back to article Enlightenment reaches 0.27, continuing its quiet but persistent journey

Enlightenment is one of the granddaddies of Linux desktops, and after a couple of years, the project has a shiny new release. Version 0.27.0 was released earlier this month, with possibly the shortest description in its release notes that we've seen in any FOSS project: This is the latest release of Enlightenment. This has a …

  1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

    One of the things I really like about Linux is that while I currently stick to a pretty much stock Ubuntu 24.04.1+patches+updates with NVidia CUDA 12.x stack is that you do have the option of swapping almost every default component save for the NetworkManager and systemd themselves. With Linux, you have options, should you need or choose to use them.

    The "kitchen sink" approach used by other operating systems leaves them more vulnerable, because miscreants know for sure which tech stacks are going to be running on machines that identify with those OS strings, while with Linux there is some doubt and variation. No wonder Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone technologies are the vast majority of attacked operating systems out there.

    Yet it costs you virtually nothing to learn and run Linux. It's reliable and stable and easy enough for a base installation without the gaming support to easily replace the typical home user's desktop experience when Windows 10 support is no more and your machine becomes a malware infested almost-brick due to lack of support from Microsoft.

    1. druck Silver badge

      NetworkManager and systemd can certainly be replaced.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Possibly not so easy to remove and replace the systemd-cancer on the *buntus. I haven't bothered trying for over a decade ... but it would probably be easier to choose one of the distros that ships without it in the first place. (I use and recommend Slackware, as always YMMV, and very probably does.)

        NetworkManager should be easy enough to R&R ... but try it first, it is quite improved from a few years ago, so it may work for you.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh, Enlightenment. The libraries form the underpinnings of Samsung's Tizen. There's plenty of critiques of the libraries, as they are poorly documented, architecturally flawed and extremely buggy, but this rant on DailyWTF is probably the most entertaining:

    https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened

    1. LionelB Silver badge

      Ouch, yes, come across that before - a painful read.

      Having played around with Enlightenment sporadically over the past few decades, the bigger question, is: do they still subscribe to that 70s prog-rock aesthetic? And does it still have that weird desktop/workspace/viewport/wtf thingummy? My conclusion is that it is specifically designed to suck up all your time trying to configure a half-sane desktop that doesn't leave you reeling with vertigo, and that persists for at least a couple of minutes before crashing.

      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        > that 70s prog-rock aesthetic?

        Little bit. That's what I was alluding to when I mentioned that it was far from the boring grey corporate Linux we're used to.

        The two big Chinese desktops, UKUI and Kylin, are both very bright and colourful. I think both use code from MATE and from Qt along with homegrown stuff. (They are quite similar but I can't prove any connection.)

        I sort of wish they had picked Enlightenment instead, and gone full-in on the bling. :-)

        1. LionelB Silver badge

          Ah, well there's bling and there's bling... but isn't that what theming is supposed to be for? For the major distros (GTK or Qt based) It'd be nice to be able to choose from, say, Hipgnosis artwork (if that floats your boat), and, say, Bauhaus, pre-Raphaelite, Mondrian, Eraserhead, Magic Roundabout, ... the only themes I come across seem to range from corporate drear through eye-blisteringly jarring, through just plain unimaginative.

          I'd even volunteer if my graphics skills were not completely numpty. (I did manage, though, to tweak a theme for the still-wonderful GKrellM to a point where it is at least inoffensive; that home page gives a strong clue as to why that is a necessity rather than a desideratum.)

          1. jake Silver badge

            Bling doesn't get work done. All it does is use CPU cycles unnecessarily.

            But whatever floats your boat. Follow your bliss, put the P back into the PC.

            1. LionelB Silver badge

              > Bling doesn't get work done.

              I know. But hey, I do to hang the odd picture, or have the odd pot plant in my study.

              > All it does is use CPU cycles unnecessarily.

              Maybe not that you'd necessarily even notice on a modern machine, depending on how it's implemented. (Ironically, one thing I always found with Enlightenment is that its bling may be unstable, but it's fast.)

          2. DrXym

            Themes are nice and all, but a functioning desktop is even nicer. This is why Enlightenment flamed out so fast in the day - great to look at but it brought computers to their knees and was useless as a desktop. When GNOME & KDE appeared and were slightly boring but actual functional desktops, interest in Enlightenment died on the spot. I seem to recall that Enlightenment got dropped by Red Hat too which caused a kerfuffle.

            I expect these days you could go to town with window decorations again. It's a little bit different for Wayland and modern toolkits that they rendered the frame in the client rather than by the WM so Qt / Gtk draw all those bits as part of the program's surface before compositing. So it's a function of what themes you have installed for the toolkit as to what the UI and frame would look like.

            1. LionelB Silver badge

              Sure, function trumps bling, but that doesn't mean we should just accept corporate drear - which is hardly conducive to a good working environment.

              Interestingly, I always found that E ran pretty fast, even on low spec machines. But it was, as you say, dysfunctional and unstable to the point of unusable.

              There were "boring" alternatives, though, before Gnome/KDE, such as Blackbox (later Fluxbox)1 and GNUstep/Windowmaker - which are both functional, frugal with resources, extremely stable, and have distinctive theme-able aesthetics (which are not necessarily even fugly). They are also, as it happens, unapologetically non-Windows-like. I use Fluxbox as my main desktop to this day.

              1Some might argue that these are window managers rather than "desktop environments", but they do include a taskbar, menus, tools for setting backgrounds, launchers, desktop pagers, etc.

    2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > this rant on DailyWTF

      I did consider including that, but decided against it; not only was that a full decade ago, in the era of version 0.20, there were comprehensive rebuttals soon afterwards.

      I am not a C/C++/curly-bracket-anything programmer so I can't judge for myself what's sane or not -- any language that allows pointer arithmetic is insane in my book. Let them eat Pascal. That'll teach 'em.

      But while a quick Google didn't find it, I have seen reasoned defences to that piece. This was at the end of the big rewrite after 0.17; I am told that things have settled down a great deal since then, but 0.18-0.20 or so were still pretty rough.

      1. F. Frederick Skitty Silver badge

        I've had a recent poke around in the Enlightenment library repos, and the code is still shocking. Just for starters, things that are supposed to be abstractions often mirror the implementation and quirks of what it was first written to support - the X Window System libraries - rather than being really cross platform.

        The documentation is still incomplete or entirely missing for some significant parts. What actually there is often out of date, misleading, outright wrong or just poorly written (grammatical errors, awkward and confusing phrasing).

        One major problem with writing anything using the EFL is the project's habit of deprecating or just entirely replacing big bits of it with no porting guides. It feels more like a playground for hyperactive coders than a reliable framework, which would be fine but it's also supposed to be the underpinnings of Tizen development!

        1. jake Silver badge
          Pint

          "It feels more like a playground for hyperactive coders than a reliable framework"

          You mean it's not? Colo(u)r me confuzled ... but I stand corrected. Mea culpa.

    3. Dan 55 Silver badge

      I followed that for years, it made me feel much better about the code I'm responsible for. While following that thread, I made a mental note...

      1. Not buy any product with Tizen.

      2. Not use Enlightenment, as either a user or a developer.

      An short example amongst many of why not to use it as a developer:

      Let me tell about a certain experiment conducted in my corp. Three developers were tasked with creating a certain window application, nothing fancy. They were to do it in qt, some OSX lib (can't remember which) and efl. Neither knew any of those libraries.

      Qt guy finished in 3 days; OSX guy finished in 3.5 days; efl guy gave up after 2 weeks.

      Let that sink in.

    4. ThomH Silver badge

      My favourite two comments being:

      (1) Enlightenment's thin-skinned author substituting an argumentative assault for an actual rebuttal, including the claim that "as for the "you bitch" comment. that does not appear anywhere inside efl at asll. i can only assume you are full of bullshit here as with a lot of the prior "facts" you have disclosed"; followed by:

      (2) A short reply to that linking to the Enlightenment author's pull request, merged on the same day as his abusive post, in which he hastily eliminated the text "you bitch" from the source code.

      1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
        Alert

        Christ, what an asshole.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          He briefly worked at RedHat circa 1999. Left under something of a cloud from what I recall, which is saying something as they put up with Ulrich Drepper (notoriously divisive glibc maintainer) for an awfully long time.

    5. gnasher729 Silver badge

      So for “fun with Linux” you are not recommending it?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I really like englightenment's style....

    ...but I gave up on it after a year and have been using KDE Plasma ever since.... Much less buggy.

  4. frankyunderwood123

    It's hideous, but who cares...

    In a world of so called GUI perfection, flat UI's, billions of dollars of user research and big tech dominance, it's great to see a project like enlightenment still going after all these years.

    I've tried it a few times, each time running away screaming because it's so ugly, but it was way ahead of it's time at one point.

    I'm going to try it again, to see if it's less ugly - I kinda hope it isn't.

  5. gosand

    Never got into Enlightenment.

    Started on fvwm on Unix in '93 at work. Didn't install Linux at home until '98. Used Gnome, KDE, and eventually XFCE which I've been running for the last 15 years. I tend to not change unless something better comes along, and although I tried out Cinnamon/Mate, XFCE just works and doesn't get in my way.

  6. DrXym

    I remember trying it back in the E16 days but it was hideously complex to make work and a performance hog. It was great if you liked bizarre themes with handlebars sticking out of windows or whatever but not so good if you just wanted to do stuff on a desktop without the desktop becoming your preoccupation because it was so broken.

    I was happy when Red Carpet (a packaged version of GNOME 1.x) and demonstrated that yes Linux could offer a desktop that didn't require a PhD to install.

  7. drankinatty

    E16 was quite enjoyable, the E17 launch however did not go so well...

    I don't recall the year, but it would have been early in the SUSE 10.x days. SUSE provided just about every desktop under the sun and E16 was included. It was a wonderful traditional Linux desktop with this cool icon-panel widget where you would configure your most used dozen or so apps and then icons would appear in 3x3 or 4x3 or 4x4 floating panel. This counted as ghee-whiz in the early 00 time frame. Everything worked and you really had few issues with E16 - just as a desktop should.

    There was much fanfare about the "new" E17, and of course, SUSE packaged it. It could be installed alongside E16 (and every other desktop from blackbox through wmii, alphabetically) Let's just say things didn't go so well. One of the new offerings in E17 was its file-manager type widget. It didn't look too much different from the screenshot shown in this article, however that is where the functionality usually stopped. Attempting to actually use it, resulted in a cascade of issues with navigating the filesystem that were impossible to resolve without a completely X-server restart. The DailyWTF article articulated well the despair felt by both user and developer alike in those early E17 days.

    On the up-side, E17 looked really good, graphics were clean, gradients, transitions and window decorations rendered very well, and E17 showed much promise. I did no graphics programming back then, so can't opine on the internals, but let's hope the thousands of commits across 151 files has improved things substantially on both fronts, for developers and users alike.

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