writing up posts like this when a machine did the work? Maybe it's a result of fewer and fewer people blogging. Maybe I'm just old and yelling about things changing.
that was literally me... i stopped it because... well.. short version - chasing bug in efl that blurted out an invalid object stdout errors when http requests for the forecasts module failed - the module relies on a caching proxy service on e.org to get weather forecasts. i simulated it a bit brute-force by temporarily taking down apache :) it's back and bug is fixed in git. it's silent now not complaining about invalid objects.
E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.
Yeah that was the reason for me too, in order to get the distro CD ROMS I had to mail $10 to some random address and wait 4 weeks for them to be mailed back!
I tell people you used to have to post a cheque when you bought stuff online and they just look at me like I’m nuts. It was basically just mail order, but on the web.
Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.
Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised
that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation
at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3
but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated
smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix
bugs must also be small.
A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...
> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.
I used enlightenment for a bit and was very happy with it - just like some things on a desktop at home don't matter, but do on a laptop. I've more than once mangled i3 and gnome or xfce or kde together to have the "desktop environment" things like wifi and power management and so on.. whereas in the 90s on a desktop I cared about neither of these things.
And while this was all very much a long time ago, I don't see how enlightenment would have changed - it's just a bit barebones compared to a DE, just like i3.
I ultimately switched back to KDE despite that ergonomic advantage because it crashed too often and then to Gnome because KDE also crashed too often. Gnome has been rock solid ever since.
Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images! Right there in the terminal! Wow! I was compelled to point out that terminology has had that (and video playback, too) for a LONG time.
One of my favourite features of enlightenment is that it has this thing from back in the day called "configurability", where behaviours tend to be optional and you can decide for yourself whether you want them enabled or not. I know it's not fashionable anymore and maybe not for everyone but personally I think it's a better approach than the gnome-style "You'll take what we give you and be happy about it" approach which is in vogue these days.
But yeah, I also do not like Gnome, because they more and more just removed the switches, but without spending effort to make things fine for everyone.
Plasma is so configurable, I've never seen anything more configurable. On any OS that I've seen.
My personal experience: Yes, you can also build your own environment out of blocks. And then you configure a lot. But not in order to customize it better, but in order to somehow glue these components together in a way that somehow remotely makes sense. :-/
And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? E is a graphical desktop, no? Based on X11 or Wayland. There are actual media players!! A lot. Not a single one is really great, but most will be better than the terminal, I guess. VLC is that bad?
And then you only need access to the mouse position in pixel granularity, and you basically have the foundation for a graphical environment. We can implement Qt and GTK for that new thingy. So there is finally a usable text editor available in a Unix terminal! Email clients that don't make you sad! You can finally navigate your files in a less lousy way!
And, of course, we can then also port these E libraries, so we can start their terminal app inside their terminal app inside their terminal app!
But: What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way? The existence of terminal emulators is the proof for it being at least as strong (or stronger) as your terminal can ever get. Right? So what's the point of this indirection? I just don't get it...
Yes... Let's imagine I regularly look through my files. And these files aren't plain text (otherwise it would just be cat or mcedit) and aren't ODT files, kdenlive projects, Gimp files, ..., ..., but they are particularly png or jpeg or mpeg (or whatever the tycat thingy understands). And I want to do that via ssh. And I always have this E terminal in range. Then this is one valid option to do so imho. Still a very weird, freaky, odd one. But it would somehow make some sense to me...
Haha, you beat me to it. Basically the same example.
Just like today. But we lost the option to make it work.
For instance, there's a setting in enlightenment to allow you to choose how scrollbars work - you can:
a) Have sensible scrollbars like graphical applications have had for 40+ years, or
b) Have 'hover at the right to show the scrollbar and make it virtually impossible to select the last item in a list' behaviour, like the gtk-bros insist you want, or
c) Have no scrollbars at all if you prefer. Maybe you've got a touchscreen or a wheel mouse and a tiny screen, or whatever.
In e, this is just a setting where the user gets to choose what their computer does.
I know, it's a pretty revolutionary idea. So I'll just say it again: the user is the one who chooses what their computer does.
I haven't played with KDE seriously since the days of Corel Linux. I tried KDE4 back when it was a new thing, observed my desktop running at <1fps for the 10 minutes it took me to exit, and never tried it again. I've since heard good things about plasma. One day maybe I'll try it.
Aha, I can tell you haven't tried it! :)It's a fantastic way to preview videos. You type "ls", and it gives you a list of files. And you say to yourself "Huh, I don't remember what 'video_clip_1280p.mp4' is. So you right-click on the filename and choose 'preview', and the video pops up in your terminal window and starts playing. And once I know what the file is I press escape and I'm back to where I was. It's marvellous! The only way I could think of improving this would be if there was some way to do it without any mouse interaction... like for example by typing 'typop video_clip_1280p.mp4'.
I do watch my movies in either vlc or mpv, usually - nobody is actually sitting around watching movies in their terminal (I hope!). For that, you use a media player. But for quickly previewing videos / images / audio (yes, audio too!), it's :chef-kiss:
I also have a custom command_not_found_handle which displays a randomly-chosen animated gif from a list I've built up (things like picard facepalming and people shaking their heads), along with a nice ascii art message in the vein of "You suck!" when I type an invalid command [1]. The reason I have that is........................................because it's fun!
[1] https://imgur.com/a/tL9h8Xs
When I read further, about your scrollbar example, I wasn't sure if I would consider that a good example for your point or for my point... ^^ Anyways... Maybe it's a corner case. Fine. Not the worst one I've ever seen.
> I know, it's a pretty revolutionary idea. So I'll just say it again: the user is the one who chooses what their computer does.
That's obviously just the 2nd part of the story. At least so far. In some years, sure, every user (of FOSS software at least) can vibecode her own creepy set of features...
> It's a fantastic way to preview videos.
What you describe sounds exactly like what I would do, but I would start Dolphin instead. It's another shortcut for closing it. That's it. On the other hand: Here I can start arbitrary applications. For a LO-spreadsheet, LO would start! For a Blender model, Blender would start! VLC starts so quickly, and can read any remotely valid video file. I still don't really understand what I'm missing tbh...
> I also have a custom command_not_found_handle which displays a randomly-chosen animated gif from a list
Well, okay, that's far away from my taste how a system should behave... Maybe I'm just too old... ^^
Then Qt and GTK can have backends for terminal( emulator)s and I can finally run a graphical terminal emulator inside a terminal emulator? tmux and screen will be dead!!! :D
And when do the terminal hacks for AR glasses start to appear? I still cannot walk through vimacs? Doing ":q!" with just some head gesture? Why not??
SCNR
But that was... idk... E16 or so?! I really cannot remember. Maybe it had better times earlier, or maybe (surely) people are different and have different criteria for choosing such things.
Was E13 before they started trying to be a klingon starship UI?
That’s the point the OP is trying to make about the advantage of open source
Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...
Luckily the hang was deterministic.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
(digital blasphemy is still around and still selling art.)
Certainly not everywhere. I definitely remember plenty of tasteless ones, some deliberately so and others just cases of other people's taste differing from mine!
Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.
As screens get larger, the amount of pixels you need to push to composite windows gets larger-squared. It makes sense to move the pixel pushing away from the CPU and more importantly away from CPU-RAM and on to a separate RAM bus.
The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) saves memory at the cost of more redraws. The composition model allows you to do things like drag window A over window B without forcing a repaint of window B every frame.
It also allows for better process isolation. I think in both Win16 and X11 you could just get a handle to the "root window" and draw wherever you wanted?
True, but which is more efficient?
> on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway
Opinions differ. The main benefit of splitting RAM is not having to share the bus. As I said, this lets you use the CPU for CPU things without having to spend precious DRAM bandwidth shovelling pixels.
My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiwm
There is still a lot of things I miss from the Amiga, but I'm acutely aware that a lot of what I wish for are based on rather rose-tinted memories.
https://www.bandshed.net/
Latest Version Release Announcement:
https://www.bandshed.net/2026/03/01/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...
A few more details from and older release announcement:
"Both ISO’s are built on an MX Linux 25/Debian Trixie base with Liquorix kernels."
https://www.bandshed.net/2025/11/27/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...
shell=C:\LiteStep\litestep.exe
https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
https://github.com/JeffHoogland/moksha
After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.
Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).
Due to similar realisation, my main working devices became Window 7 with Virtual Box/VMWare Worstation, nowadays WSL.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just That was confusing me a bit.The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged:
The documentation is there: https://www.enlightenment.org/contrib/enlightenment-debug
I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.
To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.
Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)
I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.
Coincidence, or collateral hug?
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix bugs must also be small.